Organization · SSSR · Founded 1946
OKB-1 / Soviet space program (today Roscosmos)
The OKB-1 design bureau, led by Sergei Korolev, was behind the R-7 launcher, Sputnik, Vostok, and Soyuz. Predecessor of today's Roscosmos agency.
- Country
- SSSR
- Founded
- 1946
- Missions
- 5
- Hardware
- 4
- Programmes
- 2
- People
- 2
Programmes
Programmes
Vostok programThe Vostok program (1961–1963) was the first Soviet crewed spaceflight program. Six single-seat Vostok craft carried, among others, the first man and the first woman into space.Open article →International Space Station (ISS)Under construction in low Earth orbit since 1998 and continuously inhabited since November 2000, the station is a joint project of five space agencies and the record holder for continuous human habitation in space.Open article →
Flights
Missions
SOY
Soyuz T-10-1
A launch to the Salyut 7 station aborted by a fire on the pad less than two minutes before the planned liftoff. The crew was saved by the SAS escape system; the rocket was destroyed in the explosion.
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VOS
Voskhod 2
On 18 March 1965 Voskhod 2 delivered the first human spacewalk: Alexei Leonov spent 12 minutes and 9 seconds outside the spacecraft. The return nearly ended in tragedy — a ballooned spacesuit, an automatic-system failure and an emergency landing in snowbound taiga hundreds of kilometres off target.
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VOS
Vostok 6
Vostok 6 carried Valentina Tereshkova into orbit on 16 June 1963 — the first woman in space. In under three days she orbited the Earth forty-eight times and landed on 19 June near Barnaul. It was the final flight of the Vostok program.
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VOS
Vostok 1
The first crewed spaceflight in history. Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in 108 minutes and landed safely near Engels.
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SPU
Sputnik 1
The first artificial satellite of Earth. Launched on 4 October 1957, it remained in orbit for 92 days.
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Hardware
Rockets and spacecraft
MirFirst flight 1986A modular Soviet and later Russian space station, inhabited from 1986 to 2000; it was deliberately deorbited in March 2001.Open article →SoyuzFirst flight 1967 · Height 7.2 mSoyuz is a family of Soviet and Russian launch vehicles and spacecraft that has flown from the 1960s to the present day. The Soyuz rocket descends from the legendary R-7, and the Soyuz spacecraft has carried crews into orbit for over half a century — today to the International Space Station. It ranks among the longest-serving and most reliable space systems in history.Open article →VostokFirst flight 1961 · Height 4.4 mA single-seat Soviet spacecraft with a spherical reentry capsule. Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth aboard its first crewed flight.Open article →R-7 / SputnikFirst flight 1957 · Height 29.2 mOriginally an intercontinental ballistic missile, adapted as a launch vehicle. It carried the first Sputnik and Vostok into orbit, and its descendants still fly today.Open article →
People
Notable people
Sergei Pavlovich KorolevHe was born on 12 January 1907 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Fascinated from an early age by aviation and rocketry, in the 1930s he was among the founders of Moscow’s Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD). In 1938, at the height of Stalin’s purges, he was arrested, tortured and sentenced to forced labour. He passed through a camp in Kolyma in the far north-east of Siberia and then a “sharashka” — a prison design bureau led by aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev. He was released only in 1944 and fully rehabilitated in 1957. After the war he headed the OKB-1 design bureau, where he developed the R-7 Semyorka — the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile and the launch vehicle that carried Sputnik 1 into orbit on 4 October 1957. There followed Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika, the Luna probes and the crewed Vostok spacecraft, aboard which Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth on 12 April 1961 and, in 1963, the first woman Valentina Tereshkova. The Voskhod programme then produced the first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov, 1965). Korolev’s identity was strictly concealed — Soviet leaders feared for his safety and for the secrecy of the whole programme, so in the West he appeared only as the anonymous “Chief Designer”. He died on 14 January 1966 during surgery, before he could complete his great goal of a crewed flight to the Moon. Only after his death was his role revealed, and he was buried with state honours at the Kremlin Wall.
Yuri Alekseyevich GagarinThe first human in space. On 12 April 1961 he orbited the Earth aboard Vostok 1 and became a symbol of the Soviet space program.History
Key events
- Sputnik 1The first artificial satellite of Earth opened the Space Age and kicked off the space race between the USA and the USSR.
- Vostok 1Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space and in orbit around the Earth.
- Vostok 6
- Soyuz T-10-1
- Soyuz T-10-1The date falls outside the main 1957–1975 period and is included here to illustrate the theme of launch escape systems. Two seconds before the launcher exploded on the pad, mission control activated the launch escape system (SAS, the Soviet counterpart to the LES). The crew, Vladimir Titov and Gennadi Strekalov, survived accelerations of roughly 15–17 g without serious injury — still the only real-world use of this type of system in the Soviet/Russian program.