Sputnik 1, was launched in 1957, by an ICBM, and created the space race. Its successor, Sputnik 2, carried the first breathing cargo, a dog sent on a one way mission, which ended up dying a painful death.
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soviet satellites
Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, here are some of the other lesser known Soviet satellites.
Soviet space gear looked different to NASA space gear. There was something alarming about this, since it meant that there was a cultural and aesthetic aspect to the type of their design that we expect to be based purely on rational criteria.
These days the variety of satellite design does tend to reflect their function more than their provenance, however here are our picks of the ones that were quintessentially Soviet. Vote on your faves.
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Sputnik 3 looks more like a badly made Dalek, than a state of the art piece of hardware. Another ICBM launched satellite, it entered orbit in 1958 and contained laboratory experiments to monitor the upper atmosphere.
This picture presumably shoes the experiment contained within the Etalon 1, a satellite launched in teh late 80’s and designed with a very long lifespan. Its purpose includes confirmation of accurate measure of the Gravitational Constant.
The Polyot 1 is the stuff of James Bond movies, and provided a freak-out moment for the West, since it was designed by the soviet military as a propulsion system to seek out and destroy enemy satellites. It was created in 1963.
The Molniya satellite is one of the most successful designs produced in the Soviet Union. It was first launched in 1965, and variants were still used well into this century. Requiring less power than a geosynchronous satellite, the Molniya looped the earth in a 12 hour elliptical orbit, called after the satellite itself.
The Zenit 2 was the first Soviet reconnaissance satellite to go into orbit. As a spy satellite, it was launched as part of the Cosmos program to evade detection of its true purpose.
The Cosmos 954 was a reconnaissance satellite that was nuclear powered. This created an international incident when it was realized that it was malfunctioning and would crash into the earth along with its Uranium core. The final destination of the debris was in Canada. There is an account of the story at the blog, linked to below.
The Luna 10 blurs the distinction between a probe and a satellite. It was the first craft to be put in orbit around the moon, in 1966, carrying out scientific studies of the moon’s surface and magnetic field.
One of 13 satellites launched by the Russians with mineral names, this is a rare shot of the Cobalt spy satellite.
The GLONASS satellite system was the Soviet equivalent of the network of satellites that provide the US GPS system. This is one of the last of the Soviet space projects, started in the early 1980’s and did not go into full service till after the disintegration of the USSR, in 1995.
The Nadezhda is a modification of the Tsikada maritime navigation satellite. They were equipped with a system for search and rescue systems, locating vessels and aircraft in distress.
First launched in 1970 the Stela satellite network was designed to enable communications for the soviet military.
The plan was to have 45 of the Gonets communications satellites in orbit by the mid nineties, howvere the project was abandoned. The storage capacity of this satellite was a whopping 8MB.
