The Soviet program won the contests that mattered most in the 1950s and 1960s. First satellite, first animal in orbit, first human in space, first woman in space, first spacewalk, first soft landing on another planet. It then lost the one contest that the American public remembered, the race to the Moon, and was then shut down in place by the collapse of the system that funded it. The asymmetry of the legacy, American Apollo against Soviet Mir, has obscured how much of the early program the Soviets actually won.
The Soviet program was also unusually secretive. Its chief designer, Sergei Korolev, was unknown by name to the general public during his lifetime; he was referred to in the Soviet press as “the Chief Designer” until his death. The N1 lunar rocket, the parallel to the American Saturn V, was not acknowledged as a program until 1989, two years before the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Asif Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo (NASA, 2000) is the standard account and the source for many of the figures that follow.
Origins in Soviet Rocketry
The Soviet program began, like the American one, with the V-2. Soviet forces captured around 100 V-2 rockets and the records of the Peenemünde operation in the spring of 1945. The captured rockets were shipped to the Soviet Union and test-fired at Kapustin Yar between 1946 and 1950. Several hundred German specialists were also taken, mostly involuntarily, and they worked alongside Soviet engineers for the rest of the decade. Unlike the American Operation Paperclip, the Soviet effort was run by the NKVD (later MGB and then KGB) until 1947, and the German specialists were closely supervised.
The Soviet program’s most important figure was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, a Ukrainian-born aeronautical engineer who had been imprisoned in the Gulag in the late 1930s and again in the early 1940s. Korolev was assigned to OKB-1 in 1956, and the bureau developed the R-7 ICBM and the Vostok, Voskhod, and Soyuz spacecraft families. OKB-1 was the central design bureau of the Soviet space program, but it was not the only one; the Glushko engine bureau (OKB-456), the Pilyugin guidance bureau — the Chelomei design bureau (OKB-52) were all independent, relationships between them were often difficult.
The Era of Firsts
The Soviet firsts between 1957 and 1965 followed a logical pattern: first prove the launch vehicle, then prove the life-support system, then prove the human. Sputnik 1 (October 4, 1957) was a capability demonstration. Sputnik 2 (November 3, 1957) demonstrated that a passenger could be carried, and the choice of a dog was dictated by the fact that the satellite was not designed to return to Earth. Laika died within hours of launch, probably from overheating in the cabin; the Soviet public was not told this until 2002.
Luna 1 (January 2, 1959) was the first spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, missing the Moon by 5,995 km and entering heliocentric orbit. Luna 2 (September 12, 1959) hit the Moon, the first human-made object to reach another celestial body. Luna 3 (October 7, 1959) photographed the far side of the Moon, the first time any human had seen it. Vostok 1 (April 12, 1961) put Yuri Gagarin in orbit for 108 minutes. Vostok 6 (June 16, 1963) carried Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, on a 70-hour, 48-orbit flight. Voskhod 2 (March 18, 1965) carried Alexei Leonov on the first EVA, a 12-minute spacewalk that nearly killed him when his suit ballooned in vacuum.
The propaganda value of these firsts was enormous. Pravda covered each one as a vindication of the Soviet system. The American press covered them as evidence that the United States was losing the technological Cold War. The response, the Apollo commitment of 1961, was a direct consequence of these flights and especially of Gagarin’s orbit.
The Lunar Program and the N1 Disaster
The Soviet response to Kennedy’s commitment was slow, fragmented, and ultimately defeated by Korolev’s death. Korolev had been working on a lunar program since at least 1960, and the design he favored was a single-launch architecture similar to Apollo. The hardware required, the N1 booster, was under development from 1960 onward, but Korolev had to compete for resources with Vladimir Chelomei’s alternative architecture (a heavy booster and a separate lunar lander launched in pieces) and with the Strategic Rocket Forces, which had higher priority.
Korolev’s death on January 14, 1966, was the decisive blow. He was undergoing surgery for colorectal cancer and died on the operating table. The program was taken over by Vasily Mishin, who lacked Korolev’s authority and his ability to force consensus among the competing design bureaus. The N1’s first stage used 30 NK-15 engines, more than five times the number on the Saturn V’s first stage, and the engine article’s control system was a continuous source of failure. The four N1 test launches (February 21, 1969; July 3, 1969; June 26, 1971; November 23, 1972) all failed, the first three within the first 70 seconds of flight and the second two of those catastrophically on the launch pad. The June 1971 failure destroyed Launch Site 110 at Baikonur, and the program was effectively dead.
The Soviet leadership canceled the lunar landing program in 1974, after the fifth N1 had been built but never launched. The decision was not announced; the existence of the N1 program was officially denied until 1989. Two American astronauts, John Young and Charles Duke, had already walked on the Moon by the time the decision was made.
Salyut and Mir
The Soviet program recovered from the N1 disaster by redirecting its resources to long-duration spaceflight, the contest that the Apollo program was not designed to fight. Salyut 1, launched on April 19, 1971, was the first space station in orbit. It was inhabited by the Soyuz 11 crew (Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev) for 23 days, a new record, but the crew died during reentry when a pressure-equalization valve opened prematurely. The Salyut program continued through seven more stations (Salyut 2 failed; Salyut 3, 4, 5 were shorter-lived military or civil stations; Salyut 6 and 7 were the operational long-duration stations of the 1977–1991 period).
Salyut 6, launched on September 29, 1977, was the first station designed for routine crew rotation and resupply by Progress cargo ships. It was inhabited for a total of 683 days across multiple crews and hosted cosmonauts from Warsaw Pact countries, France, India, and others. Salyut 7, launched on April 19, 1982, set a single-mission endurance record of 237 days (Kizim, Solovyov, Atkov, 1984) and was the site of a famous repair mission in 1985 after its electrical system failed.
Mir, launched on February 19, 1986, was a fundamentally more capable station. It was the first modular space station, with a core module and six additional modules (Kvant, Kvant 2, Kristall, Spektr, Priroda, and the docking module) attached between 1987 and 1996. Mir was continuously inhabited from September 8, 1989, to August 28, 1999, a period of nearly 10 years, and was the site of the longest single spaceflight (Valeri Polyakov, 437 days, 1994–1995). Mir hosted the Shuttle-Mir program, which brought American astronauts to the station between 1995 and 1998 and which served as the operational test bed for the International Space Station partnership.
Mir was deorbited on March 23, 2001, splashing down in the South Pacific. The program had lasted 15 years and had produced an unmatched dataset on the long-term effects of weightlessness on the human body.
The End of the Program
The dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, ended the Soviet space program. The space-industrial complex was divided among Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and the Russian successor agency Rosaviakosmos was chronically underfunded through the 1990s. The Buran program, the Soviet Space Shuttle equivalent, was canceled in 1993; one flight had been completed in November 1988. The Energia heavy-lift rocket flew twice (1987 and 1988) and was then abandoned.
The Russian space program’s recovery came through partnership with NASA on the International Space Station, which began assembly in 1998 and which has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. The ISS is in part a Soviet design: its Russian segment, the Zvezda service module and the Zarya functional cargo block, are direct descendants of Mir and Salyut hardware.
The Soviet program’s peak output, between 1957 and 1971, remains one of the most remarkable sustained runs of technological innovation in the 20th century. The collapse of the program in the 1990s, after the collapse of the state that funded it, is a useful counterpoint to the American belief that technological achievement follows from a free political system.
Key sources
- Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (NASA SP-2000-4408, 2000)
- Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, 4 vols. (NASA SP-4110, 2005–2009)
- Mikhail Tarasenko, Military and Space Programs of the USSR and Russia (1992)
- Brian Harvey and Olga Zakutnyaya, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier? (Springer, 2021)