All Questions
Tagged with history soviet-union
29
questions
38
votes
5
answers
7k
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Did Sputnik 1 tell us more than "beep"? What science was improved by information gained from its orbiting the Earth?
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite launched by humans to orbit the Earth.
This answer begins:
Sputnik had just one single job: Prove its existence by sending a simple "beep" ...
- 149k
35
votes
4
answers
7k
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How did the USSR track Gagarin's Vostok-1 orbital flight? Was tracking capability an issue in the choice of orbit?
For the USA's Mercury flights, a number of tracking stations were installed around the globe. John Glenn's first orbital flight was tracked with them, plus a number of ships.
(Tracking stations used ...
- 14.5k
33
votes
1
answer
6k
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How did the U.S.S.R manage to rotate the N-1 from horizontal to vertical?
The title says it all - but I heard that NASA considered horizontal integration for the Saturn V couldn't be considered, as lifting the rocket to a vertical position would require an immense ...
- 551
27
votes
2
answers
4k
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Gagarin not ejecting from capsule
I'm currently reading a dutch book about the earlier days of manned spaceflight (Ruimtevaart B. van der Klaauw). Published in 1962
In a chapter about Vostok 1 the book reads as following
Translated ...
- 1,134
25
votes
1
answer
8k
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What "fuel more powerful than anything the West (had) in stock" put Laika in orbit aboard Sputnik 2?
The BBC World Service Radio Witness History podcast Laika, the first dog in space contains a short audio clips from some vintage 1950's British news. At 02:30 in a ...
- 149k
25
votes
2
answers
4k
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What caused the N1 to become a failure?
What were key factors that made the N1 the recipe for disaster it became for the USSR? Especially when the USSR was the Space King at the time?
- 539
23
votes
4
answers
6k
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Was the Soviet N1 really capable of sending 9.6 GB/s of telemetry?
On the Wikipedia page for Soviet N1, it says of the control system:
The telemetry system relayed data back at an estimated rate of 9.6
gigabytes per second on 320,000 channels on 14 frequencies. ...
- 815
20
votes
1
answer
4k
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How was the cosmonaut of the Soviet moon mission supposed to get back in the return vehicle?
In the Soviet Moon mission, for which the ill fated N-1 launcher was built, we know that the cosmonaut responsible for landing on the moon was to transfer from the equivalent of the command module to ...
- 559
19
votes
8
answers
10k
views
What kept the Soviets from going to the Moon (before the US)?
I know that Saturn V's payload was 140 tons, about 20 times that of Soyuz. The Soviets did not have a functioning rocket with similar characteristics. But why? They had a head start in the space race ...
- 364
12
votes
1
answer
843
views
Was the R-7 the first two stage rocket of the Soviet Union?
The first US two stage rocket was bumper, a combination of a german V2 liquid fuel rocket with an US second stage.
The Soviet Union had the R-1 and R-2 based on the V-2.
In this list, the R-7 is ...
- 49.2k
10
votes
1
answer
434
views
Was Fidel Castro ever in a Soviet spacecraft?
I was looking at a Roscosmos news item Russian monitoring tools track the stage of the rocket that launched the module of the Chinese station about the reentering Long March 5B
This situation will ...
- 149k
9
votes
1
answer
923
views
Did the Soviet Union put an unmanned satellite in "very low orbit"above the Kármán line which used aerodynamic attitude control?
This interesting, archived page https://www.webcitation.org/618QHms8h?url=http://www.fai.org/astronautics/100km.asp which I found in this answer, says:
Later in the same decade (or very early in ...
- 149k
8
votes
1
answer
476
views
What was the first Soviet spacecraft that could recharge its battery it each orbit? Where were the photovoltaic cells made?
Sputnik 1 (/ˈspʌtnɪk, ˈspʊtnɪk/; "Satellite-1", or "PS-1", Простейший Спутник-1 or Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1, "Elementary Satellite 1") was the first artificial Earth ...
- 149k
7
votes
3
answers
3k
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In what ways did the Soviet Union "observe the Apollo Moon landings closely"?
@DarkDust's comment says:
If the USSR had had just a tiny amount of doubt whether the landings were faked, they would have used that for propaganda. Loudly! They observed the landings closely and ...
- 149k
6
votes
1
answer
492
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What budgetary and technical impact did the N1 program's failure have on the Soviet Union's space program?
After the failure of the N1 program, what impact did this have on the budget for the space program of the Soviet Union?
What technical impacts did it have? For example, did other missions suffer ...
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