Abstract
With the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik 1 , on October 4, 1957, began a new era in human history, the so-called Space Age. Sputnik was soon followed by numerous other satellites.
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- 1.
The astronomical term “satellite” in the Russian language is translated as “sputnik,” a word whose etymology is the association of the letter “s” (with) and the word “puti” (path, way) and, therefore, literally “walking with …” or “fellow-traveller.”
- 2.
Kvant-1, the first module, was launched on March 31, 1987, followed by Kvant-2 (November 26, 1989) and Kristall (May 31, 1990). Because of the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the launch of the last two modules was delayed and in the end, Spektr (May, 20 1995) and Priroda (April 23, 1996) were completed and launched only because of funds from USA as part of the Mir-Shuttle program. The seventh pressurized module was a docking unit used for docking of the NASA space shuttles.
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Dicati, R. (2017). Prologue: From Sputnik to the International Space Station. In: Stamping the Earth from Space. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20756-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20756-8_1
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