Definition
As the initial leaders in space flight, both unmanned orbiters and manned orbital flight, the Soviet Union pioneered many aspects of space exploration. With the continuing experience, independently and with international collaboration, the further efforts of the Russian Space Program contributed to space station development and extended duration human orbital flights. Several accidents and serious mishaps in their program occurred and are summarized.
Overview
The former Soviet Union, now Russia, was the first country to send a human into orbit when Yuri A. Gargarin launched and successfully completed one orbit in the Vostok I spacecraft on April 12, 1961. After the early success of the US lunar program, the Soviet Union switched priority for their human space program to space stations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Oberg (1981). They quickly set long duration records. As of 2015, 14 humans, all Russian cosmonauts, have cumulative spaceflight in LEO over 500 days, and four...
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Clark, J.B. (2019). Human Spaceflight Accidents: The USSR/Russian Space Program. In: Young, L., Sutton, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Bioastronautics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10152-1_65-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10152-1_65-1
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Human Spaceflight Accidents: The USSR/Russian Space Program- Published:
- 01 December 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10152-1_65-2
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Human Spaceflight Accidents: The USSR/Russian Space Program- Published:
- 11 March 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10152-1_65-1