In the early 1970s, a Soviet defector exposed Soviet achievements as “space bluff,” which hid failures and created illusions about technological capacities. A wealth of previously classified documents ...

Today (April 12) marks the 60th anniversary of the daring launch that sent the first human into space, paving the way for manned space exploration of the cosmos. On April 12, 1961, Russian ...

National Archives and Records Administration The space race between the United States and the Soviet Union stepped up a gear on May 25, 1961, when American President John F. Kennedy announced that his ...

Yuri Gagarun was the first Russian cosmonaut sent into space, but his 1961 journey wasn't all it seemed, writes John Strausbaugh in "The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned." ...

When the Space Race kicked off in earnest in the 1950s, in some ways it was hard to pin down where sci-fi began and reality ended. As the first artificial satellites began zipping around the Earth,… ...

Sent on their way by an R-7, the Soviet space program’s treacherously temperamental workhorse, Voskhod circled the Earth 16 times and returned home safely, much to the relief of Sergei Korolev ...

But the Russian space program has stalled for years, plagued by sparse budgets. ... that set the pace for the history books, now risks flaming out because of a land war back on Earth.

It was all in support of a Soviet Moon program initiative that was hoped would beat the Americans, winning the space race in the process. Korolev planned to achieve this with the Soviet answer to ...

On Nov. 3, 1957, this mild-tempered mutt entered the history books and the hearts of millions, ... At the time, the Soviet space program was the envy of the rest of the world.