Showing posts with the label Russia

The Osoaviakhim-1 Disaster

Mar 13, 2024

Between 1930 and 1932, Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard made more than two dozen trips to the upper atmosphere using a balloon of his design...

Nedelin Catastrophe: The Worst Space-Related Disaster

Sep 19, 2023

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan is one of the busiest and the most important spaceport on earth with over a thousand satellit...

The Ice Palace of Anna Ioannovna

Mar 28, 2023

The winter of 1739-40 was incredibly harsh all over Europe and especially brutal in Russia. Temperatures plummeted to forty degrees below ze...

Why Soviet Cosmonauts Carried a Gun to Space

Oct 27, 2022

For decades, the standard survival kit carried by Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz spacecraft included a specially built gun and a few do...

Luna 9: The First Soft Landing on Another Planetary Body

Jun 2, 2022

The first spacecraft to achieve a survivable soft-landing on the moon was the Soviet unmanned spacecraft Luna 9. It was an exceedingly diffi...

Why The Soviet Union Advertised Products That Didn’t Exist

May 4, 2022

The purpose of commercials is to advertise products and drive sales, but in Soviet Russia under communism they served an altogether differen...

How The Soviet Union Tried to Abolish Weekends

Apr 8, 2022

About a hundred years ago in August 1929, the Soviet Union moved to alter the most fundamental tool of daily functioning: the calendar. An i...

Belyana: Russia’s Giant Wooden Boats

Dec 22, 2021

The Belyana were some of the largest wooden ships ever built. Yet, they were only meant for a single journey. They were built to transport...

Belka and Strelka: Soviet Space Dogs

Dec 17, 2021

In August 1960, two dogs named Belka and Strelka completed went to space aboard a Soviet spacecraft, stayed for a full day orbiting, and ret...

The Bronze Horseman And The Thunder Stone

Dec 16, 2021

At the Senate Square in Saint Petersburg, Russia, stands a magnificent equestrian statue of the founder of St Petersburg, Peter the Great. K...