Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
147
Conquering the Cosmos
The big, bad Soviet Union, America's rival in the race to space and nuclear
superiority, was as surprised at its superpower status as the outside world. An
unwieldy mass of illiterate peasants before Lenin came along, Russia took just
a few decades to reach the scientific heights needed to conquer the cosmos.
The Soviet government poured funding and pressure on its rocket scientists,
who stunned the world when they beat the Americans in sending the first
satellite into space in 1957.
Sputnik,
the name of the vessel and the Russian
word for “satellite,” instantly entered the international vocabulary. A month
later a Soviet mutt named
Laika
orbited the earth. She was merely setting the
stage, however, for the Soviets' next breakthrough:
Yuri Gagarin's first
manned flight
in April 1961—a month before U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard
made the journey. Gagarin came to represent Russia's victory over its own
backward and repressive past, with a literal and figurative blast into the future.
The anniversary of his flight, April 12, is informally celebrated as a national
holiday, and his smiling image is one of the few Soviet-era faces that evokes
universal pride. Just 2 years later, textile worker-turned-cosmonaut Valentina
Tereshkhova became the
first woman in space,
a full 20 years before the
United States sent Sally Ride into orbit in 1983.
The Soviet space program suffered plenty of defeats, including the deaths of
four cosmonauts in accidents on the Soyuz-1 in 1967 and the Soyuz-11 in 1971,
but propagandists largely concealed them from the public. Pilots from dozens
of countries flew to space on Soviet rockets, and it wasn't until the late 1980s
that the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union started crippling its once-mighty
space machine.
Mir space station
became a remarkable symbol and victim of
Russia's post-Soviet plight. Launched in 1986, just weeks after the U.S. shuttle
Challenger
exploded in tragedy, the Mir orbiting lab was built to last 3 or 4
years. But when the country that launched it crumbled in 1991, the Mir's crew
was told to stay aloft for another 6 months while the government found money
to bring them home. The station and Russia's space program scraped by,
helped out by a once-unthinkable partnership with NASA, which had no space
station of its own. After a string of accidents in the late 1990s, the Mir was
finally sent to a choreographed demise in the Pacific Ocean in 2000.
Russia's space program has since dedicated most of its energies to the Inter-
national Space Station—and to sending the world's first
“space tourists”
into
orbit. The once-secretive compounds at Star City and Korolev outside Moscow
now occasionally open their doors for well-paying tourists, who can test their
stamina on centrifugal machines even if they don't plan any space journeys.
For a cheaper and less stomach-churning way to learn more about the Rus-
sian space program, visit the
Museum of Cosmonautics
(reviewed above) or
climb aboard a real
Buran space shuttle
in Gorky Park (reviewed below).
Three, two, one, blastoff . . .
7
