After a Soyuz crew landed hundreds of miles off course in the frozen Ural wilderness, the Soviet space program built a custom survival weapon designed for bears, wolves, and worst-case landings. For ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. On November 3, 1957, a Soviet space dog named Laika became the first animal to orbit Earth. Laika was a 3-year-old stray ...

"I believe that [Apollo program director George Low] certainly was concerned, and rightly so, that we could have orbited the moon ahead of the Americans. We had everything for it. That is why he ...

The most persistent myth about Apollo is that the United States faked the Moon landing in a studio and somehow fooled the entire planet. The more closely I look at the historical record, the clearer a ...

MOSCOW, April 16 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday praised Elon Musk, comparing him to Sergei Korolev, the chief engineer behind the Soviet Union's space success in the 1950s ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. In 1972, the Soviet Union launched a pair of space probes destined ...

Originally published: Challenge to Apollo : the Soviet Union and the space race, 1945-1974. Washington, D.C. : National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2000. Presage -- First steps -- Stalin and ...