USSR

The Space Age past may come knocking on the world's door next week as the defunct Soviet Union's Kosmos 482 Venus lander from 1972 makes an unwelcome return home and is predicted to crash into the Earth's atmosphere around May 10.

Sixty years ago on Monday, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a variation of a rocket originally designed to launch nuclear weapons to become the first person to orbit the Earth.

The only bits of the Moon available for private sale sold at auction at Sotheby's in New York today for US$855,000. The three small shards of lunar rock were a gift to the widow of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the “Chief Designer” and director of the Soviet space program.

Jodrell Bank Observatory has released an audio recording from a 1968 Soviet mission that could have seen the United States losing the race to the Moon. The audio recording intercepted by the radio telescope is from the unmanned Zond 6 mission that might have put the Soviet Union on the Moon first.

On March 18, 1965, Soviet cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev lifted off in Voskhod (Sunrise) 2, during the flight of which Leonov would become the first person to step into the vacuum of space.