РУССКИЙ
12:41 12.04.2024 •
Photo: ROSCOSMOS
Russia celebrates April 12 as Cosmonautics Day.
An Angara-A5 heavy-lift rocket with an Orion booster launched from the Vostochny spaceport in Russia’s Far East, a TASS correspondent reported from the scene.
In about 12 minutes, the Orion booster with the test payload separated from the Angara upper stage and kept delivering it into the target orbit as part of the rocket’s flight development tests.
This is the first test-flight of the Angara rocket from the Vostochny spaceport in eastern Russia. Previously, these launch vehicles blasted off only from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Russia.
The Angara test-launch from the Vostochny spaceport has commenced flight development tests of the Amur rocket system that comprises the Angara carrier rocket and the spaceport’s infrastructure.
The Angara is a family of next-generation Russian space rockets. It consists of light, medium and heavy carrier rockets with a lifting capacity of up to 37.5 tons. The new family of rockets uses kerosene and liquid oxygen as environmentally friendly propellant components compared to the fuel of the Proton-M rocket, which Angara will replace in the future.
Aside from the baseline Angara-A5 rocket (a liftoff mass of about 773 tons and a carrying capacity of up to 24.5 tons into low near-Earth orbit), Russia is set to produce the Angara-A5M modification with the increased lifting capacity and the Angara-A5V launch vehicle with the first and second reusable stages and the third hydrogen-powered stage.
Russia intends to use the Angara family of carrier rockets to put automatic probes (for instance, the Spektr-UF orbital observatory) into near-Earth orbit, deliver some modules of its future Russian Orbital Station and crews to the orbital outpost aboard the next-generation spacecraft.
Yury Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth.
On April 12, 1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. His spacecraft Vostok blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome to travel around the globe once. Gagarin successfully landed in Russia’s Saratov Region. His flight lasted 108 minutes. At the moment of blastoff Gagarin dropped a remark that instantly went down in history: "Off we go!" The space flight earned him the title of The Hero of the Soviet Union, TASS reminds.
At the end of April 1961 Yury Gagarin began a "world tour of peace." During the next three years he visited about 30 countries, including Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Finland, Britain, Poland, Cuba, Brazil, Canada, Hungary, India, Egypt, Austria, Japan, France, Mexico, East Germany, Sweden and Norway.
After his truly historic accomplishment Gagarin continued to work at the Cosmonauts Training Center. Starting from May 1961 he was the cosmonauts’ training team’s commander and senior instructor. Later, he took the position of deputy chief of the Cosmonauts Training Center’s space flight training program. Gagarin was a standby of his colleague, Vladimir Komarov, who died on April 24, 1967 while returning after a test flight on the Soyuz-1 spacecraft. Gagarin was not destined go to space again. The world’s first cosmonaut died in an air crash while performing a test flight on a MiG-15UTI training fighter jet together with instructor Vladimir Seryogin on March 27, 1968.
Currently, Russia’s Nikolay Chub and Alexander Grebenkin, Americans Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps are working at the International Space Station (ISS). China’s Tiangong National Station has a crew of two: Tang Shengjie and Jiang Xinlin.
The longest orbital flight in the history of space exploration - 437 days 17 hours 58 minutes and 17 seconds - was performed by Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov from January 1994 through March 1995 on the Mir station. The holder of the world record for total time spent in space is also a Russian cosmonaut - Oleg Kononenko, who is currently working on the ISS. It is his fifth orbital flight. On February 4, 2024, he broke the previous record (878 days 11 hours 29 minutes and 48 seconds) set in 2015 by Russia’s Gennady Padalka, who also had five space flights. At the end of the year-long mission in September 2024, Oleg Kononenko's total time in space is expected to reach 1,110 days.
The first-ever spacewalk was performed on March 18, 1965, by Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, who flew on the Voskhod-2 spacecraft together with Pavel Belyayev. Leonov spent 12 minutes and 9 seconds outside the spacecraft (in all, the spacewalk lasted 23 minutes and 41 seconds). The longest stay outside the spacecraft (8 hours and 56 minutes) was performed on March 11, 2001 from the ISS by US astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms. The record holder for the largest number of exits (16) is Russia’s Anatoly Solovyov, each one of them taking place from 1990-1998 when he was on the Mir space station. According to Roscosmos, he spent a total of 78 hours and 46 minutes in open space.
The world's first woman to go into space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova: on June 16-19, 1963, she flew the Vostok-6 spacecraft (for 2 days 22 hours 50 minutes). Tereshkova is also the only woman to have made a solo orbital flight. The longest flight among women (328 days 13 hours 58 minutes and 37 seconds) was carried out by NASA astronaut Christina Koch who stayed on the ISS from March 2019 to February 2020. American astronaut Peggy Whitson spent a record 675 days 3 hours 50 minutes and 13 seconds in space over four flights.
Svetlana Savitskaya, of the Soviet Union, was the first woman to make a spacewalk on July 25, 1984 from the Salyut-7 station together with Vladimir Dzhanibekov (3 hours and 33 minutes). The longest spacewalk was performed by American Susan Helms, and Peggy Whitson holds the record for total time spent in open space over ten spacewalks (60 hours 19 minutes).
A total of 615 men and women from 40 countries (including unofficial astronauts and space tourists), 76 of them women, have made orbital flights since the beginning of the space era. The United States ranks first (364 astronauts), followed by the Soviet Union/Russia (135) and China (20). In addition, 14 representatives of Japan, 12 representatives of Germany (including East Germany), 11 representatives of Canada, 10 representatives of France, 8 representatives of Italy, and 3 representatives of Saudi Arabia have performed orbital flights. There were also 2 representatives of Belgium, Bulgaria, Great Britain, Israel, the Netherlands, the UAE and Sweden, 1 representative each from Afghanistan, Austria, Belarus, Brazil, Hungary, Vietnam, Denmark, India, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Syria, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and South Africa.
read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs
