Secret Dawn - Among the Stars - Complete Chronicle

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is born in a village in Ryazan Governorate. Scarlet fever at ten leaves him nearly deaf, cutting him off from ordinary schooling and driving him to self-education.

After years reading alone in Moscow libraries, Tsiolkovsky passes his exams and becomes a provincial teacher of arithmetic and geometry in Borovsk and later Kaluga, the setting of a lifetime of solitary calculation.

In the same year the Wright Flyer leaves the ground at Kitty Hawk, a deaf Russian schoolteacher publishes 'The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices', deriving the fundamental equation of rocket flight.

His paper works out the mathematics of reaction propulsion and proposes liquid-fuelled, staged rockets for spaceflight, decades before the technology exists. It is the intellectual charter of the Soviet programme.

Vasily Parin, son of a physician, becomes a leading Soviet physiologist specialising in circulation and the reflexes of the heart.

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev is born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. A fascination with aviation seizes him young; he designs gliders as a student.

Valentin Glushko is born in Odessa; the sources give 2 or 3 September 1908. He is said to have written to Tsiolkovsky as a teenager and to have dreamed of interplanetary travel.

Born on the official date of 18 October 1908, which the same record calls probably a year too early, Nikolai Kamanin becomes one of the first Heroes of the Soviet Union on 14 April 1934 (the Russian record gives 20 April) for rescuing the Chelyuskin expedition from the Arctic ice, a celebrity aviator turned general.

Tsiolkovsky writes the line most often quoted from his work; in a 1912 article it runs 'The planet is the cradle of reason, but one cannot live forever in a cradle'. His writings frame space as human destiny.

Boris Chertok is born in Łódź. An electrical engineer, he works in the aviation industry and joins Korolev's rocket team in 1946 as a specialist in guidance and control.

The industrial slaughter of 1914-18 topples the Russian Empire and midwifes the Bolshevik state that will, four decades later, put the first machine and the first human into orbit.

Vladimir Chelomei is born in what is now Poland; a brilliant mechanician, he will build the design bureau that rivals Korolev's.

The Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd. The new Soviet state will make rocketry a matter of ideology, prestige and survival.

Oleg Gazenko is born in Stavropol Krai; he trains as a physician and physiologist, drawn to the frontier of the body under extreme stress.

The GDL in Petrograd, the seed of Soviet rocket-engine work; Glushko joins it in May 1929 and designs the first Soviet liquid-fuel motors there.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is constituted, the polity that will run Baikonur, Star City and the space-medicine institutes for seven decades.

By his own account Konstantin Feoktistov survives being shot and left for dead by German troops as a teenage scout in the war, a brush with death that marks the future spacecraft designer.

In late works he describes rocket trains (multistage rockets), orbital greenhouses and space colonies, anticipating the closed-loop life support and stations the programme will build.

At the Gas Dynamics Laboratory Glushko designs the first Soviet liquid-propellant rocket motors, the start of a career as the USSR's master of the rocket engine.

The Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD) forms in Moscow with Korolev among its leaders; volunteers joke that GIRD means 'group of engineers working for nothing'. In 1933 they fly the first Soviet liquid-fuel rocket, GIRD-09.

With Tsander and others he founds the Moscow rocketry group GIRD and, in 1933, helps launch the first Soviet liquid-fuel rocket.

The Nazi seizure of power sets in motion the war whose rocket technology, the A-4/V-2, both superpowers will seize in 1945 as the seed of their space programmes.

GIRD and the GDL are merged into the Reactive Scientific Research Institute (RNII), bringing the amateurs under military discipline, and, soon, under the shadow of the purges.

Valentina Ponomaryova trains as a liquid-propellant rocket-engine engineer and pilot, one of the very few Soviet women flying powered aircraft in the 1950s.

Yuri Gagarin is born to a carpenter and a milkmaid on a collective farm near Gzhatsk (later renamed Gagarin). Under Nazi occupation his family is turned out of their home.

Alexei Leonov is born in a Siberian village, one of many children; by his own account the family was exiled under collectivisation. He is a gifted painter as well as a pilot.

He dies a Soviet hero, his birthday later marking Cosmonautics Day festivities. His ideas pass to a generation of engineers, Korolev among them, who will make them real.

Stalin's purges sweep through the aviation and rocketry institutes: Korolev, Glushko, Tupolev and countless engineers are arrested. The Soviet space programme is founded, in part, by men who first met in prison.

Valentina Tereshkova is born in a village in Yaroslavl Oblast; her father is killed in the Winter War, when she is two. She works in a textile mill and joins an amateur parachuting club.

Boris Yegorov, son of a distinguished neurosurgeon, trains as a physician and specialises in the vestibular apparatus, the balance organ that space sickness attacks.

Denounced on testimony that included Glushko's, extracted under interrogation three months earlier while Glushko was himself in custody, Korolev is arrested and tortured, according to later accounts with a broken jaw, and after sentencing sent on to Kolyma, the Gulag's deadliest region.

Caught in the purges, Glushko is imprisoned; interrogation extracts testimony implicating Korolev. The two men will work together for decades under the shadow of that betrayal.

War engulfs Europe. German rocketry at Peenemünde produces the world's first ballistic missile; its capture in 1945 will jump-start both Soviet and American space efforts.

Near death in Kolyma, Korolev is transferred to a prison design bureau (sharashka) under Tupolev, then to Glushko's rocket-engine sharashka, the men who will build Soviet space met as prisoners.

Viktor Savinykh trains as a geodesist and optical engineer before joining the cosmonaut corps, an expert in the instruments the stations carry.

Valeri Polyakov trains as a physician specialising in astronautics medicine and joins the IBMP, determined to fly himself and study the body from the inside.

Chelomei makes his name in pulsejet cruise missiles and heads OKB-51 from September 1944; his own OKB-52 in Reutov follows in 1955 and by the 1960s is a power in its own right, protected for a time by Khrushchev (whose son he employed).

As the Reich collapses, Soviet and American teams race to seize V-2 hardware, blueprints and engineers. Korolev and Glushko are sent to Germany in uniform to reconstruct the missile.

The atomic bombings make the marriage of rocket and warhead the central strategic problem of the age, and the reason the USSR pours resources into the missiles that become launch vehicles.

In colonel's uniform, Korolev is sent to occupied Germany to study captured V-2 hardware, the technology he will surpass.

Chertok runs the Institute RABE in occupied Germany, gathering V-2 documentation and engineers, the raw material of the Soviet programme.

Stalin signs decree no. 1017-419ss creating NII-88 and the network of design bureaux, with a special committee for rocket technology and a new firing range. The decree does not name Korolev; he heads the long-range missile department at NII-88 in Kaliningrad (later Korolyov), near Moscow.

Appointed chief designer of long-range ballistic missiles, Korolev builds the bureau (OKB-1, later Energia) in Kaliningrad near Moscow that will produce Sputnik, Vostok and Soyuz.

From 1951 Chertok leads control-systems design for Sputnik, Vostok, Soyuz and the stations, at the technical heart of every mission.

For four decades the superpower rivalry frames every Soviet launch as propaganda and every secret as survival. Space becomes the theatre where the systems compete without firing a shot.

From the new Kapustin Yar range, the R-1, a reverse-engineered V-2, flies. The copy is the school; from it Korolev's bureau will grow the R-7 that opens space.

Sent to the United States on a scientific mission, Parin is accused on his return under article 58-1a of passing Soviet cancer research to the Americans, and imprisoned, a victim of late-Stalin paranoia.

Svetlana Savitskaya, daughter of an air-force marshal, becomes a champion aerobatic and test pilot, setting world aviation records and flying supersonic jets before she is thirty.

Dezik and Tsygan ride an R-1V rocket to about 110 km and parachute back alive, the first mammals recovered from a space-altitude flight, the beginning of Soviet space medicine.

Gazenko works on the early dog flight programme, which recovers the first mammals from space altitude, the practical birth of Soviet space medicine.

Stalin dies; the thaw that follows loosens (a little) the terror under which the rocket engineers had worked, and clears the way for Khrushchev's fascination with space spectaculars.

Parin is released on 29 October 1953 and fully rehabilitated on 13 April 1955; he turns to the new field of space physiology, bringing clinical rigour to the study of the body in flight.

Glushko's RD-107/108 engines power the R-7 that launches Sputnik and Gagarin. His combustion chambers are the heart of the Soviet space rocket. The dates of the engine development are not established by the research behind this archive.

Construction begins on the launch complex at Tyuratam in the Kazakh steppe, code-named Baikonur to mislead. From here every crewed Soviet and Russian flight will depart.

Baikonur is deliberately misnamed and misplaced on maps (the real site is at Tyuratam, hundreds of kilometres away) to confuse Western reconnaissance. Secrecy is the programme's default state.

After foundry school and flying club, Gagarin joins the air force and flies MiGs in the Arctic north, the profile the cosmonaut selectors seek.

R-7 rocket lofts an 83.6 kg polished sphere into orbit; its beeping is heard worldwide and detonates the Space Race. The 'Chief Designer' who built it must remain anonymous for state security.

The R-7 Semyorka, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, makes its maiden flight. Its descendants (Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz) will fly for seventy years.

Sputnik 2 carries the dog Laika into orbit, the first living creature to circle the Earth. There is no plan to recover her; her death, days into the flight, opens the ethical file of space biology.

Laika's one-way flight makes plain that living things can survive launch and weightlessness, and that the programme will spend lives, animal and eventually human, to learn how.

Korolev's identity is a state secret; he signs public articles as 'Professor K. Sergeev'. The Nobel Committee reportedly asks who should be credited for Sputnik; Khrushchev answers: 'the whole Soviet people'.

Korolev's R-7 puts the first satellite in orbit. He is celebrated as the anonymous 'Chief Designer'; the state forbids naming him, fearing assassination.

Gazenko helps select and train Laika for Sputnik 2. He carries the ethical weight of the one-way flight for the rest of his life, quoted in 1998 as saying the mission had not been worth the death of the dog.

At Korolev's bureau, Feoktistov is a lead designer of the Vostok capsule that carries Gagarin, and then of Voskhod and Soyuz, the engineer who drew the ships. The year he moved onto the Vostok work is not established by the research behind this archive.

Yelena Kondakova trains as an engineer and joins RKK Energia; she marries cosmonaut Valery Ryumin.

The first spacecraft to reach escape velocity and fly past the Moon, a reminder that the same rockets carry both robots and, soon, people.

An R-16 missile explodes on the pad at Baikonur during a rushed test, killing roughly 78-126 personnel including Marshal Nedelin. The disaster is hidden for decades, the cost of the race against the clock.

Twenty air-force pilots are chosen in 1960 and trained for the first flights under Kamanin and physician-selectors.

In August 1960 Sputnik 5 carries two dogs, rabbits, mice, flies and plants into orbit and back, the first Earth-orbital biological payload recovered alive, the direct proof of concept for Gagarin.

The Nedelin disaster, the failed N1 launches, cosmonauts removed from photographs after falling out of favour, the programme's public face is retouched. Glasnost will later reveal how much was hidden.

Glushko refuses to build the huge engines Korolev wants for the N1 (disagreeing over propellants); Korolev turns to Kuznetsov instead. The split between the two greatest designers hobbles the Soviet Moon effort.

Chosen among twenty pilots, Gagarin's calm, small stature (an advantage in the cramped Vostok) and easy charm mark him out. Korolev takes to him personally.

Selected in the first group, Leonov is already a trained painter; in 1965 he will take coloured pencils into orbit and sketch the Earth, the first artist in space.

Kamanin becomes deputy chief of combat training for space in 1960, takes over the preparation of crewed flights in January 1961 and serves as the air-force commander-in-chief's assistant for space from 1966 to 1971; he oversees training, crew assignments and the endless politics of who flies.

Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space aboard Vostok 1. The USSR wins the opening round of the crewed race; Gagarin's smile becomes the face of Soviet modernity.

A final Vostok test flies the dog Chernushka and a mannequin, 'Ivan Ivanovich', with a tape recorder aboard, to prove the life-support and recovery systems weeks before Gagarin.

Gherman Titov spends more than 25 hours aboard Vostok 2, and becomes the first human to suffer space sickness, opening the medical problem of vestibular adaptation that will define space physiology.

Western radio hobbyists (the Judica-Cordiglia brothers) claim to hear dying cosmonauts before Gagarin. No evidence supports secret fatal launches, but the secrecy of the programme makes such myths unkillable, the exact myth-space the novel exploits.

Korolev's Vostok carries the first human into space. He watches from the bunker, having personally chosen Gagarin.

Chelomei develops the Proton heavy rocket and proposes the Almaz, a crewed military reconnaissance space station with its own return capsule and defensive gun.

Gagarin orbits the Earth once aboard Vostok 1 and, by later accounts, ejects to parachute down separately. 'Let's go!' he says at launch. He returns the most famous man alive.

Gagarin travels the world as the human face of Soviet achievement; the state, fearing the loss of its icon, is reluctant to risk him on another flight.

The world comes closest to nuclear war. The same R-7 lineage that launches cosmonauts is, at heart, an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Five women (Tereshkova, Ponomaryova, Solovyova, Yorkina, Kuznetsova) are selected in stages during 1962 and trained as parachutists and pilots. Only one will fly; the group is disbanded by order on 1 October 1969.

Chosen for her more than 100 parachute jumps and impeccable proletarian background as much as her flying, Tereshkova enters the secret women's group and trains alongside Ponomaryova and Solovyova.

Selected for the secret women's group, Ponomaryova is regarded by some instructors as the most technically capable, but her independence and, in Kamanin's diaries, a taste for the good life make the political selectors wary.

Kamanin backs the idea of a woman in space for its propaganda value but treats the female group paternalistically; his diaries record the calculations behind Tereshkova's selection over Ponomaryova.

Valentina Tereshkova orbits 48 times in 2 days 22 hours 50 minutes aboard Vostok 6, a propaganda triumph that the USSR will not repeat with a woman for nineteen years.

Vostok 5 and 6 fly at the same time; Vostok 6 is launched into a nearly identical orbit, so the two craft come close without any active rendezvous. The dual flight showcases both endurance and the first woman.

The Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP) is established in Moscow as the lead centre for space medicine: physiology, radiation, psychology, life support, and the biology of long-duration flight.

The Institute of Biomedical Problems is founded in October 1963 under its first director A. V. Lebedinsky; Parin takes over its leadership in 1965 and shapes the medical selection and monitoring of cosmonauts.

'Chaika' (Seagull) orbits the Earth 48 times in 2 days 22 hours 50 minutes. She reportedly notices an error in the automatic descent programming and helps correct it, a detail long suppressed.

In a state-managed wedding, Tereshkova marries fellow cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev; their daughter Yelena is studied with interest as the first child of two people who had both flown in space.

Ponomaryova serves as second back-up for the Vostok 6 flight, behind Irina Solovyova; a proposed second all-female or solo women's flight is cancelled. The chance never comes again.

The day after Voskhod 1 lands, Khrushchev is ousted. The crew that flew for his prestige returns to a different Kremlin. Brezhnev's era of stagnation begins.

Korolev strips a Vostok to cram in three: a pilot, an engineer (Feoktistov) and a physician (Yegorov), flying without pressure suits. The flight lasts 1 day 17 minutes 3 seconds.

Boris Yegorov, aboard Voskhod 1, makes the first in-flight medical observations by a doctor: vestibular function, cardiovascular response, the beginnings of clinical space medicine.

Rejected in 1962 for short sight and admitted only in May 1964, Yegorov flies on Voskhod 1 with Komarov and Feoktistov, making the first medical observations of humans in orbit by a doctor.

A civilian engineer, Feoktistov talks his way onto Voskhod 1, becoming the first engineer and one of the first designers to fly in his own spacecraft.

Alexei Leonov leaves Voskhod 2 for the first-ever extravehicular activity, and nearly cannot return when his suit balloons; he bleeds off pressure to squeeze back through the airlock. Another first snatched from disaster.

Back on Earth, Yegorov heads departments at the IBMP studying the vestibular system and space motion sickness, and from 1984 to 1992 directs an institute, the affliction Titov first suffered and every long crew must overcome.

Leonov floats free of Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes 9 seconds, by his own account for over ten minutes, then finds his suit so ballooned he cannot re-enter the airlock; he secretly bleeds off pressure, risking the bends, to squeeze back in.

The Chief Designer dies at 59 on the operating table, his health broken by six years in the Gulag. Only in death is his name made public. Without him the Moon programme loses its centre of gravity.

Weakened by the Gulag, Korolev dies during surgery. His ashes are interred in the Kremlin Wall and his name is finally spoken; the Moon programme he alone could hold together begins to fall apart.

Vladimir Komarov dies when Soyuz 1's parachute fails to deploy, the first in-flight fatality of any space programme. The rushed, half-tested spacecraft becomes a warning the engineers had raised in vain.

American satellite and signals intelligence tracks Soviet launches the Kremlin never announces; the CIA assembles a picture of a programme the Soviet public is never shown.

Gagarin serves as backup to his friend Komarov on Soyuz 1 and reportedly argues that the spacecraft is not ready. Komarov flies and dies.

The giant N1, Korolev's answer to the Saturn V, with thirty first-stage engines, explodes on all four launch attempts (1969-1972). One 1969 failure is among the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. The Soviet Moon dies quietly.

Gagarin dies with instructor Seregin when their MiG-15 crashes near the village of Novosyolovo in the Kirzhach district. The cause stays disputed for decades, a symbol of how much the programme kept hidden even about its greatest hero.

Leonov is assigned to the L1 and L3 lunar programmes and, by later accounts, to command a circumlunar flight; Apollo 8 beats them and the mission is cancelled, one of the great might-have-beens of the programme.

The United States wins the Moon. The Soviet response is quietly redirected: if not the Moon, then permanent presence in Earth orbit: the space station.

Two Soyuz dock and two cosmonauts spacewalk from one to the other, the techniques (rendezvous, docking, transfer) that make a permanent station possible.

As head of the Institute of Biomedical Problems, Gazenko oversees Soviet space medicine at its height: the physiology of long flights, radiation, life support, and the psychology of confinement.

Without flying any of them again, the cosmonaut corps quietly dissolves the female group. Tereshkova turns to politics and public life as a Soviet heroine and women's-movement figurehead.

The women's group is disbanded by order on 1 October 1969 without further flights. Ponomaryova stays at the cosmonaut training centre as a researcher, moves to the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in 1988 and becomes a historian of the programme and, decades later, one of its most candid memoirists, a key source on how the women were used and set aside.

Feoktistov becomes a principal designer of the Salyut stations, the orbital homes at the centre of this history. The years of that work, and any part in Mir, are not established by the research behind this archive.

To hide their military purpose, Chelomei's Almaz stations fly under the civilian Salyut designation (Salyut 2, 3, 5). Salyut 3 carries an aircraft cannon, the only armed space station ever flown.

The USSR launches the world's first space station. Denied the Moon, the Soviet programme reinvents itself around the goal that will define it for thirty years: living in orbit.

Returning from three weeks aboard Salyut 1, the crew of Dobrovolsky, Volkov and Patsayev die when a valve opens during reentry and depressurises the cabin. They are found dead in their seats, the only humans to die in space. Pressure suits are made mandatory forever after.

Aboard Salyut and Mir, the Oazis and later Svet greenhouses attempt to grow peas, wheat and other plants, the first steps toward closed-loop life support and, one day, food on a Mars ship.

Parin dies in Moscow; the discipline of Soviet space medicine he helped found outlives him at the institute he built.

The deaths of the Soyuz 11 crew end Kamanin's career; he retires from the cosmonaut directorate in August 1971.

The first military Almaz station, flown under the Salyut cover name, breaks up in orbit before a crew can board, the secret armed reconnaissance station programme of Chelomei's bureau.

A series of Bion (Vostok-derived) biosatellites flies monkeys, rats, cells, fish and plants, often in collaboration with the United States and France, to study radiation and weightlessness on living tissue.

Salyut 3 (Almaz OPS-2) carries a modified 23 mm Rikhter aircraft cannon, the only gun ever flown on a crewed station. An unmanned test firing in January 1975 is reported, but the research behind this archive does not confirm it. A crewed military reconnaissance outpost of the Cold War.

The military Almaz reconnaissance stations fly under the civilian 'Salyut' name to disguise their true purpose: high-resolution photo-reconnaissance and, on OPS-2, a cannon. Their real history stays classified for decades.

After Korolev's death and the N1's failure, Glushko is made director of the merged NPO Energia in May 1974, a post he holds until June 1977 before continuing as general designer; he cancels the N1 and redirects the bureau toward stations and, eventually, the Energia-Buran shuttle.

Leonov and Stafford shake hands through a joined hatch: détente made visible. It is the first international crewed docking, a dress rehearsal for the partnerships of the 1990s.

Under Gazenko the institute develops the exercise regimes, loading suits and monitoring that let cosmonauts survive missions of months and then a year, the science beneath every endurance record.

Commanding the Soviet side, Leonov shakes hands with Tom Stafford through the joined hatch, the symbol of détente and the template for the international stations to come.

Glushko's Energia, the most powerful Soviet rocket, launches the Buran shuttle on its single uncrewed flight in 1988, the last great achievement before the collapse.

With two docking ports, Salyut 6 can be resupplied by uncrewed Progress freighters and host visiting crews, enabling the first genuinely long expeditions and the Intercosmos guest cosmonauts from allied nations.

Czechoslovak, Polish, East German, Cuban, Mongolian, Vietnamese and other guest cosmonauts visit Salyut 6 and 7, the space programme as socialist diplomacy.

The invasion ends détente and triggers the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics; the renewed Cold War shadows the Salyut and Buran programmes.

Long Salyut 6 missions reveal serious calcium loss, muscle atrophy and cardiovascular deconditioning; the countermeasures (the treadmill, the 'Penguin' loading suit, rigorous exercise) are developed in response.

Popov and Ryumin set an endurance record, deepening the medical study of long-duration weightlessness (bone loss, muscle wasting, fluid shifts) that is the real science behind the propaganda.

Nineteen years after Tereshkova, the programme selects a second cohort of women; Savitskaya, the outstanding test pilot, is chosen to fly.

The first TKS flies unmanned as Kosmos 929 in 1977; Kosmos 1267 docks with Salyut 6 in 1981 and Kosmos 1443 with Salyut 7 in 1983. The crewed Almaz programme is cancelled, but Chelomei's transport spacecraft and its modules become the basis of the add-on modules for Salyut 7, Mir and eventually the ISS.

Savinykh makes his first long-duration flight, 74 days 17 hours 37 minutes, learning the routines of station life that will save him four years later.

The last of the Salyut line and the immediate predecessor of Mir; it will host the first woman's spacewalk, a near-fatal fuel leak, and the astonishing 1985 rescue of a dead station.

Soviet biosatellite and station work raises, and largely leaves open, the questions the novel dramatises: how weightlessness affects the reproductive system, fertilisation and development. Rat and quail experiments give partial, cautious answers; human reproduction in space remains unstudied and speculative.

Savitskaya's flights are hurried partly by the NASA selection of six women in 1978 and American plans to fly a woman; the 'firsts' are timed as much by rivalry as by science.

Savitskaya flies to Salyut 7 aboard Soyuz T-7, pointedly ahead of the first American woman in space. By the often repeated story, her male crewmates offer her an apron and she declines.

Kamanin dies in March 1982, on the 11th or the 12th depending on the source; his detailed private diaries, published after the USSR fell, become one of the most revealing accounts of how the programme really made its decisions.

Aboard Salyut 7, Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform an EVA, cutting and welding metal in orbit, a first the Soviets stage partly to pre-empt the Americans' first female spacewalker.

Chelomei dies in Moscow; his Proton rocket and station modules outlive him by decades, still flying into the 21st century.

On a second flight she performs an EVA outside Salyut 7, cutting and welding metal, the first spacewalk by a woman, staged ahead of the first American woman's EVA.

Gorbachev becomes General Secretary; glasnost slowly lifts the veil over the space programme: the launch failures, the Nedelin disaster, the names of the designers finally spoken aloud.

Salyut 7 falls silent and freezes, tumbling and powerless. Dzhanibekov and Savinykh chase it down, dock manually with a dead target, and revive it in the cold and dark, one of the most impressive in-space repairs in history.

Launched on 6 June 1985 and docking manually on 8 June, Savinykh and Dzhanibekov board the frozen, tumbling Salyut 7: frost on the walls and instruments, no power after a failed sun sensor stopped the batteries recharging. Within days they bring it back to life in gloves and hats, one of the most impressive in-space repairs in history.

The reactor explosion becomes the great symbol of Soviet technological hubris and secrecy, even as, two months earlier, the USSR launches Mir, the crown of its space engineering.

The core of Mir reaches orbit, the first modular, permanently crewed space station, designed to be expanded module by module over a decade. It will become the great school of long-duration spaceflight.

A planned all-female Soyuz mission that Savitskaya would command is cancelled; no source in this archive gives a reason. She leaves active cosmonaut service in October 1993 and enters the Duma in December 1995.

Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov complete the first mission longer than a year (365+ days) aboard Mir, a deliberate probe of the human limits for a possible Mars mission.

The Soviet space shuttle Buran completes a single automated orbital flight and landing, a technical triumph launched by the giant Energia rocket, and, with the USSR's collapse, a dead end.

Under Gorbachev, the Soviet press begins publishing what had been secret: the launch failures, the designers' names, the medical costs. The gap between the propaganda and the record is finally visible.

Polyakov flies to Mir for eight months as a physician-cosmonaut, monitoring the crew and himself through the medical stresses of long-duration flight.

After the Soyuz TM-5 mission of June 1988, Savinykh is elected rector of MIIGAiK in 1988, takes office in 1989 and becomes a leading figure in Russian geodesy, a link between spaceflight and Earth science.

The Eastern Bloc unravels. The space programme that had been a instrument of superpower rivalry must reinvent itself, almost overnight, as a commercial and international enterprise.

Glushko dies as the system he served begins to fail; a crater on the far side of the Moon bears his name.

Japanese quail eggs are incubated and hatched aboard Mir, among the first vertebrates to develop from egg to chick in space, though the hatchlings struggle to orient without gravity.

The USSR ceases to exist. Baikonur is suddenly in a foreign country (Kazakhstan); Sergei Krikalev, launched a Soviet citizen, returns months later to a nation that no longer exists.

Russia and the United States agree to dock the Space Shuttle with Mir and fly American astronauts aboard, turning a Cold War fortress into the prototype of the International Space Station.

Physician-cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov launches for the longest single spaceflight in history, 437 days aboard Mir, studying his own body throughout; the flight was later described as a test of the round-trip time to Mars.

Yegorov dies in Moscow at 56; married four times, a celebrity-scientist, he embodied the glamour and the science of the early programme.

Kondakova launches to Mir on 3 October 1994 (4 October in one source) for a mission of 169 days, the first genuinely long-duration flight by a woman, demonstrating that women can endure the missions the men had monopolised.

Polyakov launches for the longest single spaceflight ever attempted, later described as a test of whether a human can withstand the duration of a round trip to Mars.

In his eighties and nineties Chertok writes a four-volume memoir, the indispensable insider history of the Soviet programme. The Russian volumes appear from 1994, the English NASA edition is completed in 2011.

After 437 days Polyakov insists on walking the few steps from the Soyuz to a chair, a deliberate demonstration that a crew could land on Mars and function after the journey.

After 437 days 17 hours 58 minutes he insists on walking from the capsule, proving a Mars crew could function on arrival. His self-experiment remains the benchmark of human endurance in space.

A Progress freighter collides with Mir during a manual docking test, puncturing the Spektr module and depressurising it, the worst crisis of the international Mir era, survived by quick improvisation.

Tereshkova remains a public figure into the 21st century, a deputy in the Russian parliament and, into her eighties, the surviving first woman of space.

Kondakova flies aboard Atlantis to Mir, the first Russian woman to fly on the American shuttle, the international era of Russian spaceflight in person.

The Russian-built Zarya module, a direct descendant of the TKS/Almaz lineage, becomes the first element of the International Space Station, the Soviet station heritage reborn.

In a ground isolation experiment at the IBMP, an international crew is confined for months; an assault and a forced kiss during a New Year's party expose the real psychological hazards of mixed-sex confinement that space agencies had preferred not to discuss.

Kondakova is elected to the Russian parliament in December 1999 and sits as a deputy until 2003, her flights having quietly closed the gap Tereshkova's single mission had left open for three decades.

After 15 years and 3.6 billion kilometres, Mir is guided to a fiery reentry over the Pacific. An epoch of Soviet-Russian orbital habitation ends.

Gazenko dies in Moscow, remembered as the physician who made living in space survivable.

Feoktistov dies in Moscow, remembered as the engineer who both designed and flew the early Soviet spacecraft.

At the IBMP, six volunteers spend 520 days in a sealed mock spacecraft simulating a Mars mission, the longest isolation experiment ever, studying the psychology of the crew the programme dreamed of since the 1960s.

Chertok dies just short of a century, having chronicled almost the entire arc of the Soviet space age from the inside.

Leonov dies in Moscow, one of the last of the pioneering cosmonauts of the heroic age; his paintings of the cosmos hang in museums.

Elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006 and a full member in 2019, Savinykh remains a public authority on the station era, one of the last cosmonauts who kept a Soviet station alive by hand.

Polyakov dies at 80, holder of the record no one has broken, the physician who used his own body to chart the frontier of long spaceflight.

Ponomaryova dies at 90, having written the inside story of the women history nearly forgot.