Tag Archives: russia

The Day The Soviet Union Dropped A Nuclear Bomb On Its Own Citizens

The Orenburg Oblast Blast

The article originally identified the bomber as a Sukhoi T-4, an aircraft that did not fly until 1972. The mistake was obvious to me from the picture, which has not (as of today) been replaced. That is not a bomber from the early 1950’s. The bomb was dropped from a Tupolev Tu-4, the Soviet copy of of the U.S. B-29 bomber, which was used in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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The death of Vladimir Komarov — Another look

I posted about this before.

Soyuz 1: Falling to Earth

Yuri Gagarin was one of the good guys in this story. Another was a KGB officer. The villains were Leonid Brezhnev and Dmitry Ustinov.

I can remember when Brezhnev and Ustinov were names known to everybody. However, younger readers may not recognize them, so I included the Wikipedia links. In the grand scheme of human history, they deserve to fall into obscurity.

Russia’s Soyuz Spacecraft

46 Years and Still Soaring High

While many improvements have been made to the Soyuz rockets and spacecraft since the first launch in 1966, the bottom line is that the Soyuz have become the world’s most used launch vehicles due to their consistent performance and relatively low cost.

“This is a safe and reliable and proven way to leave the Earth, and each successive Soyuz is different; each one has small changes. The role of the astronaut is to learn those small changes… and learn to apply them.”
– Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield