Sergei Korolev - from Siberian concentration camp to head of human space flight.

1961 Yuri Gagarin - the first human in space

1963 Valentina Tereshkova - the first woman in space.

1964 Voshkod 1 - the first crew in space

1965 Alexei Leonov - The first space walk - but what went wrong?

The images above capture some key features of a story that was brilliantly told at a recent exhibition Cosmonauts - Birth of the Space Age  hosted by the Science Museum London. Whilst Yuri Gagarin's accomplishment certainly received world wide attention, other achievements are rather less well known outside of the Russian Federation and certain details scarcely known there either. It is intriguing to reflect for example that Sergei Korolev was sent to a Siberian concentration camp by Stalin in a 1938 purge, before being placed in charge of, first, the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile development and then, its manned space flight programme.
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• Gagarin's orbit of the earth on Vostok 1 on the 12th April 1961 was first detected by Jodrell Bank in the UK, which meant that The Times was (from the Soviet Union's perspective) irritatingly quick of the mark in reporting the news. 
• On the 16th June 1963 Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, completed 23 orbits of the earth so as to beat the 22 orbits by US astronaut Gordon Cooper one month earlier. 
• On the 12th October 1964 – Voshkod 1 (Voshkod being Russian for sunrise) enabled the first multi-crew space flight. The extremely cramped conditions make sense when one considers that the capsule (originally designed for one) was quickly adapted to accommodate three cosmonauts and thereby beat the Americans in the race to achieve a multi-crew space flight. This adaptation involved dispensing with spacesuits and taking out the ejector seat that had existed in the original space craft - meaning that now the crew would have to land in the capsule itself  (rather than ejecting from it) thus relying on enormous parachutes to bring them en masse safely to earth.
• On the 18th March 1965 -  Alexei Leonov on Voshkod 2 achieved the first space walk. Carefully scrutiny of film of the space walk (36:20 into the film) reveals that Leonov appears to spin whilst in space, what is less evident is why this happened.  It has subsequently transpired that this occurred because Leonov had to act quickly to avoid a disaster. Realising that his space suit had dangerously expanded, making reentry into the capsule impossible, Leonov risked releasing oxygen from his suit to enable him to make it through the hatchway to the comparative safety Voshkod 2.
• The planned moon landing by the Soviet Union became public knowledge in 1989, having remained secret for more than 20 years. Technical issues with achieving lunar orbit, limited economic resources and fading political will - once the Americans had already landed on the moon - meant that fully developed lunar craft and lunar explorers never saw the light of day and remained hidden away as a secret testimony to both human engineering accomplishment and face-saving political strategy. 

All geared up - but nowhere to go. The Soviet moon lander that unfortunately never achieved its purpose.