Craziest Soviet Space Projects

Space fighters and laser pistols sound like pure science-fiction, but they’re examples of real projects that the USSR developed during the Space Race. The Soviet Space Program was responsible for revolutionary inventions and catastrophic failures, including gigantic orbiting mirrors, a space-station armed with a machine-gun and robots that successfully landed on Venus. Let's travel back to the Cold War, as we check out the Craziest Soviet Space Projects!

Laser Space Pistol

In the 1950s, the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union led to the Space Race, where both countries competed to have the best space program. The race continued until the USSR fell in 1991 and it led to some crazy advancements in space technology, as the USA landed on the moon in 1969 and the Soviets developed some amazing sci-fi weapons.

The real-life raygun in the image below is The Laser Gun with Pyrotechnic Flash Lamp; a working space-weapon that fired an 8540°F laser beam. That’s hot enough to melt diamonds, and the device worked like a semi-automatic handgun, as each shot used a small laser-generating lamp before a new one was automatically fed into the chamber.

The lamps burnt out in 5-milliseconds, so each beam didn’t last long enough to seriously hurt a person. As a result, the weapon was actually designed to destroy sensors on enemy spacecraft at a maximum range of 65ft.

The gun put the ‘ray’ in comrade, and it was ready for use in 1984. But disappointingly, the Soviet’s never took it into space and used it during a mission. Their government didn’t explain why. But it could be because the USSR started to decrease military spending in the late ‘80s, and relations with the USA were improving, making it less necessary to bring weapons into space. Still, it’s a shame that the gun never left Earth, especially since they also developed a version that worked as a six-shot revolver.

Rikhter R-23 Space Cannon

In the 1960’s, it felt like the United States and the USSR could attack the other at any given moment. So, the Soviets wanted to become the first superpower to build a military presence in space. They did this by founding Almaz; a top-secret program that developed three militarized space stations that could be used for surveillance on America. This included the Salyut-3, which became the world’s only armed space station after it was sent up to orbit with a giant Rikhter R-23 cannon.

The gun was originally designed for the Tu-22 bomber; a supersonic Soviet jet that could fly faster than the speed of sound with its 2 turbojet engines. Its cannon could fire up to 5000 rounds per minute, and its 14.5mm shells weighed around half a pound each, making it an incredibly powerful gun.

Salyut-3 was used to test how it would fire in space, and because the station didn’t have a gun turret the astronauts had to rotate the entire spacecraft to aim the cannon. Furthermore, the gun’s recoil pushed the entire station backwards through space, so they had to use its thrusters to counteract the powerful weapon. Still, despite these complications, they test-fired it in space in 1975, firing 20 shells into the atmosphere where they promptly burnt up.

After the successful test, Salyut-3’s job was done, so the entire station was de-orbited and burnt up too. The Soviet’s never attached the R-23 to another station, so Salyut-3 is the only space-station that’s been capable of destroying enemy spacecraft, and this test is still the only time that a gun has been fired in space.

Znamya Space Mirror Satellite

Some bosses are obsessed with boosting their workers’ productivity, and the leaders of the USSR weren’t any different. In 1988, they plotted to literally increase the length of the working day by placing a giant mirror in orbit, that would reflect sunlight back to the Soviet Union at night. This would make it light after the sun had set; allowing their citizens to work later while also providing extra energy through solar power.

This satellite was named Znamya, and the project was started by a Soviet engineer called Vladimir Syromyatnikov, who initially worked on developing spacecraft with "solar sails". This concept involves using giant reflective sheets to catch the radiation emitted from the sun, and use it to propel a spacecraft the same way a sailboat uses the wind.

Vladimir worked on the sails throughout the 80s, but the Soviets weren’t willing to fund the project, so he suggested that they use the sail’s reflective surface as a mirror instead. With this, Znamya was born, and after receiving funding from the USSR, the project eventually had its first test flight in 1993, just after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Incredibly Znamya successfully sent a 3-mile-wide beam of light over the Atlantic Ocean, Europe and Russia in the middle of the night, before finishing its test by intentionally burning itself up in the atmosphere. This success made the satellite one of the USSR’s most impressive inventions.

But unfortunately, the next test-flight failed and the project ground to a halt when the newly-independent Russian government weren’t willing to continue funding it. This was a huge loss for Vladimir, but I think it was a win for the average Russian citizen. Just imagine a beam of light coming through your window at 3am because your boss wants you to get back to work!

Spiral Orbital Fighter

When Star Wars was released in 1977, its X-Wings and Tie-Fighters seemed like mind-blowing science-fiction. However, the Soviet government must’ve thought the movie was pretty boring, because they’d been developing a real space plane since 1965 called the Spiral Orbital Fighter.

This small plane would initially be launched on the back of a hypersonic jet. Then, when it reached a high-altitude, it would fire its boosters to push itself into space. Once it left Earth’s atmosphere, the Spiral would allegedly be able to fly around at eight times the speed of sound, while taking reconnaissance photos and firing missiles at targets in space and on Earth. However, the vehicle was incredibly expensive and complicated to produce, so it was cancelled in 1978 before it was tested in orbit.

The concept of a re-usable space plane lived on in 1988 with the MAKS orbiter; a proposed spacecraft that was designed to carry cargo into orbit to resupply space stations. The re-usable spacecraft would be carried to a high altitude on the back of a gigantic AN-225 Mriya plane. Then, MAKS would separate from the plane and propel itself into orbit using the booster fuel in its giant zeppelin-shaped fuel tank, which would detach and fall to the ground after use.

Sadly, MAKS never flew and in 1991 it was also cancelled due to a lack of funding. Because by that point, the USSR had spent all their money on another spacecraft, one that they’d stolen from America.

Buran Shuttle

In 1981, NASA got into the space-plane game with the launch of the Space Shuttle; a re-usable vehicle that could launch like a regular rocket and land back on Earth like an airplane. It was primarily used to deploy satellites and serve as an orbiting laboratory, but the Soviets were worried that America would use it to bomb Moscow from space, so they started working on their own shuttle to compete. This was the largest and most expensive space project in Soviet history, but in 1988 the USSR finally unveiled the Buran, which looked suspiciously similar to its American counterpart.

It turns out, when the Soviets started developing the Buran, they discovered that NASA’s Shuttle program wasn’t classified, so it was incredibly easy for their spies to steal the blueprints and smuggle them home. This let the Soviet engineers copy the US, but in their defense, the Buran wasn’t a complete clone, and they actually managed to improve the design. Their craft could carry more supplies than America's and it could land under remote control with no crew on board.

The Buran’s debut launch in 1988 went perfectly. But unfortunately, the Soviet Union collapsed before its second flight could take place in 1991. As a result, the Buran never flew again and the three that had been built were abandoned at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The only one that had been to space rusted away in a hangar for years, until the roof collapsed in 2002, completely destroying one of the Soviet Space Program’s most important artefacts.

Polyus Spacecraft

As the USSR pushed to build a military presence in space, they developed some projects that are ripped straight out of the script of a science-fiction movie. One of the craziest examples was Polyus; a satellite that was designed to shoot down American spacecraft with a powerful carbon dioxide laser.

The 95-ton laser pointer would have been the largest satellite ever placed in orbit, and the laser emitter was on the very front, making the whole thing a giant laser gun. The Soviet’s actually test-launched an unarmed version on a rocket in 1987, but it didn’t exactly go to plan.

The initial launch went perfectly, but afterwards, Polyus needed to detach from the rocket and perform a 180-degree flip, before using its built-in engines to enter Earth’s orbit. Unfortunately, an error caused it to rotate 360-degrees and end up facing Earth, which meant its boosters blasted it straight into the ocean instead.

After this failure, the project was cancelled due to a shortage of funds. But if the laser satellite had worked, it was set to be the primary weapon onboard the planned Mir-2 space station. This would have been the largest space station ever assembled, and with its built-in laser cannon and docking stations for the Buran, it would’ve acted as a fully-armed military base in space.

But the plans fell apart in 1988 due to the failure of Polyus and a lack of money, preventing the Soviet’s from having a permanent military presence in orbit. That’s definitely for the best. If they’d built Mir-2 and figured out how to significantly increase the power of their lasers, they’d essentially have their very own Death Star, and if the Soviet’s developed a space-station that was powerful enough to blast at Earth from orbit the Cold War could’ve ended very differently.

Luna-15

In July 1969, NASA was getting ready to win the race to the Moon by launching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on Apollo 11. The Soviet’s had already landed their unmanned Luna-9 probe on its surface and snapped some photos in 1966.

But Apollo 11 would overshadow their achievements, so the USSR made a Hail-Mary play by launching another moon mission three days before the Americans left Earth. Their Luna-15 craft was unmanned, but they hoped to use its robotic arm to collect some Moon rocks and beat Apollo 11 back home to make NASA’s achievement seem less impressive.

This meant the race ended with a final sprint, as Apollo 11 and Luna-15 flew to the Moon at the same time! The Soviet’s reached lunar orbit first, but they delayed landing due to the uneven terrain at the landsite. While they waited, the Americans reached the surface and planted the Stars and Stripes, so the Soviets forced a landing and crashed Luna-15 into the Moon at 298mph. Armstrong and Aldrin were still on the surface when Luna-15 smashed into it, but luckily, they were 350 miles from the crash site.

Still, even that’s too close for comfort, and something tells me history would look very different if the Soviets had accidentally hit America’s most-famous astronauts. The Soviet’s later successfully landed another robotic probe on the moon and gathered some rocks during their Luna-16 mission in 1970. But America is still the only country to put people on that big ball in the sky, as Apollo 11 left behind an American flag and Luna-15 left a pile of wreckage.

Soyuz-1 & N1

Landing a human-being on the moon was a key leg in the space-race, but unfortunately the Soviet’s had trouble developing rockets and spacecraft that could get the job done. In 1967, the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was launched to Earth’s orbit onboard the Soyuz-1, to test technology that could eventually be used on a Moon mission.

The Soviets scheduled the launch to take place on the birthday of the USSR’s deceased founder Vladimir Lenin, but as the date rolled around, there were still more than 200 problems with the spacecraft. Despite this, the USSRs leaders made the mission launch anyway to meet their deadline, and when Soyuz-1 reached space, one of the solar panels didn’t open which halved the amount of available power.

Then, at the end of the mission, when Komarov tried to bring the capsule back to Earth, the parachute didn’t deploy properly. As a result, the capsule smashed into the ground at 90mph and exploded, blowing out Lenin’s gigantic birthday candle, and making Komarov the first Earthling to venture to space and never return home.

After this disaster, the Soviets kept developing new spacecraft, and in 1969 they started to pin their hopes of landing a cosmonaut on the moon on the massive N1 rocket. On paper, this was the most powerful heavy-lift rocket ever built, weighing 6 million pounds fully-fueled. It used 30 engines to lift off the launch pad, and they all had to be perfectly synchronized for it to work.

This required an unachievable level of precision, and between February 1969 and November 1972, all four unmanned launches of the N1 failed. The first launch was particularly devastating as a few seconds after takeoff, the engines shut down and the rocket fell back to the ground. This caused an explosion so enormous that it completely destroyed the launchpad, and parts of the rocket were found 31-miles away.

The accident took 91 lives on the ground below, and after 3 more failed launches the project was scrapped completely. It was one of the USSR’s biggest failures, but on the bright side, they never sent any cosmonauts up in the N1. No-doubt saving even more people from sharing Komarov’s grisly fate.

Zvezda Moonbase

The Soviet’s lost the space-race when their nation dissolved in ’91. But they started it in 1957, by launching the first man-made satellite into orbit; a primitive, basketball-sized sphere called Sputnik-1.

This was a huge advancement in space travel, and the success made the Soviet’s so over-confident that the very same year, they announced that they’d be able to build a permanent base on the Moon in the near future. They then started developing “Zvezda”, a conceptual moon-base that would be powered with nuclear energy and giant solar panels. Inside, Zvezda would have space for 12-people to live comfortably, with a greenhouse to help oxygenate the air and a water recycling facility to keep the cosmonauts hydrated.

The Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere to block radiation from the sun, so its surface is exposed to 150-times more cosmic radiation than Earth. To counteract this, parts of Zvezda would’ve been completely buried under lunar soil that would shield it from the deadly sun, and further protect the base against stray meteorites.

The Soviets really thought the plan through, but in hindsight, it was unbelievably ambitious to think about building a moon-base in the 1950s. The USSR never managed to land a single person on its surface, so they weren’t able to build Zvezda, and they probably should’ve tried visiting the moon before making plans to build on it!

Soviet Venera Program

Lots of countries are currently working on missions to Mars, with the eventual goal of landing astronauts on the red planet. However, the Soviets were way ahead of their time, and they started to develop plans for a manned Mars mission back in the 1960s. Their craziest plan involved the MPK; a proposed 1800-ton, nuclear-powered spacecraft that would have to be constructed in space.

The giant craft was designed to land a crew on Mars’s surface for a 30-month mission, so it needed lots of supplies. However, the largest rocket the Soviets developed was the explosive N1, which could only carry a maximum weight of 95-tons. It couldn’t lift the 1800-ton MPK, which meant the spacecraft would have to be built piece-by-piece in orbit, as the N1 made 20 separate launches to move all the components to space!

Unfortunately, as we know the N1 had a habit of blowing up, and the Soviets never managed to successfully launch the rocket. So, launching 20 proved to be infeasible, and when the N1 was cancelled the MPK project was scrapped too.

Still, it isn’t all doom and gloom, and when the Soviets made plans to explore Venus in the 60s and 70s, they were incredibly successful. Venus’s surface has an average temperature of 867F, so it’s impossible for an astronaut to land on the planet and survive.

However, the Soviet Venera program successfully sent a number of robotic probes to Venus on small unmanned rockets. They started launching the probes in 1961, and after a series of failures and crash landings, the Venera-7 softly landed on the planet’s surface and started transmitting data in 1970. From there the program was a great success, and in October 1975 the Venera-9 landed on Venus and sent back the first photos taken on another planet’s surface.

The Soviet’s studies of Venus also helped confirm theories that 40-miles above the planet’s deadly surface, there’s a section of its atmosphere where the temperature and pressure is very similar to Earth’s. This led to a theory that the USSR could eventually use giant airships to establish floating cities in this habitable part of Venus’s atmosphere.

The Soviet’s obviously didn’t have the technology to achieve this, but NASA are currently working on a version of this airship concept and some modern scientists think this could be a viable method of colonizing another planet in our solar system. So, there’s a chance that in the distant future, humans will live in floating colonies on Venus that were originally conceived by a long-lost civilization known as the Soviet Union.

Alexi Leonov's Spacewalk

Being an astronaut is pretty dangerous, and one of the scariest jobs they perform is a spacewalk or EVA. Climbing around the outside of a space-station comes with a lot of risks, and when Alexei Leonov performed the very first spacewalk in 1965, it almost cost him his life.

NASA Releases Spacewalk Footage From Astronauts Outside International Space Station by Forbes Breaking News

The cosmonaut started the spacewalk by hooking himself up to a tether, climbing outside the Voskhod-2 capsule and floating through space for 12-minutes. It went pretty smoothly, but when it was time for Alexei to re-enter the capsule he found that his suit had started to inflate like a balloon, preventing him from fitting back through the airlock.

Humans have evolved to survive in the level of air pressure present on Earth’s surface, so Alexei’s suit was pressurized to match the conditions on our planet. However, there’s no pressure in the vacuum of space, so the earthly pressure inside Leonov’s suit faced no resistance as it pushed outwards, which caused the suit to slowly expand.

Modern spacesuits contain a layer of rigid material that forces the suit to keep its shape, and the air pressure inside is reduced to roughly one-third of Earth’s pressure to minimize the amount it expands. But Leonov’s 1960s model didn’t have this technology, so, as he was left stranded in space in the world’s most expensive sumo costume, he was forced to open an emergency valve and let his breathable air out of his suit to deflate it. This could’ve easily caused him to run out of oxygen, but fortunately as his suit shrunk down, he managed to make it back inside the craft before he suffocated.

When Alexei returned to the USSR he was praised as a hero, and he’ll forever be known as the first person to climb out of a spacecraft and float through space. However, his story highlights how dangerous space travel was during the Space Race. The cosmonaut was mere minutes away from suffocation and if he hadn’t made it back inside the capsule he’d be left floating around orbit on a tether, as his expanding suit grew larger and larger. Like a tragic, orbital yo-yo.

Cosmonauts Stuck In Space

During the Cold War, the Soviet government wanted to appear more powerful than the US. So, when their space missions failed, they kept it very hush-hush, and they even attempted to cover some of their failures up. In 1961, a trainee cosmonaut called Valentin Bondarenko suffered catastrophic burns after a fire broke out in a simulated spacecraft. His injuries were fatal, but he was brought to a doctor under a fake name and buried discreetly, so the public and US government wouldn’t learn about the accident.

The USSR didn’t officially admit that Valentin existed until 1986, and this contributed to a pre-existing conspiracy theory that the Soviet Union had covered up other failed missions and abandoned several of their Cosmonauts in space.

Two contributors to this theory were the Italian brothers Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, who used a homemade radio station to listen in on broadcasts from space. The brothers recorded real transmissions of famous Soviet spacecraft like Sputnik-1. Then in November 1960 they announced that they’d recorded a mysterious transmission of a female Russian voice desperately pleading for help from orbit, while shouting “the world will never know about us.”

Officially, there were no Russian cosmonauts in space at the time, so when the brothers shared recordings of the broadcast it attracted lots of media attention and turned them into small-time celebrities. The brothers released more recordings of breaths and heartbeats that they’d supposedly picked up from orbit, and people started to theorize that the Soviet Union had abandoned several cosmonauts in space after a failed mission.

The theory grew in popularity, although suspiciously, no-one else recorded these transmissions, and Russians who’ve listened to the recording of the female cosmonaut have stated that she had a terrible Russian accent that sounded suspiciously Italian. As a result, most experts believe that while the Russian’s did cover-up the Valentin Bondarenko incident, there probably aren’t lost cosmonauts floating around in orbit, and the Cordiglia brothers invented the story for attention.

Still, the theory that the Soviet Union abandoned their cosmonauts kind of came true when the Soviet Union fell, and their very last astronaut got stuck in orbit. Sergei Krikalev was still onboard the MIR space station in 1991, so when the USSR disbanded he didn’t technically have a country to return to. The newly-independent Russia was undergoing political chaos so they didn’t prioritize getting Sergei home, and he stayed on the station for 311-days.

They finally organized his rescue in March 1992, and Sergie was able to land back on Earth. But he never went back to the USSR, as his country had been changed, his hometown of Leningrad had been renamed to St Petersburg, and he had become the very last citizen of the Soviet Union. All due to a mishap that made him the only castaway cosmonaut who was genuinely abandoned in space!

Raketa Hydrofoil Boat

The Space Race was an important period for the USSR’s culture, and it inspired a generation of Soviet artists and engineers to create space-themed monuments, vacuum cleaners, and a special type of boat called the “Raketa” or ‘Rocket.’

The literal rocket ship sailed on-top of hydrofoils; leg-like structures with a plate on the end that lifts the vessel’s hull out of the water. This drastically reduced the amount of drag on the boat, which allowed them to travel at 40mph, 3-times faster than most similarly-sized vessels.

"Raketa" The Soviet Hydrofoil Boat by Deividas V

The Soviets produced Raketas from 1957 to the early 1970s, and today, some of the retired boats have been left to rust in a ship graveyard in Zaozyorsk, Russia. However, the popular “Meteor” model is still used for tourist river cruises in St Petersburg and the Raketa’s success led to the invention of other hydrofoil boats that are currently used in Russia and other former Soviet countries.

So, the boat was one of the few Soviet rockets that didn’t blow up, and it shows that some of the USSR’s projects were very successful, allowing parts of the Soviet Union to live on into the modern world! If you were amazed at these crazy Soviet space projects, you might want to read our article about cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who was stuck in space for 311 days! Thanks for reading.