In the early 1960s, before the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin to space, they began their Vostok programme with a series of unmanned test flights to investigate the possibilities and the means for a crewed mission. The Korabl-Sputnik 1, dubbed “Sputnik 4” in the West, was the first test flight of the Vostok programme. The 4.5 ton spacecraft carried a variety of scientific instruments, including a television camera, and a self-sustaining biological cabin with a dummy cosmonaut. The purpose of the mission was to study the operation of the life support system and the stresses of flight.
The Korabl-Sputnik 1 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on May 15, 1960 with much fanfare. After four days of flight, the reentry cabin was separated from its service module and retrorockets were fired, but because of an incorrect attitude control the spacecraft did not reenter the atmosphere as planned. Instead, it drifted into space where it remained until September 5, 1960, when it dipped back into the earth’s atmosphere. As it screeched through the thin air of the upper atmosphere, the spacecraft burned up almost entirely, except for a 20-pound chunk of metal that landed in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in the northern United States, right in the middle of a street outside of the Rahr-West Art Museum.
Photo credit: Amy Meredith/Flickr
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