The Soviet space program was, to a degree history rarely allows, one man. Sergei Korolev survived six years of the Gulag, was rehabilitated to build missiles, and turned a weapons program into Sputnik and Vostok through force of will. The state considered him so valuable that his name was a secret until the day he died — the West spent a decade trying to identify the "Chief Designer" while he beat them to every milestone.

He died on an operating table in 1966. The Soviet Moon program, which was substantially his nervous system, never recovered. It is one of history's sharper counterfactuals.

On April 12, 1961, a 27-year-old pilot with a famous smile rode a converted missile into orbit, circled the Earth once, ejected as designed, and parachuted into a potato field, where he had to convince a farmer and her granddaughter he was Soviet and friendly. Yuri Gagarin's flight lasted 108 minutes and divided history into before and after.

The details stay remarkable: the flight was fully automatic because nobody knew if a human mind would function in weightlessness — Gagarin's manual controls were locked behind a coded envelope, in case he had to become a pilot again.

Soyuz first flew in 1967 and it is flying this year. The silhouette is nearly unchanged — orbital module, descent module, service module — because Korolev's bureau got the fundamentals right the first time and the program chose refinement over reinvention for six decades. For nine years after the Shuttle retired, every human being who reached orbit rode a Soyuz.

Between Mir — which taught humanity how to actually live in space, fires and collisions included — and its segment of the ISS, the Russian program owns most of what we know about long-duration spaceflight.