Soyuz

Soyuz TMA-06 on approach to the ISS - Credit: NASA

The Soyuz, which means "union" in Russian, was originally developed in the late 1960s by the Soviet Union as part of their manned lunar program. By the early 1970s, when Soviet efforts to send a man to the moon failed, attention was then then focused on sending crews to space stations such as Salyut, Mir and the International Space Station.

The Soyuz is not reusable, so a new spacecraft is built for every flight. This allowed for numerous upgrades throughout its nearly 50 years of service.

A Soyuz has sent crews to every space station in history, except Skylab, and can remain docked as a lifeboat for about six months before requiring to be returned back to Earth. Each one can support a crew of three astronauts and cosmonauts.

Image courtesy of NASA

The spacecraft consists of three parts:

• The orbital module, which is a spheroid shape and provides extra room for the crew during their mission.
• The decent module, which the crew sits in for launch and reentry. It is the only part that returns to earth.
• The service module, which contains instruments and engines. It also has two solar panels attached.

The spacecraft launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan via a Soyuz rocket. Landing usually occurs on the flat steppe of Kazakhstan not far from the space center. The Soyuz lands via a parachute as well as a last minute thrust of "soft landing" engines. Many astronauts have compared landing in a Soyuz to a car crash.

Though its first crewed flight occurred in 1967, the Soyuz has been upgraded a number of times and today it is the most reliable human spacecraft ever developed. Since it's debut the design has been flown 120 times. 

The crew of Soyuz 11 on a
USSR commemorative stamp

Its safety record, however, isn't flawless. It's first flight in 1967 resulted in the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov due to a parachute failure. 

Just four years later the crew of Soyuz 11 departed the worlds first space station, Salyut 1. After the spacecraft completed its reentry burn the descent module separated from the orbital and service module, as planned, but a valve between the sections of spacecraft became stuck in the open position. As a result, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev quickly died from asphyxiation. To this day, they are the only humans that have died outside the earths atmosphere.

More recently, a number of International Space Station crews had to endure a steeper than normal reentry, resulting in higher than normal G-loads.

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List of Soyuz missions conducted by the Soviet Union

List of Soyuz missions conducted by Russia

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