What stories does HearLore have on Soviet inventions?

HearLore has narrated stories on Soviet inventions, each linked to related entries. Start with any one and follow the connections to your next listen.

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Curated playlist

Soviet inventions

Salyut 19 minSalyut 1 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the 19th of April 1971, becoming the world's first space station to reach orbit. It was a modest structure by later standards, 15.8 meters long with just 90 cubic meters of habitable…
Satellite10 minOn the 4th of October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to reach Earth's orbit. The unexpected announcement of its success set off the Sputnik crisis in the United States and lit the fuse on the…
Sputnik 113 minSputnik 1, a polished metal sphere barely 58 centimetres across, crossed the sky on the 4th of October 1957 and changed everything. At 19:28:34 UTC, the Soviet Union launched it from a remote stretch of the Kazakh steppe, and within…
Lander (spacecraft)12 minA lander is a spacecraft built to do something extraordinarily difficult: descend toward an alien world and come to rest on its surface without being destroyed in the process. That single distinction separates landers from a different…
R-7 Semyorka11 minThe R-7 Semyorka was the weapon that changed the geometry of the Cold War. In August 1957, a 34-meter rocket lifted off from a remote site in Kazakhstan and flew 6,000 kilometers to its target range on the Kamchatka peninsula. Five days…
Sputnik 210 minSputnik 2 lifted off at 02:30:42 UTC on the 3rd of November 1957, carrying something no spacecraft had ever carried before: a living creature. The passenger was a small part-Samoyed terrier named Laika, formerly called Kudryavka, which…
Fast-neutron reactor8 minIn 1946, the Clementine reactor at Los Alamos National Laboratory began operating with a core that relied on neutrons carrying energies above 1 MeV. These fast neutrons differ from the slow thermal neutrons used in most commercial reactors…
Laser12 minOn the 16th of May 1960, Theodore H. Maiman switched on the first functioning laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. His device used a flashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal to produce red light at 694 nanometers. It…
Space station10 minSpace stations exist to keep human beings alive in orbit for weeks, months, or longer - a feat that requires solving problems no terrestrial architect has ever faced. On the 30th of May 2023, seventeen people were living in space at the…
Vostok 113 minVostok 1 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 06:07 UTC on the 12th of April 1961, and the world changed in 108 minutes. A single orbit. A maximum altitude of 327 kilometres. And one young Soviet cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin, who…
Soyuz (rocket family)8 minSoyuz holds the record for the most launches in the history of spaceflight. That single fact, buried in technical documents and launch logs, is extraordinary when you consider what it means: one rocket family, born in the Soviet Union…