The First Human Spacecraft Is Still Being Used 65 Years Later

Did you know that the spacecraft that sent the first human into space is still flying today? Kind of sort of. Let me explain. On August 20th, 2025, Russia is going to be launching the Bion M spacecraft number two, the second in the series, and it's actually a derivative and an evolution of the Vastto spacecraft, the spacecraft that Yuri Gagarin flew in 1961, April 12th, 1961, becoming the first human in space. Even before Yuri Gagarin's flight, they actually flew a prototype of the spacecraft as early as 1960 and under the name of Carabal Sputnik even flew a few animals on board. And unlike the famous dog Leica who um died in orbit because there was no way to return the spacecraft, this spacecraft could be returned and recovered. So aside from two launch failures, all the animals that they flew on board were safely recovered alive, including Yuri Gaggarin's flight, Vostto flew six times. The last flight being the flight of Valentina Terishova, the first woman in space, which by the way, Valentina Terishova is not only still alive, she's a politician in Russia today, which is a bit mindblowing. Anyway, the remaining Vastto capsules, they originally planned to fly 13 of them, were repurposed for the Voscod program, where they could fly multiple cosminauts at once. Voscod only flew twice with people on board. It actually flew five times. The first three times were unmanned tests. And of the two crude flights, the first one had three people on board. the second one having two people on board and is the more famous flight for being the one where Alexi Leonov did the first spacew walk and that was in 1965. Now during the space race Gemini achieved a lot of the goals that the Voscod program was supposed to achieve and instead of pulling off more firsts they decided to cancel the program and focus all of their resources on the Soyuse capsule which Russia is still flying today. a evolution of that and although it's never been expressly stated anywhere the orbital module of soy use the round part on the top feels to me like an evolution of vastto just for the sake of it being round however it's never been stated that they are directly related to each other however there is a whole other series of spacecraft that Russia developed as an evolution of the vast capsule and in fact the first one was develed developed simultaneously along with Vosto and that is their Zenit spy satellite. This was a spacecraft that instead of having life support systems and a crew member, it had a camera system and back then they were using film that could not only recover the film like the Corona spy satellites from the United States but also the camera system as well and were sometimes flown multiple times. Little by little, they kept upgrading the spacecraft, like extending the service module to give it a little bit more fuel, giving it stronger batteries, eventually giving it solar power so that they could have extended missions for months. And overall, over its different iit iterations, the Zenit spacecraft flew over 600 times. There's a good chance that this spacecraft took a photo of your house at some point because it was their primary source for all of their military reconnaissance. At some point, Russia wanted a better reconnaissance satellite which they called Yandar, which was a very different design in the sense that it had a conicle capsule instead of a spherical capsule. However, the development of it took a little bit longer than they intended, which is usually the case with new spacecraft development. So, until they actually had the capsule online, they started using the Zenit capsules on Yandar. And that's where we get this kind of different looking service module, but is the service module for the Yantar satellite and its solar panels, but still using the Zenit capsule as the recoverable bit to return the film and the cameras for these different reconnaissance satellites. Eventually, the conicle capsule did come online and they switched over to using that, but the service module combination with the round zenit capsule did so well that they kept flying it in that configuration for future missions. And at some point, there were several designers and engineers who had the bright idea of, hey, why don't we use this for civilian and scientific purposes, not just military spying purposes. In the 1970s, a version of the Zenet spacecraft came out called from, which was doing multisspectral remote sensing to help look at crops and do resource management or even discover resources. That was in the 1970s. And in the 1980s and '90s, it evolved into a program called researchers. The research spacecraft was used for commercial and agricultural purposes well into the late 90s and they would even sell pictures of that to people outside of Russia. However, eventually, however, their customers made it clear by the late '9s that they wanted digital photos that they could get access to a lot faster than film camera photos despite them possibly being a higher quality. They also started doing some material science missions and there was a military version of this that was just designated under the Cosmos program or even Zenit program even though it didn't have cameras but the civilian version was called Photon and Photon would test components of new pieces of hardware for future spacecraft or different type of materials to use in construction and or doing crystal growth experiments kind of like what Varta Space is doing now of orbital manufacturing in space and then recovering it. Why develop a whole new vehicle when you already have something like Vastto that is a proven recoverable capsule? Which brings us to the version that is about to launch on August 20th, the Bion spacecraft. And what they do with these is biological experiments, sending up plants, rodents, insects, reptiles. On the one launching on August 20th, they're sending up 75 mice, thousands of fruit flies, and a couple of different samples of plants and algae. The purpose being to expose these biologics to different levels of radiation, microgravity, and other types of conditions that they want to test for future longduration missions. What future longduration missions Russia has planned right now is a little bit uh vague and up in the air until well, you know, until this stupid war ends. Now, there's only been 12 missions so far of the Bion program. The one happening on August 20th is going to be the 13th mission, but the first started flying in the 1970s. And for the majority of those flights, they conducted them under what they called the Intercossmos program, opening it up to other space agencies around the world. So, a lot of different nations participated in the program, including the United States. In fact, NASA flew over 100 biological experiments on board these Bion spacecraft in the 70s and 80s and Europe as well. The very last mission that they conducted, which was a couple of years ago now, it's been since 2013, was a large collaboration with different space agencies in Europe. This time around because of geopolitical conditions, it's only Russian experiments on this and a lot of student experiments too. So, it's just crazy to me though that with all these different versions, whether they be spy satellites or doing material science or these bion biological experiments, this spherical spacecraft has flown in space over 800 times. I think that it's just incredible that after 65 years, this spacecraft is still useful. Even though it might be an old design and maybe primitive, it was actually brilliant for its time. having a round shape and changing the center of mass from being directly in the center to a little bit lower. No matter what angle it started re-entering the atmosphere in, it would automatically correct itself to be in the right orientation no matter what without thrusters just because of weight. And because of its spherical shape, they understood the aerodynamics of it really well and put heat shields all around the entire thing so that no matter what, it would be safe and protected. So yeah, it really makes me wonder where we would be today if we had still used the Mercury spacecraft. What if we used that for our spy satellite program, Corona, and had them redesigned to do the same type of thing where the cameras and the film were inside the capsule and both could be recovered. Even after that, we could still be using it for material science and biological science, just like the Russians are doing. Anyway, I think it's cool. I'm looking forward to the launch on Wednesday, August 20th. If there's a live stream, I would like to do a watch along party for it, but even as the time of filming this, I still haven't gotten confirmation that there's going to be a public webcast, at least not one that I can get access to. Thank you very much for watching. Be sure to give us a like and subscribe if you haven't already, and hit the bell so that you're notified anytime we upload a new video. And also let me know what sort of topics that you would like me to talk about next. Let me know in the comments below. I'd also like to thank all of our members who have been supporting the show and enabling us to bring you space news. Please consider supporting us yourself if you're not already. We have membership levels for as little as a dollar a month and every little bit helps us to bring you more content. Again, thank you very much for watching this video. My name is Space Mike. Until the next time I see you guys, keep moving onwards and upwards. 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