Kosmos 57 ( meaning ''Cosmos 57'') was an uncrewed

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

spacecraft launched on 22 February 1965. The craft was essentially an uncrewed version of Voskhod 2. Its primary mission was to test the Volga

airlock An airlock is a room or compartment which permits passage between environments of differing atmospheric pressure or composition, while minimizing the changing of pressure or composition between the differing environments. An airlock consist ...

. The test was successful, but the craft was lost shortly after. The spaceflight is designated under the Kosmos system, placing it with many other Soviet scientific and military satellites.

Mission

The uncrewed craft was launched three weeks before Voskhod 2. The primary objective of Voskhod 2 was to conduct a

spacewalk Extravehicular activity (EVA) is any activity done by an astronaut in outer space outside a spacecraft. In the absence of a breathable atmosphere of Earth, Earthlike atmosphere, the astronaut is completely reliant on a space suit for environme ...

, which relied on the inflatable Volga airlock. Kosmos 57 was to test the performance of the airlock. The airlock opened and closed successfully and the craft was re-pressurized without flaw.

Destruction

The uncrewed spacecraft was destroyed on its third

orbit In celestial mechanics, an orbit (also known as orbital revolution) is the curved trajectory of an object such as the trajectory of a planet around a star, or of a natural satellite around a planet, or of an artificial satellite around an ...

around

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

. Two

ground station A ground station, Earth station, or Earth terminal is a terrestrial radio station designed for extraplanetary telecommunication with spacecraft (constituting part of the ground segment of the spacecraft system), or reception of radio waves fr ...

s, one in Klyuchi and the other in Yelizovo, sent simultaneous commands, instead of sequentially as planned, instructing the craft to depressurize its airlock. The craft interpreted this as an order to begin the descent and a

propulsion Propulsion is the generation of force by any combination of pushing or pulling to modify the translational motion of an object, which is typically a rigid body (or an articulated rigid body) but may also concern a fluid. The term is derived from ...

error put the craft into a tumble. Approximately twenty-nine minutes later, the craft's automatic self-destruct function activated. The craft was completely destroyed to prevent sensitive information from literally falling into enemy hands. Over 100 pieces of the spacecraft were tracked, falling into the ocean between 31 March and 6 April 1965. No other test or backup spacecraft was built with an EVA port. The decision was made to go ahead with Voskhod 2 anyway, due to a one-year lead time to construct a replacement. Planned follow-on Voskhod missions were cancelled, including the Soviet Air Force version, long-duration one-man flight.https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1965-012A - 27 February 2020 File:Vostok_spacecraft.jpg, Vostok spacecraft File:Voskhod_1_and_2.svg, Voskhod 1 and Voskhod 2 spacecraft File:Voskhod-2_airlock_and_spacesuit.jpg, Volga airlock and Berkut spacesuit like those used for the spacewalk of Alexey Leonov on the Voskhod 2 mission, Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, Moscow.

References

Earth observation satellites of the Soviet Union Voskhod program Spacecraft launched in 1965 1965 in the Soviet Union

Mission

Destruction

See also

References