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Russia’s exploration of the planets dates to summer of 1883 and the writings of a teacher in the town of Kaluga, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He was the first Russian to describe interplanetary journeys.

The theoretical basis for interplanetary flight had been well laid by Russia in the period from 1883, Tsiolkovsky’s first book, to the space boom of the 1920s and a resumption of interest in space travel in the 1950s. What about the practical side?

Chapter 2 described the new 8K78 rocket that would be used to send the first spacecraft to Mars and then Venus. What of the spacecraft themselves?

Zond 2 marked the end of the involvement of Korolev’s design bureau in the Soviet planetary programme. Korolev’s design bureau, OKB-1, had almost single-handedly begun and run the main programmes within the Soviet space endeavour. In August 1964, the Soviet Communist Party and government had resolved to compete head to head with the Apollo programme to send a man to the moon. From there on, Korolev’s efforts were ever more focused on the man-on-the-moon programme, adapting the N-l rocket for lunar use and flying the Soyuz spacecraft. These were huge undertakings. The decision was taken by Korolev and the government in spring the following year to spin off several key aspects of OKB-1 to other design offices. Communications satellites (e.g., were made the responsibility of the NPO-PM design bureau in Krasnoyarsk, for example. Here, all the interplanetary probes, along with the troublesome block L, were given over to OKB Lavochkin.

The descents of Venera 4, 5 and 6 had showed just how dense and difficult was the Venus atmosphere. Another Venus window came around in August 1970. Once again, measures were taken to strengthen the descent cabin for the two probes to be launched. Whatever the purpose of the Venera 5 and 6 missions, this new set was intended from the start to reach the surface intact, even if that meant it was overbuilt and that hardly any scientific instruments could be carried.

Venera 8 marked the limit to what the Soviet Union could achieve with the 3MV series and the 8K78M launcher. The 3MV series had been kept going for Venus probes over 1965–72 even thought it was no longer used for Mars probes. Although Minister Afanasayev had decided to move on to a new type of interplanetary spacecraft, it had already been decided to adapt the Mars 2–7 type of spacecraft to the exploration of Venus. This was formally called the 4V1 series, although in practice the term was little used.

VEGA 2 was the last Soviet or Russian Venus mission and remains so to the present day. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union and then Russia turned their attention back to Mars. By 1986, Soviet scientists were beginning to reach the limits of what could be achieved on Venus, although some further missions were sketched (Chapter 8). With the unbroken success of the Venus programme from 1975 to 1986, they had good reason to expect that their new efforts on Mars would be more successful than some of the previous missions.

Chapters 3 to 7 showed how the Soviet Union (and then Russia) developed its unmanned programme to explore Mars and Venus from 1960 to 1996. Chapter 2, though, left Gleb Maksimov and Konstantin Feoktistov in OKB-1 making plans for a manned flight to Mars with their TMK-1 and TMK-2 designs, respectively. What happened to them? What other Soviet projects were advanced for the manned and unmanned exploration of the planets?

The inclusion of Phobos Grunt in the Russian space programme for 2006–2015 means that Russia is, after a gap of more than ten years, set to return to the planets. Like the programmes of the Soviet period, the mission has its ambiguities. Phobos Grunt represents a victory for the ‘Venusians’, insofar as it does not compete directly with the United States or any other country, for no such mission is planned by them. Having said that, the timing puts it just ahead of the schedule of when the Americans do hope to get samples back from Mars. But in getting samples back from a Martian moon, the Russians will be able to claim, for the first time in a generation, a new, satisfying planetary ‘first’.