An artist’s concept of a Soviet spacecraft on the surface of Venus. A defunct spacecraft from the former Soviet Union that has been stuck in space for more than half a century is, at last, about to ...

It began in 1957 when the Soviet Union sent Sputnik 1, the first satellite into Earth’s orbit. About four years later, astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth. In the early ’60s, ...