Soviet-era space exploration giant Oleg Ivanovsky dies, aged 92

Oleg Ivanovsky, a Soviet rocket scientist who played a central role in developing satellites at the dawn of the space age, including the first vehicle to carry a human being in orbit around the earth, died last week. He was 92.

His death on September 18 was announced on Wednesday by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. The cause and location were not reported.

Ivanovsky worked for many years as a top engineer at the Soviet space facility known as Star City, where he helped design Sputnik, which was launched in 1957.

The unmanned satellite, only 57cm in diameter, circled the globe for three months and prompted alarm in the United States that the Soviets had taken the lead in engineering, rocketry and the cold war in general.

A month after the first Sputnik launch, the Soviets sent Sputnik 2 into space, with a dog on board. The dog, named Laika, died after a few hours in orbit, apparently from heat exhaustion, "but she gave much to biology", Ivanovsky later said.

"We didn't know if an animal could survive for longer than a few minutes in weightlessness," he said. "But from the data from Sputnik 2, we could see that she moved, and even ate, after the launch."

Encouraged that a mammal could survive in space, at least for a short time, Ivanovsky took a leading role in building the capsule that Yuri Gagarin was chosen to fly, called Vostok 1.