Voskhod (11A57)

The 11A57 was not built for cosmonauts. It was designed to launch the Zenit-4 reconnaissance satellite, and it got there by taking the large third stage developed for the 8K78 Molniya interplanetary launcher and bolting it to an R-7. That bought roughly an extra tonne of payload, 5,900 kilograms to a 200 kilometre orbit against Vostok’s 4,730. The height quoted here, 30.84 metres, is Encyclopedia Astronautica’s figure for the launch vehicle; RussianSpaceWeb notes the payload section was actually stretched by 2.71 metres over the 8K78, so treat it as the rocket rather than the full stack.

The extra tonne is the entire reason the Voskhod spacecraft exists. The story inside the industry is that Khrushchev wanted three seats after hearing about the two-seat Gemini and three-seat Apollo. To get three people into a one-man Vostok the spacesuits had to go, and so did the ejection seats, which meant the crew would land inside the capsule for the first time and would have no survivable abort at all during launch. Soviet space insiders called the mission a space circus among themselves.

It worked twice. On 12 October 1964 Komarov, Feoktistov and Yegorov flew as the first multi-person crew. On 18 March 1965 Alexei Leonov left Voskhod-2 and became the first person to float in open space, through an inflatable airlock called Volga, inflatable because every attempt to fit a rigid structure inside the payload fairing envelope had failed.

The headline flights are two out of 299. RussianSpaceWeb records 299 launches of the 11A57 with 14 failures, and Encyclopedia Astronautica independently gives the same total, which makes this one of the most heavily flown launch vehicles ever built and almost none of it for people. Wikipedia gives 300 and 13; the RussianSpaceWeb figure is used here because it states the failure count in prose alongside the engine-fit caveat that explains the variance. It kept flying spy satellites until 29 June 1976, twelve years after the last cosmonaut rode one.