Soviet/Russian reconnaissance satellites

The spacecraft sketches below have been derived from a 1996 book by chief designer Dmitriy Kozlov ("Construction of Automatic Space Apparatuses"), head of the Central Specialised Design Bureau (CSDB) in Samara, Russia. CSDB is the manufacturer of the majority of Soviet/Russian photo-reconnaissance spacecraft. The short description below the figure is a direct translation of the caption in Kozlov's book. If you click on a spacecraft sketch you will find a more detailed description and interpretation of the spacecraft sketch.

The Soviet/Russian reconnaissance satellite programme presents a daunting classification problem, but the figure above gives some help in separating satellites into classes. The table below give a summary of these classes. By clicking on a certain category more information is available. The sources for this table are varied, including internal data from the Kettering Group, my own records, US Senate reports about Soviet space activity, various Russian sources, most recently the table of Soviet/Russian space apparaturs published by Sergey A Voevodin.