On October 4, 1957, at 22:28 Moscow time, the world's first artificial Earth satellite PS-1 ("The simplest satellite 1") was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome.

By this time, heroes novel by K. Volkov, Academician Yakhontov and the Odintsovs have already returned from Venus, where they flew as part of the first interplanetary expedition organized by the head of VNIKOSMOS Nikolai Aleksandrovich Sandomirsky. Preparations are in full swing for a new space journey - to Mars. The country's best engineers are working on this task under the leadership of Academician Korolev. In the meantime, scientists are solving theoretical problems of space exploration, writers are already busy settling into the new space. There is an intense struggle between reality and fantasy. The battlefield is Mars.

Read one of the first Soviet space novels.