Soyuz (rocket family)

The service arms swing up around a Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 26, 2013, after it arrived at the pad by train with the Soyuz TMA-09M crew ship for the International Space Station on top. The family tree is the point. Soyuz grew out of the R-7, the Soviet missile that launched Sputnik, and an improved version of it carried Yuri Gagarin into orbit. The same basic design still flies today in its modernized Soyuz-2 form.