Lost In Space: The Weird & Wonderful, Cold War-Era Satellites Still Circling Earth

A Vanguard satellite being fitted to its rocket. Dismissed as the “grapefruit” by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, America was playing catch-up with its Vanguard program in the wake of the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik 1. After two fiery failures, the 1.5-kilogram space ball was finally popped into orbit in 1958.

Vanguard was the first satellite to use solar power and transmitted faint radio signals back to Earth for six years before sputtering into silence. It is now humankind's oldest object in space.

NASA’s Tiros 1 weather satellite being jiggled during a test to see if it will survive the violent ride into space in 1960. Tiros was the first attempt at a weather satellite that could transmit a view of incoming weather from its two cameras to a control center back on Earth.

A delicate (and sweaty) moment as Tiros 1 is fitted onto the rocket that would launch it into orbit. The 122-kilogram satellite worked for 78 days before clocking out and entering its long, whirling retirement.

With its horror-clown eyes, the Soviets’ Luna-10 was a little unlovable. But its mission marked a significant moment during the space race when, in 1966, it became the first craft to orbit the moon.

Luna-10’s mission was timed to liven up a Communist Party congress by transmitting the party's anthem from the moon’s orbit. But a technical hitch shortly before the performance threw technicians into a panic and the wildly applauded transmission of the song was later revealed to have be prerecorded.

NASA’s cosmic disco ball, known as LAGEOS 1, was blasted into orbit in 1976. The 400-kilogram aluminum-and-brass sphere is pocked with reflectors that allow lasers on Earth to precisely measure the drift of tectonic plates and the exact shape of the planet.

LAGEOS 1 (in exact center of image) nestled in the nose cone of the Delta rocket that would blast it into orbit. The 60-centimeter satellite is expected to return to Earth as a ball of flame in around 8.4 million years -- sure to be quite a sight if there’s anyone there to see it.

The Soviet Molniya 1 satellite was designed for military communications and required a massive rocket in 1965 to heave the 1.5-ton satellite into clear space where its petal-like solar panels could unfold.

Today, some 18,000 man-made objects large enough to be tracked circle the Earth, with most of them defunct. Efforts are now under way to develop the means to clean up some of the space junk left in orbit. The urgency of the problem was highlighted in 2009 when a defunct Russian and a working American satellite obliterated each other when they collided at a combined speed of some 42,000 kilometers per hour.