New York: A Russian businessman has bought a 1960s Soviet space capsule for nearly three million dollars at auction in New York.
The spherical Vostok 3KA-2 Space Capsule went under the hammer at Sotheby's for 2.88 million dollars, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Winning bidder Evgeny Yurchenko, chairman of the AS Popov investment fund, said he was buying the scorched machine to return it to Russia as part of the celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the historic conquest of space by Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin.
The battered craft was used for the final dummy run before Gagarin left on his mission in 1960. It was used to carry a small dog, Zvezdochka, and a life-sized human dummy into orbit and back.
ANI
First Published: Wednesday, April 13, 2011, 11:55