paragraph_text: The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station, or a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. Its first component launched into orbit in 1998, the last pressurised module was fitted in 2011, and the station is expected to be used until 2028. Development and assembly of the station continues, with components scheduled for launch in 2018 and 2019. The ISS is the largest human - made body in low Earth orbit and can often be seen with the naked eye from Earth. The ISS consists of pressurised modules, external trusses, solar arrays, and other components. ISS components have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets, and American Space Shuttles.

paragraph_text: Sputnik 1 (/ ˈspʊtnɪk / or / ˈspʌtnɪk /; ``Satellite - 1 '', or`` PS - 1'', Простейший Спутник - 1 or Prosteyshiy Sputnik - 1, ``Elementary Satellite 1 '') was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957, orbiting for three weeks before its batteries died, then silently for two more months before falling back into the atmosphere. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable even by radio amateurs, and the 65 ° inclination and duration of its orbit made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth. This surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the Cold War. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments.

paragraph_text: The Moon is an astronomical body that orbits planet Earth, being Earth's only permanent natural satellite. It is the fifth - largest natural satellite in the Solar System, and the largest among planetary satellites relative to the size of the planet that it orbits (its primary). Following Jupiter's satellite Io, the Moon is second - densest satellite among those whose densities are known.

paragraph_text: In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. Since then, about 6,600 satellites from more than 40 countries have been launched. According to a 2013 estimate, 3,600 remained in orbit. Of those, about 1,000 were operational; while the rest have lived out their useful lives and become space debris. Approximately 500 operational satellites are in low - Earth orbit, 50 are in medium - Earth orbit (at 20,000 km), and the rest are in geostationary orbit (at 36,000 km). A few large satellites have been launched in parts and assembled in orbit. Over a dozen space probes have been placed into orbit around other bodies and become artificial satellites to the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, a few asteroids, a comet and the Sun.

paragraph_text: Sputnik 2 (, , "Satellite 2"), or Prosteyshiy Sputnik 2 (PS-2, , "Elementary Satellite 2") was the second spacecraft launched into Earth orbit, on 3 November 1957, and the first to carry a living animal, a Soviet space dog named Laika. Laika survived for several orbits but died a few hours after the launch.

paragraph_text: The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station, or a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. Its first component launched into orbit in 1998, and the last pressurised module was fitted in 2011. The station is expected to operate until at least 2028. Development and assembly of the station continues, with components scheduled for launch in 2018 and 2019. The ISS is the largest human - made body in low Earth orbit and can often be seen with the naked eye from Earth. The ISS consists of pressurised modules, external trusses, solar arrays, and other components. ISS components have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets, and American Space Shuttles.

paragraph_text: ATS - 6 (Applications Technology Satellite - 6) was a NASA experimental satellite, built by Fairchild Space and Electronics Division It has been called the world's first educational satellite as well as world's first experimental Direct Broadcast Satellite as part of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment between NASA and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was launched May 30, 1974, and decommissioned July 1979. At the time of launch, it was the most powerful telecommunication satellite in orbit. ATS - 6 carried no fewer than 23 different experiments, and introduced several breakthroughs. It was the first 3 - axis stabilized spacecraft in geostationary orbit. It was also the first to use experimentally with some success electric propulsion in geostationary orbit. It also carried several particle physics experiments, including the first heavy ion detector in geostationary orbit.

paragraph_text: In Earth's sky, the Sun, Moon, and stars appear to move from east to west because of the rotation of Earth (so - called diurnal motion). However, orbiters such as the Space Shuttle and many artificial satellites appear to move from west to east. These are direct satellites (they actually orbit Earth in the same direction as the Moon), but they orbit Earth faster than Earth itself rotates, and so appear to move in the opposite direction of the Moon. Mars has a natural satellite Phobos, with a similar orbit. From the surface of Mars it appears to move in the opposite direction because its orbital period is less than a Martian day. There are also smaller numbers of truly retrograde artificial satellites orbiting Earth which counter-intuitively appear to move westward, in the same direction as the Moon.

paragraph_text: The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR or RSFSR; Russian: Российская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика, tr. Rossiyskaya Sovetskaya Federativnaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika  listen (help·info)) commonly referred to as Soviet Russia or simply as Russia, was a sovereign state in 1917–22, the largest, most populous, and most economically developed republic of the Soviet Union in 1922–91 and a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with its own legislation in 1990–91. The Republic comprised sixteen autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais, and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. To the west it bordered Finland, Norway and Poland; and to the south, China, Mongolia and North Korea whilst bordering the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the east and the Black sea and Caspian Sea to the south. Within the USSR, it bordered the Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), the Byelorussian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR to the west. To the south it bordered the Georgian, Azerbaijan and Kazakh SSRs.

paragraph_text: OPS 9794 was launched at 10:21 UTC on 14 July 1983, atop an Atlas E/F carrier rocket with an SGS-2 upper stage. The Atlas used had the serial number 75E, and was originally built as an Atlas E. The launch took place from Space Launch Complex 3W at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and placed OPS 9794 into a transfer orbit. The satellite raised itself into medium Earth orbit using a Star-27 apogee motor.

paragraph_text: BeiDou-2 (formerly known as COMPASS) is not an extension to the older BeiDou-1, but rather supersedes it outright. The new system will be a constellation of 35 satellites, which include 5 geostationary orbit satellites for backward compatibility with BeiDou-1, and 30 non-geostationary satellites (27 in medium Earth orbit and 3 in inclined geosynchronous orbit), that will offer complete coverage of the globe.

paragraph_text: The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station, or a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. Its first component launched into orbit in 1998, and the ISS is now the largest human - made body in low Earth orbit and can often be seen with the naked eye from Earth. The ISS consists of pressurised modules, external trusses, solar arrays, and other components. ISS components have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets, and American Space Shuttles.

paragraph_text: The U.S. Earth satellite program began in 1954 as a joint U.S. Army and U.S. Navy proposal, called Project Orbiter, to put a scientific satellite into orbit during the International Geophysical Year. The proposal, using a military Redstone missile, was rejected in 1955 by the Eisenhower administration in favor of the Navy's Project Vanguard, using a booster advertised as more civilian in nature. Following the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, the initial Project Orbiter program was revived as the Explorer program to catch up with the Soviet Union.

paragraph_text: In the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an artificial object which has been intentionally placed into orbit. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as Earth's Moon.

paragraph_text: NigeriaSat-2, Nigeria's second satellite, was built as a high-resolution earth satellite by Surrey Space Technology Limited, a United Kingdom-based satellite technology company. It has 2.5-metre resolution panchromatic (very high resolution), 5-metre multispectral (high resolution, NIR red, green and red bands), and 32-metre multispectral (medium resolution, NIR red, green and red bands) antennas, with a ground receiving station in Abuja. The NigeriaSat-2 spacecraft alone was built at a cost of over £35 million. This satellite was launched into orbit from a military base in China.

paragraph_text: Foton-M No.4 was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on 18 July 2014, atop a Soyuz-2-1a carrier rocket. The launch was completed successfully, with the satellite separating from its rocket and beginning data transmission to its controllers. However, after four orbits, it ceased responding to commands issued to it from the ground. As a consequence of this, the spacecraft did not perform an orbit-raising maneuver that had been scheduled to occur shortly after orbital insertion. Satellite control was regained on 26 July by which time some of the microgravity experiments had already begun. On 1 August the head of Roskosmos, Oleg Ostapenko, was quoted as saying that the satellite will fly its entire two-month mission as originally planned, despite the cancellation of the orbit-boosting maneuver. However, all of the experiments completed by 27 August, and the Russian space agency decided to return the spacecraft to Earth on 1 September, two weeks earlier than the original 15 September target landing date.

paragraph_text: Space Tethered Autonomous Robotic Satellite II or STARS-II, was a nanosatellite built by Japan's Kagawa University to test an electrodynamic tether in low Earth orbit, a follow-on to the STARS mission.

paragraph_text: On January 31, 1958, nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, von Braun and the United States successfully launched its first satellite on a four-stage Juno I rocket derived from the US Army's Redstone missile, at Cape Canaveral. The satellite Explorer 1 was 30.8 pounds (14.0 kg) in mass. It carried a micrometeorite gauge and a Geiger-Müller tube. It passed in and out of the Earth-encompassing radiation belt with its 194-by-1,368-nautical-mile (360 by 2,534 km) orbit, therefore saturating the tube's capacity and proving what Dr. James Van Allen, a space scientist at the University of Iowa, had theorized. The belt, named the Van Allen radiation belt, is a doughnut-shaped zone of high-level radiation intensity around the Earth above the magnetic equator. Van Allen was also the man who designed and built the satellite instrumentation of Explorer 1. The satellite actually measured three phenomena: cosmic ray and radiation levels, the temperature in the spacecraft, and the frequency of collisions with micrometeorites. The satellite had no memory for data storage, therefore it had to transmit continuously. Two months later in March 1958, a second satellite was sent into orbit with augmented cosmic ray instruments.

paragraph_text: Unlike the American GPS, Russian GLONASS, and European Galileo systems, which use medium Earth orbit satellites, BeiDou-1 uses satellites in geostationary orbit. This means that the system does not require a large constellation of satellites, but it also limits the coverage to areas on Earth where the satellites are visible. The area that can be serviced is from longitude 70°E to 140°E and from latitude 5°N to 55°N. A frequency of the system is 2491.75 MHz.

paragraph_text: Astérix, the first French satellite, was launched on November 26, 1965 by a Diamant A rocket from Hammaguir, Algeria. With Astérix, France became the sixth country to have an artificial satellite in orbit after: USSR (Sputnik 1, 1957), the United States (Explorer 1, 1958), the United Kingdom (Ariel 1, 1962), Canada (Alouette 1, 1962) and Italy (San Marco 1, 1964), and the third to launch a satellite on its own (the UK, Canada and Italy's satellites were launched on American rockets). The satellite was originally designated A-1, as the French Army's first satellite, but later renamed after the popular French comics character Astérix. Due to the relatively high altitude of its orbit, it is not expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere for several centuries.

Question: When did the RSFSR cease to be a part of the nation that build the first satellite to orbit Earth?
Answer: 91