Beginning in 1960, two teachers and their pupils at Kettering Grammar School tracked Soviet spacecraft using a war-surplus radio receiver. In 1966, the unusual orbits of Kosmos 112 and later satellites allowed them to pinpoint a secret launch site at Plesetsk, roughly 800 kilometres north of Moscow—17 years before the Soviet Union officially acknowledged the cosmodrome existed.

Beginning in 1960, two teachers and their pupils at Kettering Grammar School tracked Soviet spacecraft using a war-surplus radio receiver. In 1966, the unusual orbits of Kosmos 112 and later satellites allowed them to pinpoint a secret launch site at Plesetsk, roughly 800 kilometres north of Moscow—17 years before the Soviet Union officially acknowledged the cosmodrome existed.

A school satellite-tracking group used surplus radio equipment and intersecting orbital ground tracks to place the Soviet Union’s hidden Plesetsk launch site on the public map.