Oleg Ivanovsky, a Russian engineer in the early years of the space race who helped design Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth, and Vostok 1, the craft that carried the astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, died on Thursday. He was 92.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced the death without specifying a location or a cause.

In the 1950s, Mr. Ivanovsky was a technician in the Russian government agency devoted to designing advanced military equipment when he was recruited by the leader of the agency, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, to join the design team for a satellite that would circumnavigate the globe.

“Initially I had my doubts; it was all very much unknown to me,” Mr. Ivanovsky recalled in a 2007 interview with a Dutch journalist, Bruno van Wayenburg, adding that Mr. Korolev, who would become known as the father of the Soviet space program, changed his mind by pointing out that space exploration was unknown to everybody. “Sergei Pavlovich said: ‘What do you think? We are going into space, to the moon and the planets. Do you think we have any experience? Don’t you think this is new for me?’ So then I said yes.”

Sputnik 1, as the satellite was called, was a metal sphere, 23 inches in diameter and weighing 184 pounds. Hauled into space on Oct. 4, 1957, by a Soviet R-7 rocket, it made 1,440 orbits of Earth over three months, its two radio transmitters emitting a distinctive “beep-beep-beep” sound that was picked up by ham radio operators around the world and, Mr. Ivanovsky said, sending encoded information about the flight to technicians on the ground.