My favorite Six Million Dollar Man episode is where Steve Austin had to fight a Soviet Venus rover that accidently landed on Earth. It was autonomous, obviously, and because it was designed to survive on Venus, it was nearly indestructible.
Also similar to the strange subplot in "Until the End of the World" [1] where a damaged Indian nuclear satellite threatens to fall to earth destroying civilization.
wow that's an old movie call back I hadn't thought about in years. I loved the whole sub-plot of the repercussions of being able to record and replay ones dreams.
That scared the snot out of me as a little kid. I half want to see it again, and half know it’d be so cheesy that it’d ruin the memory of watching from the safety of underneath the coffee table.
Ah I've been trying to dig up that episode from my faulty memory for years! I was convinced it was an episode of the A-Team fighting a killer tank instead.
It’s funny that classified imaging platforms would definitely have tracked this reentry, but they’re gonna hold off on providing their data and maybe not going to provide it at all because it needs to be parallel constructed through non-classified capabilities.
so it’s sort of like that submarine implosion incident where US Navy knew what happened immediately. They may have even notified people at that time.
but I’m sure that US space force already exactly knows the trajectory of this object and probably the Russian corresponding agency does as well. but like the public has to wait for “open science” to reverse engineer where it might’ve been.
It’s a funny Highlighting of the gap between public state-of-the-art and deployed capabilities that are not public.
I'm still convinced that Luigi's capture happened via similar parallel construction. I suspect they knew where he was as soon as the crime occurred (or shortly thereafter).
It also reminds me of the fact that the Titanic was only discovered because Robert Ballard funded the submersible robots via the US Navy looking for specific wrecks.
> "The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity," Ballard told National Geographic. "But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots."
Wondering what capability you think their might have been that caught Luigi? And do you think the fast food workers and local cops were in the know, or just that he was being tracked waiting on an organic tip?
Yes and in general I think it's a good thing. It's a shame and a moral obscenity (and moral injury for the people staffing those systems) when they can see crimes or abuses but are unable to do anything due to "national security" (when such withholding seems to undermine it!).
Good connecting of the dots with the Titanic! Interesting. Did not know that :)
I don't think these issues can be easily resolved. Intelligence isn't just about what you know, but also about the other side knowing what you know. What if exposing that capability to public will allow enemies to circumvent it, thus leading more lives lost? This isn't something confined to questions of military intelligence.
That being said. There was series, Person of Interest, exactly about this problem.
It's the intersection of morality, and power. In the game of power morality is often suspended, or vastly differs. In the realm of ordinary human affairs, where people are not endless in competition, morality reigns supreme and governs ideals for interactions, such as interpersonally. Both morality, and game of power, are necessary and important, I guess. But it's not easy because I think there's a fundamental tension between morality and power always.
That's why people in intelligence (fundamentally a power game) need moral flexibility. This can go right, or sometimes it goes wrong. But having to make such high stakes decisions all the time would at the least be fatiguing I imagine. And overtime, with the inevitable bad decisions, or implementing decisions made by others, the moral injury sets in.
> but also about the other side knowing what you know
The israelis used the Spike missile for DECADES (they even had mock tanks launching it) and kept it quiet.
The ukrainians immediately uploaded videos of them using FPVs, I was sure at that time that the russians will in no time catch up and surpass ukraine in their FPV drone usage.
One might think that “moral obscenity” happens when “people staffing those systems” get their jobs and pretend that their responsibility is now delegated to some imaginary authority from the contemporary tales (which is not carved from wood or stone in our enlightened times).
In other words, such dramas are fake, and smokescreen the unclean consciousness. Remember the story about digital spying clerks from US complaining about being lent to Saudi Arabia, not because it was against their principles or laws, but because they were not paid “well enough”?
Cosmos 482's orbital data and reentry predictions were publicly available from the US Space Force via USSPACECOM's space-track.org service.
It was tracked for decades as object number "NORAD 6073" and anyone with a sufficiently-capable observation apparatus could have imaged its reentry.
Provided they were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, of course.
It will be difficult to get an exact final position because the space surveillance network points up, not down, and it was behind the horizon from the GEODSS at Diego Garcia anyways, and ballistic missile radar coverage does not extend to the Indian Ocean.
I think it's just a general term for things like satellites, space vehicles, ground-based radar or other grounded imaging, drones, etc without being specific as to whether it's optical, IR, radar, etc, and also disregarding its mounting and domain of operation. Sort of in the same sense that "spectroscopy" in science can refer to a wide variety of instrumentation! :)
Dude everybody knew what happened to that sub. At that pressure differential there was never going to be a failure mode wherein the sub is unable to surface or communicate yet still has an intact pressure vessel.
There is a lot of difference about random Twitter posters sharing cynical opinions and multi-billion military systems actually sensing the collapse of a sub thousands of miles away from a secret location.
It feels weird having to explain the different definitions of the verb “knowing”, but such is the case in a post-truth world.
The entire Soviet Union Venus missions are absolutely fascinating. "Hardening" takes on a whole new meaning when you're preparing a craft to survive mere minutes on Venus' surface. I'm a little surprised their deep sea craft never got much attention.
USSR focused on Venus, because at that time it wasn't apparent which one would be more interesting/accessible -- Venus or Mars.
And USSR didn't want to compete with US anymore, after lost the Moon race. USSR really did want the Moon too, after so many prior successes. So switching to Venus allowed to "split" the race.
A fun fact is that two Soviet Mars probes missed their trajectories because of the same software bug in the onboard navigation firmware. There's also a legend that the bug was a mistyped comma in the Fortran code.
The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA. Unfortunately the lander it was tethered to, Mars 3, stopped communicating about two minutes after landing so the rover didn't get a chance to go into action.
Anyway, the Soviet Union's relative lack of success with Mars wasn't really for lack of trying. Space is hard.
Right, NASA's first remote controlled rover (anywhere) was Sojourner in 1997. The first successful remote controlled rover was the Soviet Lunokhod 1 in 1970. That succeeded in driving around the Moon for almost a year.
Mars 3 didn't pan out but I still think that level of ambition from the Soviet Union, relative to NASA, is notable and worth celebrating.
The same way the USSR lost. People talk about final-point reasons like economic issues caused by an arms race or whatever, but that's just the final steps of a long lost race. Empires collapse long before they finally fall due to inertia alone. And I think the "real" cause is always the same. When enough people inside an empire want it to fail, that empire will fail.
And a common cause for creating that sentiment (that applies to everything from Rome to the USSR to the US) is Empires naturally tend to spend an increasingly disproportionate amount of their time focused on affairs outside their borders rather than within them. You have urban left leaning types becoming increasingly anti-capitalist, and the more right leaning and rural types feeling neglected by both internal and external policy.
People agree on less than ever, but the one thing they all agree on is that the system sucks. This will likely result in over more radical shifts between presidencies. You end up with a country that's starting to feel a lot like a boat being rocked back and forth with increasing vigor. And obviously this isn't just the US. It seems many political systems throughout the world are headed towards dramatic shifts.
Economic issues can cause an empire to start effectively dissolving itself, as happened with the British Empire, but that's not what happened with the USSR. It was forcibly dissolved from within as regions began literally just declaring their independence and refusing to recognize central authority, and that was largely caused by decades of increasing dissatisfaction with the system that simply reached it's final decline under the policies of Gorbachev.
One can also look to examples like the US which survived numerous catastrophic economic collapses, like the Great Depression, wholly intact.
Pretty much all the "USA #1" types place Peak America after WW2, not before it. Reasonable historians would agree that it was less of a world power than the European nations before WW1, roughly on-par at the time of the Washington Naval Treaty, and surpassing them at some point between 1930 and 1945.
The Great Depression did a lot of damage to individuals but FDR's response to that, and later the war, strengthened the US as a nation.
While I would describe the economic transition of the USA going from laissez-faire to New Deal as being as much of an "end of capitalism"* as the collapse of the USSR was the "end of communism", the country of the USA itself remained cohesive in the New Deal.
As Russia itself was cohesive, I guess you could analogise e.g. Texas to Kazakhstan (leaves), and Alaska to Siberia (remains)?
* as it was understood at the time, and to my limited grasp of the history of such matters
Losing geopolitical influence, respect, and significance. Losing economic impact. Dramatically losing scientists, researchers, innovation, and the things to build future technologies. Losing the lead in electric vehicles and renewable energy. Losing the ability to build ships, semiconductors, large steel foundries, and more essentials.
Given that the original post cites a cold war the US is losing, I'd list these things as part of that war. Russia controls many aspects of the US now, and is bringing about these collapses on purpose. As one does in a war against one's deadly enemy. It's not particularly mysterious.
About ten years ago I became fascinated with the Venusian landings. I've read a fair number of books about the US space program, including the great "Failure Is Not an Option", and I was kind of surprised to not find many English language books detailing the Soviet programs, and particularly the Venus missions.
"...The Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a Telegram post that the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere Saturday morning at 2:24 a.m. ET and landed in the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, Indonesia. It said Kosmos 482 reentered the atmosphere about 350 miles west of Middle Andaman Island off the coast of Myanmar. ..."
NASA gave the same reentry time and landing location for the spacecraft in a post on its website...."
Multiple km's deep in most of that area. That's if it missed the Sunda trench, which goes down to more than 7km in places (hint: it's a subduction zone where tectonic plates slide into Earth's interior. So ehm... deep).
Unlike eg. the Gulf of Thailand (max. 85m according to Wikipedia) or large parts of South Chinese Sea, which are very shallow in comparison.
Too expensive. It's very hard to find even an aircraft carrier at the surface, ocean is just too big. Metallic non-moving things at the bottom is easier, but it still often takes years to find a large sank ship, yet alone a small round spacecraft.
But there are many ocean hunters ready to jump on the assignment, if you secure funding.
There have been searches for years for MH370 airline in Indian ocean and it has not been found. I guess the problem there is getting a more accurate? location where it came down...
It wouldn’t be HN if your joke wasn’t met with pedantry, so I’ll mention the heat and pressure at the surface means the atmosphere is a supercritical fluid of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen.
That one means "having to do with Venice". Of Venus would be "Venusian", "Venereal" (yes, really), or "Cytherean". Or, one of a dozen others—it's a Greek god-name; there's millennia of
culture to drawn on.
There's an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to this adjective question,
I’ve held one of the fuel tanks that came back down around the launch. It was impressively thick and for a kid, very heavy. I sometimes think how much that would’ve weighed if it was standard iron and not titanium.
It came down in a rural field in the south of New Zealand and the secretary of the primary school I went to was of the family that owned the field. It made a fun show and tell item.
At the time no one knew what it was, and titanium was a classified material so they had to wait for the government to show up and then eventually after correspondence with the yanks gave it the all clear.
People wondered if it was extraterrestrial and this wasn’t helped by finding two field mice huddled inside when it was recovered.
I had the live tracking up and went to bed and apparently it fell out of the sky about 90 minutes later :-). I was hoping that if it started burning over North America I'd be able to go out and see it go over. Alas.
I heard rumors that it had a Plutonium RTG on it for power, that would have been a bit spicy if it had splatted across the ground somewhere. Does anyone have any primary sources on whether or not that was the case?
There's nothing to indicate there were radioisotope sources on this mission.
Public information: [0] describes the six publicly-disclosed Soviet radioisotope launches up to 1989. (It's not a primary source; it's hard to find those). This one's not among them—none of the Venus missions were reported to use radioisotopes. This Kosmos 482[1] and the rest of the Soviet Venera program were publicly described as being solar-powered, which is evidence against any engineering need for other power sources. The landing probes themselves carried chemical batteries (they were very short-lived landers).
Nothing I can find through search contradicts [0]. Wikipedia's list[2] is the same, and adds two more post-1989 launches.
Seven radioisotope payloads have already reentered/crashed into Earth before—four Soviet or Russian and three American; some thermometric generators and some simple heaters; containing either polonium-210 or plutonium-238. That's not counting fission reactors, of which there are several in addition (I'm unclear the precise count of which nuclear reactors returned to Earth, or simply exploded in orbit; or what became of the latter group).
[1] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... ("Two solar array wings, with an area of 2.5 meters, had a span of 4 meters. Due to the spacecraft's proximity to the Sun at Venus, the wings were only partially covered with solar cells".)
I am usually an exceedingly rational person yet for some silly reason I had this creeping feeling for the last couple weeks I've known about the probes return that it was going to crash into my house and kill me. Very unlike me to think that way.
The persistence of the thought itself kind of gave me the creeps.
I can't explain it, it's absurd. The odds were astronomical in the truest sense of the word, and yet it did not happen and I am grateful.
They just say things like this didn't happen. It doesn't take creative writing skills to just call people you disagree with liars. It's very lazy overall.
They always can. But I think it’s sometimes kind of interesting to see the creativity of trying to reconcile such an outlandish belief with the evidence.
Well as always the belief is immutable, the evidence can only serve that belief and so if it doesn't it surely isn't evidence in that confused perspective.
Oh, they will think up something, and gullable useful idiots will continue to believe they actually believe that stuff, whilst they rake in the money from content engagement, laughing at the idiots trying to convince them the earth isnt flat for the 9000th time
There’s a (very slim) chance this one is being preserved at the bottom of the Indian Ocean for whoever invents submersible scanner drone swarm tech to find it.
USSR scientific accomplishments were amazing, and more considering the lack of resources they had, so bad many of their breakthroughs have been overshadowed or credited to people from other nationalities
It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years. In USSR, unlike modern times, all products were made to last, like refrigerators, motorcycles, TV sets or clothes, because there was not enough supply to replace them every year.
I was under the impression that the Soviets launched multiple identical missions to account for failure. In other words: rather than investing a huge effort into reducing the probability of failure of a singular mission, they invested in multiple missions in hopes that one would be successful. If that is the case, it sounds like the had much more confidence in the engineers who did the design work than their ability to do quality control while building.
Any how, it's meaningless to compare old Soviet products to new Western ones. The older Soviet ones are likely still in use due to an incentive to maintain and repair them. Old Western products were probably just as repairable, but there was less incentive to do so. As for new Western products, there are both technological and business reasons to ignore repairability.
For starters, there was little to be shared between unique programs in space industry and products for general public, they belonged to different universes even when being made by the same factories. In fact, it was quite common to point to the split between praise of spaceships in media and regular people living like swine, both in servile and in critical works. Which, of course, is not in any way specific to USSR, or very original.
“Quality” and chances of success are relative, you need to have reference points. As space missions had none, they all were test flights AND scheduled flights at the same time. If boosters for a new rocket to Venus, radios and solar panels were ready, you launched a rocket with a dummy to check how those systems behaved, and so on.
> It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years.
I mean we couldn't use for the last 53 years and it didn't fulfill its mission. It's like saying the boulder in my yard has remained intact for 100 years "they just don't build them like they used".
We are talking about space junk, a dead chunk of metal just orbiting Earth until its inevitable decay. Saying that it was "intact" and "built to last" is disingenuous.
But it wasn't built to orbit Earth for 53 years. It was built to land and survive for a period on the surface of Venus. I can think of few places more difficult to survive, so to say it wasn't built to last is disingenuous on your part.
I think "simple but rugged" would be a more apt description. Less moving parts than the US equivalent, easier to maintain, and usually fairly sturdy. On the other hand, since cost was a constant concern, Soviet equipment was generally not designed with aesthetics in mind. So "ugly but reliable" might be another way to put it!
I saw still working after many years Soviet refrigerators, motorcycles and TV sets, so maybe they were built not that poorly after all. Of course there could be some survivorship bias, but generally modern (inexpensive) things seem to break earlier.
Depends; they might not have had the most expensive materials available, or the trickiest assembly quality, but were often designed so that the inevitable repairs could be made quickly in the field by minimally-trained personnel.
See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.
One joke/observation was that soviet product will either fall apart immediately or will last 70 years.
Other ones:
> What's as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shit-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces.
> What is it? It doesn't glow, and it doesn't fit into ass. Answer: soviet thing to glow in the ass.
> A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, “You don’t have any meat?”
> The clerk says, “No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.”
Also, exaggerated (but partially true) stories about factory fulfilling production quota for 10 tons of nails by producing single enormous 10 ton nail.
My favorite Six Million Dollar Man episode is where Steve Austin had to fight a Soviet Venus rover that accidently landed on Earth. It was autonomous, obviously, and because it was designed to survive on Venus, it was nearly indestructible.
No one comes up with plots like that anymore!
Also similar to the strange subplot in "Until the End of the World" [1] where a damaged Indian nuclear satellite threatens to fall to earth destroying civilization.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101458/
That movie has one of the best soundtracks ever. Highly recommended - it was released as an album and you can find it on Spotify and similar services.
wow that's an old movie call back I hadn't thought about in years. I loved the whole sub-plot of the repercussions of being able to record and replay ones dreams.
> Wim Wenders' original rough cut for this film was twenty hours long.
Holy hell
I'm still working on all 83 hours of Suits
That scared the snot out of me as a little kid. I half want to see it again, and half know it’d be so cheesy that it’d ruin the memory of watching from the safety of underneath the coffee table.
Did Steve have a mustache? Those are the epic seasons. Imagine fighting a CCCP Venus rover with a glorious 'stache!
Kenner also released a surprisingly large toy version of that probe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWJc72p2pE
Considering the GI Joes I had, that was average size for toys like that.
Ah I've been trying to dig up that episode from my faulty memory for years! I was convinced it was an episode of the A-Team fighting a killer tank instead.
Glad to help! I was 12 at the time, proving the adage about the "Golden Age of science fiction."
Was that the episode where it was defeated by screwing an eye hook into the top of it and lifting it to immobilize?
Its a dalek: Just climb stairs.
It’s funny that classified imaging platforms would definitely have tracked this reentry, but they’re gonna hold off on providing their data and maybe not going to provide it at all because it needs to be parallel constructed through non-classified capabilities.
so it’s sort of like that submarine implosion incident where US Navy knew what happened immediately. They may have even notified people at that time.
but I’m sure that US space force already exactly knows the trajectory of this object and probably the Russian corresponding agency does as well. but like the public has to wait for “open science” to reverse engineer where it might’ve been.
It’s a funny Highlighting of the gap between public state-of-the-art and deployed capabilities that are not public.
I'm still convinced that Luigi's capture happened via similar parallel construction. I suspect they knew where he was as soon as the crime occurred (or shortly thereafter).
It also reminds me of the fact that the Titanic was only discovered because Robert Ballard funded the submersible robots via the US Navy looking for specific wrecks.
https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-...
> "The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity," Ballard told National Geographic. "But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots."
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/titanic-w...
> Ballard met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic.
Wondering what capability you think their might have been that caught Luigi? And do you think the fast food workers and local cops were in the know, or just that he was being tracked waiting on an organic tip?
Yes and in general I think it's a good thing. It's a shame and a moral obscenity (and moral injury for the people staffing those systems) when they can see crimes or abuses but are unable to do anything due to "national security" (when such withholding seems to undermine it!).
Good connecting of the dots with the Titanic! Interesting. Did not know that :)
I don't think these issues can be easily resolved. Intelligence isn't just about what you know, but also about the other side knowing what you know. What if exposing that capability to public will allow enemies to circumvent it, thus leading more lives lost? This isn't something confined to questions of military intelligence.
That being said. There was series, Person of Interest, exactly about this problem.
It's the intersection of morality, and power. In the game of power morality is often suspended, or vastly differs. In the realm of ordinary human affairs, where people are not endless in competition, morality reigns supreme and governs ideals for interactions, such as interpersonally. Both morality, and game of power, are necessary and important, I guess. But it's not easy because I think there's a fundamental tension between morality and power always.
That's why people in intelligence (fundamentally a power game) need moral flexibility. This can go right, or sometimes it goes wrong. But having to make such high stakes decisions all the time would at the least be fatiguing I imagine. And overtime, with the inevitable bad decisions, or implementing decisions made by others, the moral injury sets in.
Sort of related but a lot of the bigdrone pilots have serious PTSD and suicide: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2GFcNynl9qY
> but also about the other side knowing what you know
The israelis used the Spike missile for DECADES (they even had mock tanks launching it) and kept it quiet.
The ukrainians immediately uploaded videos of them using FPVs, I was sure at that time that the russians will in no time catch up and surpass ukraine in their FPV drone usage.
One might think that “moral obscenity” happens when “people staffing those systems” get their jobs and pretend that their responsibility is now delegated to some imaginary authority from the contemporary tales (which is not carved from wood or stone in our enlightened times).
In other words, such dramas are fake, and smokescreen the unclean consciousness. Remember the story about digital spying clerks from US complaining about being lent to Saudi Arabia, not because it was against their principles or laws, but because they were not paid “well enough”?
Regarding Luigi, he took no steps to alter his very prominent facial features before or after the crime.
Cosmos 482's orbital data and reentry predictions were publicly available from the US Space Force via USSPACECOM's space-track.org service.
It was tracked for decades as object number "NORAD 6073" and anyone with a sufficiently-capable observation apparatus could have imaged its reentry.
Provided they were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, of course.
It will be difficult to get an exact final position because the space surveillance network points up, not down, and it was behind the horizon from the GEODSS at Diego Garcia anyways, and ballistic missile radar coverage does not extend to the Indian Ocean.
I’m struggling with the terminology here. what do you mean by "imaging platforms"?
I think it's just a general term for things like satellites, space vehicles, ground-based radar or other grounded imaging, drones, etc without being specific as to whether it's optical, IR, radar, etc, and also disregarding its mounting and domain of operation. Sort of in the same sense that "spectroscopy" in science can refer to a wide variety of instrumentation! :)
spy satellites
Dude everybody knew what happened to that sub. At that pressure differential there was never going to be a failure mode wherein the sub is unable to surface or communicate yet still has an intact pressure vessel.
There is a lot of difference about random Twitter posters sharing cynical opinions and multi-billion military systems actually sensing the collapse of a sub thousands of miles away from a secret location.
It feels weird having to explain the different definitions of the verb “knowing”, but such is the case in a post-truth world.
At the time MA370 went down I thought the same thing… yet in 2025 that info still hasn’t “leaked”.
To be honest, I’m blow away that organisations like NORAD a know where MA370 was
The entire Soviet Union Venus missions are absolutely fascinating. "Hardening" takes on a whole new meaning when you're preparing a craft to survive mere minutes on Venus' surface. I'm a little surprised their deep sea craft never got much attention.
USSR focused on Venus, because at that time it wasn't apparent which one would be more interesting/accessible -- Venus or Mars.
And USSR didn't want to compete with US anymore, after lost the Moon race. USSR really did want the Moon too, after so many prior successes. So switching to Venus allowed to "split" the race.
A fun fact is that two Soviet Mars probes missed their trajectories because of the same software bug in the onboard navigation firmware. There's also a legend that the bug was a mistyped comma in the Fortran code.
The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA. Unfortunately the lander it was tethered to, Mars 3, stopped communicating about two minutes after landing so the rover didn't get a chance to go into action.
Anyway, the Soviet Union's relative lack of success with Mars wasn't really for lack of trying. Space is hard.
>The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA.
The Mars 3 landed on Mars in 1971:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3
The NASA Viking program landed on Mars in 1976:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program
...but I guess that didn't rove.
Right, NASA's first remote controlled rover (anywhere) was Sojourner in 1997. The first successful remote controlled rover was the Soviet Lunokhod 1 in 1970. That succeeded in driving around the Moon for almost a year.
Mars 3 didn't pan out but I still think that level of ambition from the Soviet Union, relative to NASA, is notable and worth celebrating.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote a fun book involving Lunokhod: The Apollo Murders.
Soviets won the space race, just lost the cold war. And now we're here fighting another cold war and the US is losing
Losing how?
The same way the USSR lost. People talk about final-point reasons like economic issues caused by an arms race or whatever, but that's just the final steps of a long lost race. Empires collapse long before they finally fall due to inertia alone. And I think the "real" cause is always the same. When enough people inside an empire want it to fail, that empire will fail.
And a common cause for creating that sentiment (that applies to everything from Rome to the USSR to the US) is Empires naturally tend to spend an increasingly disproportionate amount of their time focused on affairs outside their borders rather than within them. You have urban left leaning types becoming increasingly anti-capitalist, and the more right leaning and rural types feeling neglected by both internal and external policy.
People agree on less than ever, but the one thing they all agree on is that the system sucks. This will likely result in over more radical shifts between presidencies. You end up with a country that's starting to feel a lot like a boat being rocked back and forth with increasing vigor. And obviously this isn't just the US. It seems many political systems throughout the world are headed towards dramatic shifts.
USSR economy was heavily dependent on their export oil prices. Once they fall, USSR fell with them almost immediately.
Economic issues can cause an empire to start effectively dissolving itself, as happened with the British Empire, but that's not what happened with the USSR. It was forcibly dissolved from within as regions began literally just declaring their independence and refusing to recognize central authority, and that was largely caused by decades of increasing dissatisfaction with the system that simply reached it's final decline under the policies of Gorbachev.
One can also look to examples like the US which survived numerous catastrophic economic collapses, like the Great Depression, wholly intact.
> that was largely caused by decades of increasing dissatisfaction with the system
Dissatisfaction was present earlier, just that Russia was able to crush it.
USSR collapsed due to partially inability and partially unwillingness to murder people again, like they did previously.
> It was forcibly dissolved from within as regions began literally just declaring their independence and refusing to recognize central authority
It's disputed. Some say it was top down, like USSR could roll tanks as usual when republics protested but it didn't. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio... and talk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dissolution_of_the_Soviet...
> One can also look to examples like the US which survived numerous catastrophic economic collapses, like the Great Depression, wholly intact.
"Wholly intact" might be stretching things, unless you see no problem with describing someone as surviving Alzheimer's "wholly intact".
Pretty much all the "USA #1" types place Peak America after WW2, not before it. Reasonable historians would agree that it was less of a world power than the European nations before WW1, roughly on-par at the time of the Washington Naval Treaty, and surpassing them at some point between 1930 and 1945.
The Great Depression did a lot of damage to individuals but FDR's response to that, and later the war, strengthened the US as a nation.
While I would describe the economic transition of the USA going from laissez-faire to New Deal as being as much of an "end of capitalism"* as the collapse of the USSR was the "end of communism", the country of the USA itself remained cohesive in the New Deal.
As Russia itself was cohesive, I guess you could analogise e.g. Texas to Kazakhstan (leaves), and Alaska to Siberia (remains)?
* as it was understood at the time, and to my limited grasp of the history of such matters
> And obviously this isn't just the US. It seems many political systems throughout the world are headed towards dramatic shifts.
For better or worse Trump seems to have been an antidote to many right wing shifts in the western world.
And for some, if has definitely emboldened them.
Most certainly losing popularity https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worl...
Good thing it's not a popularity contest, and so goes America still so goes the world.
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Losing geopolitical influence, respect, and significance. Losing economic impact. Dramatically losing scientists, researchers, innovation, and the things to build future technologies. Losing the lead in electric vehicles and renewable energy. Losing the ability to build ships, semiconductors, large steel foundries, and more essentials.
So. Much. Winning. I'm sick of winning.
Given that the original post cites a cold war the US is losing, I'd list these things as part of that war. Russia controls many aspects of the US now, and is bringing about these collapses on purpose. As one does in a war against one's deadly enemy. It's not particularly mysterious.
About ten years ago I became fascinated with the Venusian landings. I've read a fair number of books about the US space program, including the great "Failure Is Not an Option", and I was kind of surprised to not find many English language books detailing the Soviet programs, and particularly the Venus missions.
The other recent threads,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 ("Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry (leonarddavid.com)" — 291 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 ("After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth (gizmodo.com)" — 50 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944167 ("Cosmos 482 Descent Craft tracker (utexas.edu)") — 9 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942194 ("Cosmos-482 descent craft re-entry prediction (esa.int)") — 5 comments
Apparently it crashed near Java in the Indian Ocean [0]. Any news on retrieval efforts?
[0] https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/17407
Near Java? From memory, it will definetely be garbage collected, can't say when.
Depends on whether it landed in the C.
Efforts are already underway to convert it to Rust!
Any information on ocean depth in that area? Or did it float? for a while?
From NASA article - https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... Apparently, it broke up too 4 pieces soon after launch time and it was the lander that was circling earth for 53 years..
From https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/nx-s1-5395631/a-soviet-era-sp...
"...The Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a Telegram post that the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere Saturday morning at 2:24 a.m. ET and landed in the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, Indonesia. It said Kosmos 482 reentered the atmosphere about 350 miles west of Middle Andaman Island off the coast of Myanmar. ..."
NASA gave the same reentry time and landing location for the spacecraft in a post on its website...."
>Any information on ocean depth in that area?
Multiple km's deep in most of that area. That's if it missed the Sunda trench, which goes down to more than 7km in places (hint: it's a subduction zone where tectonic plates slide into Earth's interior. So ehm... deep).
Unlike eg. the Gulf of Thailand (max. 85m according to Wikipedia) or large parts of South Chinese Sea, which are very shallow in comparison.
Too expensive. It's very hard to find even an aircraft carrier at the surface, ocean is just too big. Metallic non-moving things at the bottom is easier, but it still often takes years to find a large sank ship, yet alone a small round spacecraft.
But there are many ocean hunters ready to jump on the assignment, if you secure funding.
There have been searches for years for MH370 airline in Indian ocean and it has not been found. I guess the problem there is getting a more accurate? location where it came down...
They’ve found debris though, so we know it’s fate.
Barnacles! https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mh370-search-debris-...
Darn. Where's an inexpensive carbon fiber based submarine when you need one?
Resting in pieces:
https://www.engineering.com/the-titan-tragedy-a-deep-dive-in...
It's been down there waiting!
They're going to find MH-370 instead...
Coming down at "145 miles per hour-plus" and a "mass of just under 500 kg and 1-meter size" I would imagine there are just pieces out there now.
That's nothing compared to Venus. There it's 500C with sulfuric atmosphere.
A lot like New Delhi...
And ~1,300 psi at the surface, and a few other features.
On the upside - undeveloped property is readily available, and quite affordable.
- "On the upside - undeveloped property is readily available, and quite affordable".
It's a dry heat anyway.
It wouldn’t be HN if your joke wasn’t met with pedantry, so I’ll mention the heat and pressure at the surface means the atmosphere is a supercritical fluid of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen.
Buyers should have all the facts
> quite affordable
The commute to there is the real problem
Apparently it was quite dense as to be able to survive the Venetian atmosphere so there has been speculation it may stay somewhat intact.
- "Venetian"
That one means "having to do with Venice". Of Venus would be "Venusian", "Venereal" (yes, really), or "Cytherean". Or, one of a dozen others—it's a Greek god-name; there's millennia of culture to drawn on.
There's an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to this adjective question,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean
Oh right! I did know that but typo’d it thanks.
Any thoughts about sunken vs sank?
Something that sank is now sunken.
I think Starcraft has it as Sunken Colony so..
It was suppose to come down with a parachute but fingers crossed.
That Italian atmosphere is really rough!
Smells worse than the venereal atmosphere the craft was designed for.
I’ve held one of the fuel tanks that came back down around the launch. It was impressively thick and for a kid, very heavy. I sometimes think how much that would’ve weighed if it was standard iron and not titanium.
It came down in a rural field in the south of New Zealand and the secretary of the primary school I went to was of the family that owned the field. It made a fun show and tell item.
At the time no one knew what it was, and titanium was a classified material so they had to wait for the government to show up and then eventually after correspondence with the yanks gave it the all clear.
People wondered if it was extraterrestrial and this wasn’t helped by finding two field mice huddled inside when it was recovered.
I had the live tracking up and went to bed and apparently it fell out of the sky about 90 minutes later :-). I was hoping that if it started burning over North America I'd be able to go out and see it go over. Alas.
I heard rumors that it had a Plutonium RTG on it for power, that would have been a bit spicy if it had splatted across the ground somewhere. Does anyone have any primary sources on whether or not that was the case?
There's nothing to indicate there were radioisotope sources on this mission.
Public information: [0] describes the six publicly-disclosed Soviet radioisotope launches up to 1989. (It's not a primary source; it's hard to find those). This one's not among them—none of the Venus missions were reported to use radioisotopes. This Kosmos 482[1] and the rest of the Soviet Venera program were publicly described as being solar-powered, which is evidence against any engineering need for other power sources. The landing probes themselves carried chemical batteries (they were very short-lived landers).
Nothing I can find through search contradicts [0]. Wikipedia's list[2] is the same, and adds two more post-1989 launches.
Seven radioisotope payloads have already reentered/crashed into Earth before—four Soviet or Russian and three American; some thermometric generators and some simple heaters; containing either polonium-210 or plutonium-238. That's not counting fission reactors, of which there are several in addition (I'm unclear the precise count of which nuclear reactors returned to Earth, or simply exploded in orbit; or what became of the latter group).
[0] https://nuke.fas.org/space/sovspace.pdf (Gary L. Bennett, "A look at the Soviet space nuclear power program" (1989))
[1] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... ("Two solar array wings, with an area of 2.5 meters, had a span of 4 meters. Due to the spacecraft's proximity to the Sun at Venus, the wings were only partially covered with solar cells".)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_... ("List of nuclear power systems in space")
fascinating and disturbing -- i had no idea that there were fission powered satellites.
That isn’t rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
The Pioneer probes used them to power their radios decades after launch. There aren’t real alternatives.
I am usually an exceedingly rational person yet for some silly reason I had this creeping feeling for the last couple weeks I've known about the probes return that it was going to crash into my house and kill me. Very unlike me to think that way.
The persistence of the thought itself kind of gave me the creeps.
I can't explain it, it's absurd. The odds were astronomical in the truest sense of the word, and yet it did not happen and I am grateful.
It's very similar to people getting scared about SKylab so, you are not alone.
The point is about how much control the launching entity has on those stranded space junk.
I think in that very case it is zero with a good approximation.
Imagine the probe was headed to a densely populated area. Then what? Nothing? Just pray hard? Relocate a million people beforehand? Rely on good luck?
> Earth isn't the planet that Kosmos 482 was supposed to land on.
Such a great line.
I’d love to know (up to a point) how flat earthers / firmament-die hard explain how a Soviet era satellite comes and crashes back on the planet.
They just say things like this didn't happen. It doesn't take creative writing skills to just call people you disagree with liars. It's very lazy overall.
Nobody saw them falling, so no reason to explain fake news
They always can. But I think it’s sometimes kind of interesting to see the creativity of trying to reconcile such an outlandish belief with the evidence.
Well as always the belief is immutable, the evidence can only serve that belief and so if it doesn't it surely isn't evidence in that confused perspective.
<sarcasm>Obviously it hit bounced off the sky dome and came back down.</sarcasm>
Oh, they will think up something, and gullable useful idiots will continue to believe they actually believe that stuff, whilst they rake in the money from content engagement, laughing at the idiots trying to convince them the earth isnt flat for the 9000th time
Related:
Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 02-may-2025 280 comments
After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 29-april-2025 46 comments
Soviet-era spacecraft plunges to Earth after 53 years stuck in orbit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949025 10-may-2025 0 comments
A Soviet-era spacecraft built to land on Venus is falling to Earth instead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938644 09-may-2025 1 comment
I wish we could push things like this into a higher orbit. High enough to not be a danger and to be preserved for future generations.
There’s a (very slim) chance this one is being preserved at the bottom of the Indian Ocean for whoever invents submersible scanner drone swarm tech to find it.
Doing this requires immense amounts of energy because you need to match its velocity to safely bump it.
Guess Kosmos 482 finally decided Earth wasn’t such a bad backup plan after all!
USSR scientific accomplishments were amazing, and more considering the lack of resources they had, so bad many of their breakthroughs have been overshadowed or credited to people from other nationalities
Paging Steve Austin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvc-FodxV4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWJc72p2pE
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It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years. In USSR, unlike modern times, all products were made to last, like refrigerators, motorcycles, TV sets or clothes, because there was not enough supply to replace them every year.
I was under the impression that the Soviets launched multiple identical missions to account for failure. In other words: rather than investing a huge effort into reducing the probability of failure of a singular mission, they invested in multiple missions in hopes that one would be successful. If that is the case, it sounds like the had much more confidence in the engineers who did the design work than their ability to do quality control while building.
Any how, it's meaningless to compare old Soviet products to new Western ones. The older Soviet ones are likely still in use due to an incentive to maintain and repair them. Old Western products were probably just as repairable, but there was less incentive to do so. As for new Western products, there are both technological and business reasons to ignore repairability.
For starters, there was little to be shared between unique programs in space industry and products for general public, they belonged to different universes even when being made by the same factories. In fact, it was quite common to point to the split between praise of spaceships in media and regular people living like swine, both in servile and in critical works. Which, of course, is not in any way specific to USSR, or very original.
“Quality” and chances of success are relative, you need to have reference points. As space missions had none, they all were test flights AND scheduled flights at the same time. If boosters for a new rocket to Venus, radios and solar panels were ready, you launched a rocket with a dummy to check how those systems behaved, and so on.
> It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years.
I mean we couldn't use for the last 53 years and it didn't fulfill its mission. It's like saying the boulder in my yard has remained intact for 100 years "they just don't build them like they used".
We are talking about space junk, a dead chunk of metal just orbiting Earth until its inevitable decay. Saying that it was "intact" and "built to last" is disingenuous.
Yeah Elons car will last forever in space, but probably won't start. Maybe it will.
But it wasn't built to orbit Earth for 53 years. It was built to land and survive for a period on the surface of Venus. I can think of few places more difficult to survive, so to say it wasn't built to last is disingenuous on your part.
Weren't USSR products rather famously poorly built?
I think "simple but rugged" would be a more apt description. Less moving parts than the US equivalent, easier to maintain, and usually fairly sturdy. On the other hand, since cost was a constant concern, Soviet equipment was generally not designed with aesthetics in mind. So "ugly but reliable" might be another way to put it!
I saw still working after many years Soviet refrigerators, motorcycles and TV sets, so maybe they were built not that poorly after all. Of course there could be some survivorship bias, but generally modern (inexpensive) things seem to break earlier.
A lot of them were built like a tank. Their issue was lack of features, not lack of reliability.
I wonder if they just had a lot of repairs done to them, due to the unavailability of alternatives.
Depends; they might not have had the most expensive materials available, or the trickiest assembly quality, but were often designed so that the inevitable repairs could be made quickly in the field by minimally-trained personnel.
See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.
One joke/observation was that soviet product will either fall apart immediately or will last 70 years.
Other ones:
> What's as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shit-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces.
> What is it? It doesn't glow, and it doesn't fit into ass. Answer: soviet thing to glow in the ass.
> A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, “You don’t have any meat?”
> The clerk says, “No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.”
Also, exaggerated (but partially true) stories about factory fulfilling production quota for 10 tons of nails by producing single enormous 10 ton nail.
"This year a semiconductor factory, next year a whole-conductor factory!"
"Soviet microchips are the largest microchips in the world!"
Soviet microchips have 8 legs and two handles