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A little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014)
- car 7y agoMovie about this event: https://imdb.com/title/tt6537238 https://imdb.com/title/tt6537238
- hef19898 7y agoGreat movie, IMHO. That's how I learned about that mission.
- rimliu 7y agoFor me there are too many cringe inducing moments. Acting is not stellar, some cold-war tropes are taken into extreme (one repeated point is that station needs to be solved, because USA is going to steal it with the Shuttle which happens to have cargo bay of just suitable dimensions). Acting is also so-so :( Visuals may be great, but otherwise I would not even call this movie good.
- cm2187 7y agoOn the shuttle, it looks like paranoia now, but let’s keep in mind the event occurred only 10 years after project Azorian was made public, which did exactly that.
- rimliu 7y agoThe movie is very loosely based on the real events though. I think the worst part for me is how incompetent flight control on the ground is portrayed.
- benj111 7y ago"USA is going to steal it with the Shuttle which happens to have cargo bay of just suitable dimensions" Assuming it would fit, is that completely outside the realm of possibility? There aren't many good reasons for being able to return such a payload from space, capturing enemy satellites seems to me to be a major one.
- NickNameNick 7y agoIf I were a shuttle commander, I'd find the idea of bringing a spacecraft inside the shuttle, where I couldn't verify the disarmed/ defueled state of the captured vehicles thrusters, deeply unpleasant.
- benj111 7y agoPossibly, but if for example you suspect it of being a space based weapon (one of the Salyuts did actually have a gun attached), and it needs to be recovered due to threat of a nuclear war... If I were a pilot I'd find the idea of people shooting at me 'unpleasant'. Its an accepted part of being a military pilot though. Plus why are you worried about piddly little thrusters on the way down? You realise what you have to sit on top of to get up there... :P
- rimliu 7y agoThere is a moment in a movie when they talk about it. Soyuz 7 is 6x15 meters and weights 20ton. Shuttle's cargo bay is 6x20 meters and has a capacity of 20 tons. Coincidence? They think not. And there is also a French guy in the Shuttle's crew who flew on Soyuz and is familiar with it. However! One of the major plot points is how the station is rotating out of control, and that makes docking very, very difficult. In fact, none of the cosmonauts can do it in a simulator, so they have to go back to the main protagonist, who was decommissioned because he saw angels(?) during EVA. Now imagine how challenging it would be to grab this rotating 20-ton object and put it into a cargo bay.
- izacus 7y agoThis movie has some of the most amazing space shots I've seen (it's worth watching in 4K/HDR). Example in blog post: https://ghostof82.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/salyut-7-2017/ https://ghostof82.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/salyut-7-2017/
- exhilaration 7y agoThank you, it's free to watch on Amazon Prime. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0H7JK1304XXVGR09FD0GXUC54O/ref=imdbref_tt_wbr_piv?tag=imdbtag_tt_wbr_piv-20 https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0H7JK1304XXVGR09FD0GX...
- russh 7y agoThank you, I'll be watching this tonight after my SO nods off.
- dang 7y agoSmall thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068017 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744920
- truth_be_told 7y agoExcellent read! Never knew about this. Thanks for posting. When i read stuff like this, i wonder how much knowledge has been lost due to the Western Press' quest to undermine/badmouth/putdown/hide and label everything Soviet/Chinese/Communist as "bad" simply because they follow a different form of Ideology/Govt. Propaganda is insidious and destructive.
- m0zg 7y agoYou're right and there's quite a bit that the US public doesn't know about Soviet space programs, but I'd like to point out that this cuts both ways. Growing up in the USSR in early 80's, well after the end of the moon landings, for some reason I thought Americans landed on the moon only once. It just wasn't talked about much, and it very much was a sore point for the Soviet space program even many years later. Turns out US astronauts landed on the moon six times with the longest stay exceeding 3 days, and rode an electric buggy on there. I only found that out much later. NASA rubbed it in pretty good. :-)
- varjag 7y agoVery much so. My uncle, a well educated and curious person had no idea Americans landed on the Moon. He learned that only around 1989 and was profoundly shocked. There was astronomy course in Soviet high school curriculum in 1980s but no mention of the landings in the textbook. And the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia article on Apollo 11 was probably one of the tersest in the whole publication :)
- m0zg 7y agoGlad to see a confirmation I'm not imagining things. My memory of those times has faded considerably, but this is one of those things that shocked me so much that I remember it better than others.
- gdy 7y agoBeing born in the USSR, my memories are quite the opposite. Everyone new that Americans have landed on the moon. What's more, I've never heard about 'moon landing hoax' until the end of 90s.
- FullyFunctional 7y agoSuper interesting, but I don't understand the very last comment "We too have mustaches," referring to the controllers who caused the problem. Is he defending them, saying they were experienced? Seems there's more to be said.
- benj111 7y agoI understood it to be a manliness thing. 'we too can do risky things too', that kind of thing. I'm not Russian though.
- wruza 7y agoI cannot find this phrase in the referenced book (googled pdf). Usually it means “we can think/act on our own, please don’t teach us”, but can depend on context, like “we have our reasons”. What it means in the article, I don’t understand. /native speaker
- dmitriid 7y agoIt’s the Russian phrase “Мы сами с усами” usually used in the context of “we weren’t born yesterday” and “they tried to trick is/tell us what to do, but we’ve know how to do it ourselves”.