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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 minute

• deepsun 1y ago
  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.
  • lupusreal 1y ago
    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.
    • floxy 1y ago
      >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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 The NASA Viking program landed on Mars in 1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program ...but I guess that didn't rove.
      • lupusreal 1y ago
        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.
        • FredPret 1y ago
          Astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote a fun book involving Lunokhod: The Apollo Murders.
    • ProAm 1y ago
      Soviets won the space race, just lost the cold war. And now we're here fighting another cold war and the US is losing
      • nradov 1y ago
        Losing how?
        • laxd 1y ago
          Most certainly losing popularity https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worldwide-trump-return/ https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worl...
          • stronglikedan 1y ago
            Good thing it's not a popularity contest, and so goes America still so goes the world.
            • computerthings 1y ago
              [dead]
        • Arainach 1y ago
          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.
          • Applejinx 1y ago
            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.
  • abcd_f 1y ago
    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.
    • pklausler 1y ago
      Source for this fun fact?
• donatj 1y ago
  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.