Article says ±3.1 days, but the author wrote a newer entry (go to homepage, click on latest article, click through to space.com link¹) that says May 10, ±2.2 days.
Starting to get to the range where a timezone would be helpful!
It's funny/sad how a bunch of Soviet Venera probes had malfunctioning camera lens caps and returned black photos. From Venera 9-12 all four probes had malfunctioning lens caps. And then
> The Venera 14 craft had the misfortune of ejecting the camera lens cap directly under the surface compressibility tester arm, and returned information for the compressibility of the lens cap rather than the surface.
FredPret · 10h ago
It's funny now - imagine being the Commissar for Lens Cap design in the old USSR and overseeing all that
dluan · 7h ago
It's not limited to Soviet missions. My high school physics teacher worked at JPL on the Mars Climate Orbiter in the 90s. His entire NASA career was in development of it, and after 10 months of travel following successful launch, the thing exploded in the atmosphere without ever reaching the surface because the team at JPL used metric while Lockheed Martin used imperial. He was so spiritually broken by the experience that he quit and became a high school physics teacher. Great teacher, but to have your life's work go up in smoke like that is brutal.
Still, NASA does not place the responsibility on Lockheed for the mission loss; instead, various officials at NASA have stated that NASA itself was at fault for failing to make the appropriate checks and tests that would have caught the discrepancy.
The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns"
Typical bureaucratic BS.
Not surprised; what's surprising is that anything works in that sort of environment.
pkaye · 2h ago
This was during the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" era when staffing was cut and projects were being privatized and had to be done for cut rate costs. This video actually goes a lot into the details on what happened.
If you take a step back the bureaucratic bs is actually that certain countries did and continue to use imperial measurements and nonsensical date formats.
wileydragonfly · 6h ago
Should have gone with the “martians shot it down” explanation which was far cooler and less embarrassing
VectorLock · 4h ago
The ultimate "fuck this shit- I'm out."
SoftTalker · 4h ago
Teaching high school physics will do more good for more people than landing a spacecraft on Mars.
sgt · 24m ago
What reality are you living in? Zero ambition?
taskforcegemini · 3h ago
that's debatable
staplung · 10h ago
Oh that Commissar was fine. It was the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Systems on Interplanetary Probes that got thrown under the avtobus.
roughly · 6h ago
I heard the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Planetary Environments caught the brunt of the blame, but the real fault was with the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Atmospheric Dynamics, who got off scott free. Turns out he was the general’s nephew.
transcriptase · 5h ago
At the end of the day, all that matters is that someone involved accidentally fell from a 5th to 12th story window.
jl6 · 1h ago
Falling upwards - truly a comrade of the space programme.
drob518 · 5h ago
Sergei is, sadly, ahem, no longer with us.
smallnix · 5h ago
Jest aside, do we know how such failure was handled in the USSR?
codedokode · 56m ago
Stalin died in 1953, and these probes were launched much later, so there were no chance to get into a Gulag. However for people who worked earlier the possibility to get there was always nearby.
Sergei Korolev, a famous Russian rocket designer (who was later responsible for launching a first satellite and first human space flight), had to go through the prison and labour camp. In 1938 he was head of a laboratory for jet propulsion (mainly for development of weapon), and as jet engines were not well studied, experimental models often failed with explosions. After another failed test, several laboratory employees were arrested, and after they testified, Korolev. They were charged with sabotage - creating a secret anti-Soviet organization with the purpose of weakening Soviet defence. After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken, he admitted the guilt and soon was sentenced to 10 years of work in labour camps [1]. The sentence was later reviewed and he was transferred to a prison where he was allowed to continue working on jet propulsion.
Another example is Andrey Tupolev - Soviet aircraft designer ("Tu" series of planes is named after him). He was also charged with sabotage (conspiracy to slow down aircraft development in USSR) and espionage during Stalin times and had to design his planes in a prison [2].
After Stalin death, both Korolev and Tupolev cases were reviewed and they were admitted not guilty.
This is a question I've tried to answer to myself, and I think it's actually pretty hard to tell, if all your sources are Western media. I'll give you my impressions but I'm by no means an expert.
I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals.
There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm.
None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
somenameforme · 58m ago
In general I think the issue is a lot of people equate Stalin with USSR. Things were substantially different both before and after him. And his reign was also from the 20s to the 50s in which there was the context of, amongst other major issues, WW2 where the Soviets lost tens of millions of people. As one can see in certain ongoing wars, exceptional loss of life seems to gradually push leaders towards having zero concern for life at all - let alone the liberties and values we hold to be desirable, even in authoritarian systems. When the "hard" decisions become quite easy, you're well on your way to dystopia.
Scramblejams · 4h ago
Since you brought him up: Stalin was also motivated by a truckload of paranoia, though, right? Hard to make rational decisions about who is dissenting if you think they’re all out to get you. The flimsiest accusations related by the least reliable people could be enough.
> Its landing module, which weighs 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), is highly likely to reach the surface of Earth in one piece as it was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure.
Awesome! I don't know how you can design for 300 G's of acceleration!
WJW · 7h ago
Overbuild everything. For things that might be fragile-ish like surface mounted electronics, cast the whole thing in resin. As a sibling poster has mentioned, we shoot things out of artillery tubes these days that have way harsher accelerations than 300g.
numpad0 · 24m ago
Gun scopes are minimum 500G rated. Apparently that's the ballpark for recoils(the reaction force from the barrel becoming a rocket engine, and/or the bolt/carrier bottoming out)
MarkMarine · 5h ago
300g is nuts. Electronics in a shell is one thing, this is a landing craft. In a prior life my designs had to survive 12g aerial drop loads and we had to make things pretty robust.
No comments yet
os2warpman · 9h ago
There are electronics and gyroscopes designed for >9,000 G loads, in guided artillery shells.
Aerospace is awesome.
nandomrumber · 4h ago
88.2 m/s^2
For well under a second though, typically artillery muzzle velocity is, what, two to three thousand feet a second?
Still, it’s wild that guidance electronics and control mechanisms can survive that sort of acceleration.
Nitpicking, but wouldn't it be 300 Gs of deceleration? I know the math is basically the same, but technically the words a mean different things
amoshebb · 8h ago
I think this is a case where “technically” the words mean the same thing but “generally” they mean different things.
Rover222 · 6h ago
This is wrong when talking about the physics of something. Deceleration is acceleration. Acceleration is just a change in velocity.
anyfoo · 8h ago
Acceleration, deceleration, point is: Something is going to apply 300 gs in a certain direction to design for.
It's not like you can tell whether you're going slow or fast, in one direction, the other direction, or even just standing still, if you close your eyes.
stickfigure · 6h ago
Sure you can. You just need a luminiferous aether detector.
anyfoo · 5h ago
Of course, my bad. Otherwise the speed of light would have to be constant in any reference frame, and that would just be ridiculous.
crazydoggers · 9h ago
Acceleration is a vector. So if you apply the “deceleration” long enough you’ll eventually be accelerating in the opposite direction. Without a frame of reference it’s all the same. Even with a frame of reference you’re still accelerating just that it’s in he opposite direction of the current velocity.
Eduard · 8h ago
I fly through trams in completely different directions depending on whether it accelerates or decelerates. So for sure a system's design must consider more than just the magnitude of acceleration.
FredPret · 8h ago
They tend to do this with spacecraft by turning the whole craft so acceleration always comes through the floor
crazydoggers · 7h ago
Without looking out the window how would you tell the difference between acceleration or deceleration? You can’t.
And if you say “well one way I fly to the back of the tram and the other the front” You’re arbitrarily associating “front” with decelerate and “back” with accelerate.
300gs is 300gs regardless of the direction vector of the component.
> So for sure a system's design must consider more than just the magnitude of acceleration.
What else would you need to consider? Acceleration up? Down? Left? 20%x,30%y,40%z? There’s an infinite number of directions.
anyfoo · 5h ago
Well to be fair, the person you reply to has a point. There’s a continuous range of directions, but even though I’m no spaceship engineer, I suspect they’re probably engineered to withstand acceleration better in some directions than others, given that pretty much only their thrust method, as well as gravity at source and destination, will actually be able to apply any acceleration.
ryandrake · 7h ago
“The enemy's gate is down.”
drob518 · 5h ago
It’s just a minus sign.
jbnorth · 10h ago
What is deceleration but acceleration in the opposite direction? /s
JohnKemeny · 9h ago
There's no need for the "/s" on the end, there. Deceleration, and especially in this case with a natural frame of reference, deceleration is negative acceleration.
rightbyte · 7h ago
More stringently, deceleration is decreasing the magnitude of the velocity vector, I would say.
If acceleration can be negative, so can speed. A negative speed with negative acceleration would not imply deceleration?
mongol · 6h ago
Speed is not a vector, it is a scalar. You are thinking of velocity.
exabrial · 7h ago
Flip your phone upside brah
jasonkester · 1h ago
Childhood me hopes this will play out exactly like the Six Million Dollar Man episode. That it will roam around terrorizing rural California, and we’ll have to team up with a pretty young Russian scientist and Bigfoot to stop it.
I wonder if the producers of that show knew about that failed mission, and that this was actually really in earth orbit, when they wrote that episode.
rbanffy · 10h ago
Would be awesome if it soft-landed on a field and started taking and transmitting pictures of sheep.
LordGrignard · 5h ago
or even better yet, landed on a desert and taking pictures of cactii and camels
em-bee · 10h ago
when i first heard about this probe last week i was wondering, isn't this thing old and unique enough to warrant a mission to rescue and preserve it? combined with todays lower prices for a space flight, it might just be worth it.
and now it looks like it might just survive anyways. but then according to the article there also seems to be a second (identical?) model. so maybe it's not that important, except for maybe material analysis what does 50 years of exposure to space do to the material.
bunderbunder · 10h ago
I would guess that the most expensive part of such an endeavor wouldn't be the launch; it would be developing and building a spacecraft capable of capturing it and bringing it back.
Even the Space Shuttle wasn't necessarily a perfect fit for the job as-is. Hubble was serviced many times, but it was specifically designed for on-orbit capture and servicing by the Shuttle. Before they decommissioned the shuttle they actually had to install an extra piece of hardware to make it feasible to capture and de-orbit using future non-crewed spacecraft. And even then that's just to make sure it crashes in a safe place, not to bring it home intact.
There was also a mission to service a satellite that wasn't designed for the purpose, and they had a really hard time capturing it and very nearly had to give up after days' worth of failed attempts. It finally took simultaneous EVA by three astronauts to coordinate a successful capture (one to grab it by hand, two to get it onto a specialized adapter rig built just for that satellite so that the Canadarm could hold it), which is quite a thing considering that the Shuttle's only designed to allow two people on EVA at a time.
This craft is likely tumbling, which I presume would make it unacceptably dangerous for a crewed mission (and certainly rules out anyone just going out there and grabbing it with their hands), in addition to making successful capture that much more difficult.
chiffre01 · 8h ago
Is this one of the missions where the shuttle returned a satellite from orbit? There were a few:
Wouldn't it be possible to "simply" match it's tumble?
paul80808 · 8h ago
Only if it is only spinning along one axis. Very likely to be spinning on multiple axis. That said, with enough money and effort I'm sure we could figure something out, like shooting it strategically with small projectiles to slow the spin, etc.
WJW · 7h ago
Anything "spinning among multiple axes" is just spinning around a single compound axis? There's no reason for a spacecraft to limit itself to any earthbound reference frame when it comes to matching frame with an incoming body from outer space.
slavik81 · 5h ago
In three dimensions, the rotation around one axis can affect the distribution of mass around other axes of rotation. That change in the moment of intertia causes acceleration, which can result in chaotic motion even without the addition of any outside forces.
accrual · 3h ago
Reminds me of the tumbling T-handle. A small tool is spun up in one axis, and due to some interesting physics, ends up flipping over on another axis every few seconds.
I wonder if it's reproducible in vacuum or the air is necessary to destabilize it?
LegionMammal978 · 5h ago
What do you mean by "other axes of rotation"? As long as the object is rigid and not acted upon by external forces, its axis should never change, since both the direction and magnitude of angular momentum are conserved.
Wikipedia talks of "chaotic rotation" of astronomical objects, but only over long timescales due to gravitational interactions and thermal effects. On short timescales, its axis shouldn't change much at all, unless you bump into it and apply an off-axis torque.
Alright, that makes more sense, the trick is that the (conserved) angular momentum vector need not be parallel with the angular velocity vector, the simplest example being torque-free precession [0]. It doesn't help that most examples of non-constant angular velocity have external forces in the mix to confuse the reader.
Unless acted on by an external force, all rigid objects only rotate about a single axis, do they not? That axis just might not be aligned with any useful parts you'd want to grab on to.
That sounds absolutely terrifying for the astronaut. Imagine the whole universe spinning past you every second. Not to mention the forces.
throw_a_grenade · 8h ago
No, when it tumbles, it does it around its centre of mass. You'd have to get a craft that has empty area inside.
If you know Elite, it has space stations where you dock by going inside, while matching station's rotation. That's only in one axis (and note the hangar goes through the axis of rotation, i.e. centre of mass). To add rotation around another axis would make the task impossible.
MetallicDragon · 10h ago
I don't think we have any active craft capable of recovering it. The space shuttle probably could have done it, but with a cost of about $1.5b per launch, there is no way that would be worth it.
SpaceX's Dragon 2 easily has enough cargo capacity to bring it down (~3 tons vs 0.5 ton), but there's still the question of intercepting, capturing, and securing it in Dragon's cargo bay. That would still cost something north of $100m to recover the lander.
olex · 10h ago
Dragon likely wouldn't be able to get it, unfortunately.
The lander would easily fit into the unpressurized cargo bay (the "trunk"), that is typically used to launch various vacuum-bound payloads alongside pressurized cargo inside the capsule. However, for a return from orbit, the trunk cannot be used - it is not protected by a heat shield, and is ejected before re-entry.
You are correct that the return payload mass of a Dragon would technically allow it. But you'd need to somehow get the captured object _inside_ the capsule, which may be possible via the EVA front hatch for something smaller, but not 1m in diameter like the Venera lander.
Starship should be able to do it, since it is fully protected by heat shielding and returns in one piece, not ejecting any modules in orbit. But that's quite a while from being operational yet.
nradov · 5h ago
No, the Space Shuttle could not have done it. It had nowhere near the ΔV that would have been necessary for an intercept and capture. The OMS had only a tiny fuel supply. We're talking about orders of magnitude difference here.
dmurray · 10h ago
Most of the benefit of the Shuttle program, and manned spaceflight in general, has come from R and D on the launch process, or from the prestige and bragging rights of being able to launch humans into space. So once they're up there, you're getting your money's worth (or not) no matter what they do, you may as well do something cool like recover a historic satellite.
pirate787 · 6h ago
The Shuttle program was a disaster that consumed NASA's budget and set back manned space flight by a generation.
Sharlin · 7h ago
You're quite overestimating our capabilities as a species if you think that planning, developing, and launching a recovery mission in a few weeks would be even remotely feasible. Sure, we've known that the thing's up there all this time, so in the very counterfactual scenario where we had started thinking about a retrieval mission a few of years ago, and the Space Shuttle was still a thing, and someone was willing to foot the n-hundred-million-dollar bill, I guess? I don't think any nation on Earth currently has the hardware required to rendezvous with a random spacecraft in orbit and bring it down in one piece. The Shuttle was unique in that respect.
potato3732842 · 6h ago
Feasible for a 50yo project motivated by nostalgia? No
National existential crisis? They'd probably take Dragon and figure out how to make it work.
rdtsc · 10h ago
In principle this is not science fiction, Space Shuttle captured a satellite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49, they just didn't return it back. It was a catch, fix, and release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32 brought back the Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment, a bigass science probe the size of a small school bus.
There are still missions that are classified that could have done so as well.
It was something the shuttle was designed to do, with the 60-foot cargo bay requirement and the ability to bring back the mass it flew with coming specifically from the military.
alnwlsn · 5h ago
I've heard that one of the things they wanted the shuttle to do was launch, capture a spacecraft in polar orbit, and land at the launch site within a single orbit. Some say it was so they could secretly grab a Soviet satellite right out of the sky when it was out of range of Russia, but I'm not sure how you would secure something like that in the payload bay.
ahazred8ta · 4h ago
That's an urban legend. There were never any plans to capture a satellite in a single orbit. It was supposed to be capable of making an emergency landing after one orbit, but not while releasing or capturing a satellite. The 1950s Air Force X-20 Dyna-Soar was intended to launch a recon satellite and land in one orbit, but not recover a foreign satellite in one orbit.
toast0 · 5h ago
> I'm not sure how you would secure something like that in the payload bay.
Tighten down some ratchet straps, wiggle it a bit and say, 'that'll hold it'
rdtsc · 6h ago
> STS-51-A marked the first time a shuttle deployed two communications satellites, and retrieved from orbit two other communications satellites
That's very interesting. First time I heard about it. Thanks for the reference!
dreamcompiler · 10h ago
They did that when they fixed the Hubble telescope too. Five times.
And Soviets were wondering why their satellite numbers were not growing...
walrus01 · 8h ago
The space shuttle also captured and returned the long duration exposure facility satellite, a materials test bus for future missions. Extremely uneconomical, however.
Rover222 · 6h ago
This thing would be going at higher than earth orbital velocity, making an in-space capture of it more or less impossible.
AStonesThrow · 8h ago
Perhaps scientists would have some particular interest in that particular hardware as it had been launched and flown in Earth orbit, but I'll tell ya: it's way easier to get your hands on flight spare equipment; while this stuff hasn't flown, it's probably a really good copy of whatever they did launch into space, and way better condition.
When I worked "on Mars" there was a "flight spare" copy of a Viking instrument which was the predecessor to the one we were working on, and of course it was encased in Plexiglas as a museum piece, but it was truly a redundant copy, as NASA was into copying everything they sent into space, (what was the saying in Contact? "Why have only one, when you can buy two at twice the price?") so that if anything needed to be tweaked, or went wrong, they would have this copy on the ground that they could experiment with to their hearts' content.
klysm · 6h ago
Who’s gonna pay for that?
erulabs · 5h ago
Any projected intercept for earth yet? Feels like it might be quite beautiful on reentry assuming you’re in the right (but not TOO right) spot.
ahmedfromtunis · 10h ago
Man, I wish we had the technology to just concoct a spacecraft that can intercept the lander in its shallow reentry and bring it back in as few pieces as possible.
I don't know what value can it have to be studied since it never left low earth orbit (albeit it was there since 1972), but I know it would be a cool addition to any museum that may host it.
fsckboy · 10h ago
space shuttle, the air force still has one, doesn't it? also, elon could whip something up.
pacificmint · 10h ago
The Air Force never had a space shuttle, though NASA flew missions for the Air Force and the NRO.
But at this point none of the remaining shuttles are in an operational state.
Maybe you are thinking of the X-37 which is operated by the space force?
potato3732842 · 11h ago
It would be pretty stereotypically Soviet to create a parachute system that only mostly (some of the Venera probes kinda crashed) works in the intended use case (short 1-way trip to Venus) but also somehow manages to work once way, way, way outside of its intended operating environment (50yr orbiting earth).
varjag · 10h ago
Parachute deployment was possibly gasodynamic rather than electronically controlled. In which case there's a broad similarity on reentry in Earth atmosphere which could trigger the release.
orbital-decay · 10h ago
Sounds unlikely, but it could have malfunctioned. I believe the deceleration chute was designed to deploy after the hot entry phase and be triggered mechanically once crossing the certain deceleration threshold of about 2g (I could be wrong though, take it with a huge grain of salt). It also worked as a pilot chute for the cap protecting the main one.
mrtksn · 10h ago
In my experience, in soviet engineering they don't augment stuff unless absolutely necessary. As a result, stuff tend to work as long as the physics work. It results in relatively crude but simple and reliable machines. The elegance comes from simplicity, in western tech the elegance comes from being well thought and designed for specific use cases. I.e. a Lada will be uncomfortable, loud, uneconomical car but at the same time it will withstand abuse and be easy to repair enough to get it going.
Thinking about the elevator in our commie block, it would have given a heart attack to a western European. Instead of having double doors to keep us safe from the moving wall, it had pads on the bottom and top edge so if your hand or leg is stuck, the pad will be pushed and the elevator will stop immediately. Also there was a tiny cabinet door on the right side so you can access the mechanism to force open the door or force move/halt the elevator. As kids, we would be experimenting with those mechanisms. They worked every single time, no legs or arms were lost.
JohnMakin · 8h ago
I had the pleasure of working closely with a Russian engineer on a team once and had to “massage” his stuff quite often into a state that would be deemed acceptable to leadership. It looked terrible, hacked together, haphazard - but it literally never broke. It’s been the better part of a decade now but I wouldnt be surprised if his stuff outlived mine.
throwewey · 10h ago
A Lada is actually an Italian car built under license.
"The name paternoster ("Our Father", the first two words of the Lord's Prayer in Latin) was originally applied to the device because the elevator is in the form of a loop and is thus similar to rosary beads used as an aid in reciting prayers."
I would have thought the name was related to the users praying before entering to increase their chances of surviving the ordeal.
tialaramex · 9h ago
Although this mechanism looks scary it's actually fine.
The reason even its proponents accept you wouldn't build these now is that they have terrible accessibility, so they're only practical as an extra option.
Their overall rate of accidents is estimated as 30 times higher than conventional elevators
Germany saw an average of one death per year due to paternosters
tialaramex · 4h ago
Huh, that's much higher than I expected, thanks.
DrSAR · 1h ago
We used to love riding in them at our university in the late 80s/90s. And when you proceed to ride over the top will the car flip upside down? We managed to scare at least one of our classmates into believe this could happen. The whole thing felt as exciting as a carnival ride in retrospect ...
em-bee · 9h ago
despite that, it looks like the reason no new paternosters are built and existing ones are removed is safety. unfortunately this is considered to be more important than cultural heritage protection.
i have used one at the university of vienna. sadly it was removed almost 20 years ago.
mrtksn · 10h ago
Depends on the model. It's Lada Niva that is legendary.
fipar · 10h ago
I often see one parked in my area (in Uruguay) with a sticker that says “Land Rover recovery vehicle”
throwewey · 10h ago
How could I forget! Many apologies.
necovek · 2h ago
Does not sound like they talked about the paternoster lift though: they did bring up doors and implied lift stopping in stations.
idiotsecant · 10h ago
Calling paternosters 'common' in the West is quite a stretch. They are a curiosity where they are found precisely because there are so few.
jtwaleson · 9h ago
For some reason I looked into this a couple of weeks ago, and discovered there's one in Amsterdam pretty close to where I often work, in the Grand Hotel Amrâth. It's supposedly open to the public every Sunday between 10am and 2pm. I think it's only the second time I've seen one in person, and the previous one has been demolished.
zabzonk · 9h ago
Only place I've ever come across one was Napier College, Edinburgh in the mid 1970s. I found it quite scary, and actually preferred to take the stairs. I seem to remember it was actually shut down, for undisclosed reasons.
ggm · 9h ago
I also used these ones in Edinburgh decades ago, and the same model at Leeds uni which was a similar vintage. The Napier one there is a story about a lecturer convincing two students it went upside down and if you tried to loop the loop you had to stand on your hands to do the transition... much hilarity when they appear upside down on the other side.
DrSAR · 1h ago
we discovered the same joke independently in Germany. loved it.
banku_brougham · 9h ago
Have a look up on the Russian town called Togliati
wileydragonfly · 7h ago
My elevator has double doors, but some of them were installed with too large of a gap between doors that a child can get trapped. The solution is to bolt plastic bumpers to the back of the outer door. Which, hey. Works.
0x000xca0xfe · 11h ago
To be fair Venus' atmosphere is pretty much hell.
BitwiseFool · 11h ago
Higher up the Venusian atmosphere is surprisingly earth-like. Interestingly though, once a probe gets deep enough into the atmosphere a parachute becomes unnecessary because the atmosphere has gotten so thick that a probe can simply soft-land.
drob518 · 5h ago
Lander reports that Venus is very… earth-like.
marcodiego · 10h ago
If it falls in my backyard. Can I keep it to myself?
IncreasePosts · 10h ago
From a previous probe:
> Space law required that the space junk be returned to its national owner, but the Soviets denied knowledge or ownership of the satellite.[8] Ownership therefore fell to the farmer upon whose property the satellite fell. The pieces were thoroughly analyzed by New Zealand scientists which determined that they were Soviet in origin because of manufacturing marks and the high-tech welding of the titanium. The scientists concluded that they were probably gas pressure vessels of a kind used in the launching rocket for a satellite or space vehicle and had decayed in the atmosphere.[9]
I wonder how space law works when the national owner (CCCP) no longer exists? Does it go to Russia? Kazakhstan?
CryptoBanker · 10h ago
Russia is the successor state to the USSR
stevage · 8h ago
One of many successor states, no?
pests · 2h ago
While many countries are successor states of the USSR, only Russia was declared the continuator.
> In an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta on 1 April 1992, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev explained the situation: “Many people think that Russia became the legal successor of the USSR automatically, but this is far from being the case. We faced a very difficult political and diplomatic task. Russia is not a legal successor, but a continuing state of the USSR.
> There was no automaticity. It was an open question. The solution was suggested to us by Western countries, especially by the British, who had a huge experience in solving inheritance issues, they had an empire. The British dug somewhere in their archives and proposed a variant of a successor state. There is a monstrous confusion even among historians who write about it and political analysts. It is simply an unwillingness to understand. So, all of them are legal successors. All Union republics. The three Baltic republics refused to be successors. All the others, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan were legal successors and now remain legal successors. In relation to foreign debt, it was a deal. With respect to the UN Security Council, an international conference of all successors under international law had to be convened to resolve the issues. Therefore, a continuator was invented. A continuator is one of the inheritors, one of the legal successors, whom everybody recognises, but it doesn't require ratification. It is simply a declaration that it is recognised as a continuing state of the legal function that is written in the UN Charter for the USSR and now for Russia.
I'd bet many parts were manufactured in Ukraine. Let them have dibs.
treyd · 10h ago
Usually international law regarding successor states applies, so it would almost certainly be Russia that would have a claim to it.
eagerpace · 10h ago
No
mensetmanusman · 10h ago
What are the chances it lands and kills a whale?
TiredOfLife · 1h ago
Yeah, that bureaucrat is at least 20% responsible for the current US administration
mystified5016 · 10h ago
Whales are not typically found on land, and usually when they're already dead.
simonebrunozzi · 9h ago
I think we can still estimate that probability. I'd say 0%.
aruggirello · 8h ago
This thread is looking more and more as if it were written by Douglas Adams.
whoopdedo · 5h ago
Oh no, not again.
ChocolateGod · 9h ago
What if it lands on water though?
IncreasePosts · 10h ago
You've clearly never been to a Walmart outside Indianapolis before.
quercusa · 11h ago
Those of a certain age will remember this as the premise of the Six Million Dollar Man episode Death Probe (S4E13).
donnachangstein · 11h ago
They would also remember there is a man with a cape in a phone booth that could be called upon to stop this thing.
CobrastanJorji · 11h ago
That's a super idea, but sadly Underdog is fictional.
gcanyon · 10h ago
“There’s no need to fear! ...”
dreamcompiler · 10h ago
Raise your hand if you remember phone booths.
alabastervlog · 10h ago
It's been so long since those could reliably be found, that even the 1978 Superman movie has a gag about it (Clark steps up to one of those stand-style payphones, briefly looks befuddled, then runs into door turnstile instead, super-speed changing while it spins)
RetroTechie · 9h ago
Bonus points if you've used those equipped with a rotary dial.
rbanffy · 10h ago
Can't. My back hurts.
AStonesThrow · 8h ago
The other week, I was dining at the Old Spaghetti Factory, and their lobby is impressive for classic furniture and cool stuff on display, including a Donkey Kong and a (nominally) Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, and some "Fragadas Españolas" models.
There was also a bona fide telephone booth in there, in wood and glass, and I absolutely went nuts, actually needing to place a phone call. But I couldn't quite figure out whether it would open and admit me, or if customers were supposed to be fiddling with it at all, or whether it was only a showpiece. So that exploration will wait until the next time I drop by.
bunderbunder · 10h ago
I was in one a few weeks ago.
greggsy · 11h ago
No, the Six Million Dollar Man stopped it
alexfromapex · 10h ago
It sounds like it will definitely land, no parachute, because it was made to be strong enough to survive the pressures of Venus. I hope it doesn't land near me.
1970-01-01 · 10h ago
Sorry, but there is still no chance it will land. It's safe to bet your house on it making a nice crater or just disappearing from radar into the drink.
stevage · 8h ago
Sounds like you have different definitions of landing.
alexfromapex · 5h ago
Sorry, I had assumed that a crash landing was obvious from what I said. I don’t know how it could be unclear since there’s no parachute.
It doesn't actually achieve that, it just makes you look like an ignorant Westerner. Similar to all the "-ski" stuff that Americans, for some reason, seem to believe is indicative of Russian.
Starting to get to the range where a timezone would be helpful!
Via Wikipedia², which will probably also get updated fast, this page says they'll stay updated with the latest estimate: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-...
¹ https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_482
> The Venera 14 craft had the misfortune of ejecting the camera lens cap directly under the surface compressibility tester arm, and returned information for the compressibility of the lens cap rather than the surface.
The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns"
Typical bureaucratic BS. Not surprised; what's surprising is that anything works in that sort of environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuYDkVRyMkg
The whole videos series of JPL and the Space Age is very enjoyable to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R...
Sergei Korolev, a famous Russian rocket designer (who was later responsible for launching a first satellite and first human space flight), had to go through the prison and labour camp. In 1938 he was head of a laboratory for jet propulsion (mainly for development of weapon), and as jet engines were not well studied, experimental models often failed with explosions. After another failed test, several laboratory employees were arrested, and after they testified, Korolev. They were charged with sabotage - creating a secret anti-Soviet organization with the purpose of weakening Soviet defence. After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken, he admitted the guilt and soon was sentenced to 10 years of work in labour camps [1]. The sentence was later reviewed and he was transferred to a prison where he was allowed to continue working on jet propulsion.
Another example is Andrey Tupolev - Soviet aircraft designer ("Tu" series of planes is named after him). He was also charged with sabotage (conspiracy to slow down aircraft development in USSR) and espionage during Stalin times and had to design his planes in a prison [2].
After Stalin death, both Korolev and Tupolev cases were reviewed and they were admitted not guilty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tupolev#Sharashka
I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals.
There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm.
None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
He executed and imprisoned a bunch of his best aircraft designers. Look what he did to Andrei Tupolev and his design bureau; they designed a whole aircraft in the Gulag: https://vvsairwar.com/2016/10/20/aviation-design-in-the-gula...
> Its landing module, which weighs 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), is highly likely to reach the surface of Earth in one piece as it was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure.
Awesome! I don't know how you can design for 300 G's of acceleration!
No comments yet
Aerospace is awesome.
For well under a second though, typically artillery muzzle velocity is, what, two to three thousand feet a second?
Still, it’s wild that guidance electronics and control mechanisms can survive that sort of acceleration.
- barrel length (x): 5.08 meters
- muzzle velocity (v): 827 m/s
Assuming a constant acceleration γ, x = γ * t² / 2 and v = γ * t
Hence:
- t = 2 * x / v = 12.29 ms
- γ = v / t = 67316 m / s² = 7000 G
A bit lower than 9000 G, but in the same ballpark.
Certain rounds, like Excalibur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur) or BONUS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors/Nexter_Bonus), are sophisticated and are able to cope with such accelerations.
Isn't that more like 9g?
https://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=6073
It's not like you can tell whether you're going slow or fast, in one direction, the other direction, or even just standing still, if you close your eyes.
And if you say “well one way I fly to the back of the tram and the other the front” You’re arbitrarily associating “front” with decelerate and “back” with accelerate.
300gs is 300gs regardless of the direction vector of the component.
> So for sure a system's design must consider more than just the magnitude of acceleration.
What else would you need to consider? Acceleration up? Down? Left? 20%x,30%y,40%z? There’s an infinite number of directions.
If acceleration can be negative, so can speed. A negative speed with negative acceleration would not imply deceleration?
I wonder if the producers of that show knew about that failed mission, and that this was actually really in earth orbit, when they wrote that episode.
and now it looks like it might just survive anyways. but then according to the article there also seems to be a second (identical?) model. so maybe it's not that important, except for maybe material analysis what does 50 years of exposure to space do to the material.
Even the Space Shuttle wasn't necessarily a perfect fit for the job as-is. Hubble was serviced many times, but it was specifically designed for on-orbit capture and servicing by the Shuttle. Before they decommissioned the shuttle they actually had to install an extra piece of hardware to make it feasible to capture and de-orbit using future non-crewed spacecraft. And even then that's just to make sure it crashes in a safe place, not to bring it home intact.
There was also a mission to service a satellite that wasn't designed for the purpose, and they had a really hard time capturing it and very nearly had to give up after days' worth of failed attempts. It finally took simultaneous EVA by three astronauts to coordinate a successful capture (one to grab it by hand, two to get it onto a specialized adapter rig built just for that satellite so that the Canadarm could hold it), which is quite a thing considering that the Shuttle's only designed to allow two people on EVA at a time.
This craft is likely tumbling, which I presume would make it unacceptably dangerous for a crewed mission (and certainly rules out anyone just going out there and grabbing it with their hands), in addition to making successful capture that much more difficult.
https://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/dev/hillger/Shuttle-related...
https://rotations.berkeley.edu/a-tumbling-t-handle-in-space/
Wikipedia talks of "chaotic rotation" of astronomical objects, but only over long timescales due to gravitational interactions and thermal effects. On short timescales, its axis shouldn't change much at all, unless you bump into it and apply an off-axis torque.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOY21HnJII
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession#Torque-free_or_torq...
If you know Elite, it has space stations where you dock by going inside, while matching station's rotation. That's only in one axis (and note the hangar goes through the axis of rotation, i.e. centre of mass). To add rotation around another axis would make the task impossible.
SpaceX's Dragon 2 easily has enough cargo capacity to bring it down (~3 tons vs 0.5 ton), but there's still the question of intercepting, capturing, and securing it in Dragon's cargo bay. That would still cost something north of $100m to recover the lander.
The lander would easily fit into the unpressurized cargo bay (the "trunk"), that is typically used to launch various vacuum-bound payloads alongside pressurized cargo inside the capsule. However, for a return from orbit, the trunk cannot be used - it is not protected by a heat shield, and is ejected before re-entry.
You are correct that the return payload mass of a Dragon would technically allow it. But you'd need to somehow get the captured object _inside_ the capsule, which may be possible via the EVA front hatch for something smaller, but not 1m in diameter like the Venera lander.
Starship should be able to do it, since it is fully protected by heat shielding and returns in one piece, not ejecting any modules in orbit. But that's quite a while from being operational yet.
National existential crisis? They'd probably take Dragon and figure out how to make it work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32 brought back the Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment, a bigass science probe the size of a small school bus.
There are still missions that are classified that could have done so as well.
It was something the shuttle was designed to do, with the 60-foot cargo bay requirement and the ability to bring back the mass it flew with coming specifically from the military.
Tighten down some ratchet straps, wiggle it a bit and say, 'that'll hold it'
That's very interesting. First time I heard about it. Thanks for the reference!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93neuter%E2%80%93re...
And Soviets were wondering why their satellite numbers were not growing...
When I worked "on Mars" there was a "flight spare" copy of a Viking instrument which was the predecessor to the one we were working on, and of course it was encased in Plexiglas as a museum piece, but it was truly a redundant copy, as NASA was into copying everything they sent into space, (what was the saying in Contact? "Why have only one, when you can buy two at twice the price?") so that if anything needed to be tweaked, or went wrong, they would have this copy on the ground that they could experiment with to their hearts' content.
I don't know what value can it have to be studied since it never left low earth orbit (albeit it was there since 1972), but I know it would be a cool addition to any museum that may host it.
But at this point none of the remaining shuttles are in an operational state.
Maybe you are thinking of the X-37 which is operated by the space force?
Thinking about the elevator in our commie block, it would have given a heart attack to a western European. Instead of having double doors to keep us safe from the moving wall, it had pads on the bottom and top edge so if your hand or leg is stuck, the pad will be pushed and the elevator will stop immediately. Also there was a tiny cabinet door on the right side so you can access the mechanism to force open the door or force move/halt the elevator. As kids, we would be experimenting with those mechanisms. They worked every single time, no legs or arms were lost.
Neah, paternoster is quite a common elevator design in the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift
I would have thought the name was related to the users praying before entering to increase their chances of surviving the ordeal.
The reason even its proponents accept you wouldn't build these now is that they have terrible accessibility, so they're only practical as an extra option.
Their overall rate of accidents is estimated as 30 times higher than conventional elevators
Germany saw an average of one death per year due to paternosters
i have used one at the university of vienna. sadly it was removed almost 20 years ago.
> Space law required that the space junk be returned to its national owner, but the Soviets denied knowledge or ownership of the satellite.[8] Ownership therefore fell to the farmer upon whose property the satellite fell. The pieces were thoroughly analyzed by New Zealand scientists which determined that they were Soviet in origin because of manufacturing marks and the high-tech welding of the titanium. The scientists concluded that they were probably gas pressure vessels of a kind used in the launching rocket for a satellite or space vehicle and had decayed in the atmosphere.[9]
I wonder how space law works when the national owner (CCCP) no longer exists? Does it go to Russia? Kazakhstan?
> In an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta on 1 April 1992, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev explained the situation: “Many people think that Russia became the legal successor of the USSR automatically, but this is far from being the case. We faced a very difficult political and diplomatic task. Russia is not a legal successor, but a continuing state of the USSR.
> There was no automaticity. It was an open question. The solution was suggested to us by Western countries, especially by the British, who had a huge experience in solving inheritance issues, they had an empire. The British dug somewhere in their archives and proposed a variant of a successor state. There is a monstrous confusion even among historians who write about it and political analysts. It is simply an unwillingness to understand. So, all of them are legal successors. All Union republics. The three Baltic republics refused to be successors. All the others, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan were legal successors and now remain legal successors. In relation to foreign debt, it was a deal. With respect to the UN Security Council, an international conference of all successors under international law had to be convened to resolve the issues. Therefore, a continuator was invented. A continuator is one of the inheritors, one of the legal successors, whom everybody recognises, but it doesn't require ratification. It is simply a declaration that it is recognised as a continuing state of the legal function that is written in the UN Charter for the USSR and now for Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession,_continuity_and_leg...
There was also a bona fide telephone booth in there, in wood and glass, and I absolutely went nuts, actually needing to place a phone call. But I couldn't quite figure out whether it would open and admit me, or if customers were supposed to be fiddling with it at all, or whether it was only a showpiece. So that exploration will wait until the next time I drop by.
It sounds about the same as if I used something like "Joe" to refer to a William.
No comments yet
If you want to troll Putin, call him Vovochka.