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.
Anyway, the Soviet Union's relative lack of success with Mars wasn't really for lack of trying. Space is hard.
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.
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.
So. Much. Winning. I'm sick of winning.
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.
For better or worse Trump seems to have been an antidote to many right wing shifts in the western world.
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".
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
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.
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...
To put this another way, would the USSR have lasted longer if not for Gorbachev? Almost certainly. Would the USSR exist today if not for Gorbachev? That, I very strongly doubt, certainly not in anything like its historic character. It's similar to e.g. slavery in America. Did Lincoln end slavery? Absolutely. Would slavery have ended without Lincoln? Absolutely, and perhaps in an even more desirable fashion.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_educ...
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.
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
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
See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.
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.
"Soviet microchips are the largest microchips in the world!"
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".
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.
“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.
No one comes up with plots like that anymore!
Holy hell
This is why lots of boomers think the news is "biased" now too, because they grew up with all of society unified against a common EXTERNAL foe, for better or worse. There was nobody saying "actually the USSR shouldn't be the enemy", mostly because socialist everything was snuffed out by WW2.
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?
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")
The Pioneer probes used them to power their radios decades after launch. There aren’t real alternatives.
Such a great line.
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.
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.
Good connecting of the dots with the Titanic! Interesting. Did not know that :)
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”?
That being said. There was series, Person of Interest, exactly about this problem.
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.
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
This my own conspiracy theory, but I theorize the anti-mask movement was started specifically to prevent masking from ever becoming normalized.
Just get a large chunk of your population to take part in a "two pictures ten years apart" meme every couple of years, they can provide their own evidence.
Maybe Facebook could be convinced to front such a program?
To be honest, I’m blow away that organisations like NORAD a know where MA370 was
It feels weird having to explain the different definitions of the verb “knowing”, but such is the case in a post-truth world.
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.
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.
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.
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?
thenthenthen•9mo ago
[0] https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/17407
rhcom2•8mo ago
SequoiaHope•8mo ago
rhcom2•8mo ago
perihelions•8mo ago
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
SequoiaHope•8mo ago
ForOldHack•8mo ago
cevn•8mo ago
genewitch•8mo ago
squigz•8mo ago
dotancohen•8mo ago
deepsun•8mo ago
pinewurst•8mo ago
bell-cot•8mo ago
On the upside - undeveloped property is readily available, and quite affordable.
perihelions•8mo ago
It's a dry heat anyway.
estreeper•8mo ago
Buyers should have all the facts
sph•8mo ago
The commute to there is the real problem
deepsun•8mo ago
But there are many ocean hunters ready to jump on the assignment, if you secure funding.
nancyminusone•8mo ago
kennethrc•8mo ago
T-A•8mo ago
https://www.engineering.com/the-titan-tragedy-a-deep-dive-in...
asdefghyk•8mo ago
pests•8mo ago
whycome•8mo ago
netsharc•8mo ago
asdefghyk•8mo ago
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...."
RetroTechie•8mo ago
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.
alserio•8mo ago
AdamN•8mo ago
tristramb•8mo ago