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.
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.
And the classic accelerometer installed backward which doomed the Genesis mission sample return, although some bits were successfully recovered, the parachute never deployed.
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.
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.
The US using Imperial (British) units instead of the modern Metric ones it's a bit silly. We are using powers of ten daily. You just have to shift points in the scale.
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.
Similar thing happened in Georgia once busy Friday night when tons of bridge railing came smashing down onto the Interstate below. Given the traffic that time of day, it's a miracle no one was hurt, much less killed. Almost immediately the head of the DOT pleaded for the public to not blame the contractor who installed the railing. While it is important to do a root cause analysis, the DOT head should be mostly concerned about the people who could have been killed instead of the contractor. It was an incredibly tone-deaf moment.
But I didn't see anything in that description that was against serving the public. The only way to serve the public at that point in time was launching an investigation, not making super preliminary statements about what could have gone wrong and who could have been hurt.
I wouldn't say the tone deafness itself is a significant sign of corruption.
So the reason to think corruption is that there's no other reason to say that?
Well that's not true. Incorrectly blaming a particular company in the heat of the moment could lead to harm or harassment, and it's good to remind people to wait for a real investigation. The last thing the DOT wants at that point is even more avoidable mistakes.
And if it was motivated by corruption that statement seems like a bad idea. It draws a lot of attention to that specific contractor while telling people to wait for the investigation. If they are at fault, that extra attention is bad for them in the long run.
> the DOT head should be mostly concerned about the people who could have been killed instead of the contractor
You can't do anything about the past, but you can do something about the future.
The DOT head should be looking at both things. But at that point in time there's nothing they can meaningfully say about what happened except by making a serious promise to investigate. On the other end, the harm from incorrectly blaming the wrong people is something they can try to prevent.
It probably was tone-deaf but when you say their underlying concerns are wrong I disagree.
"…the thing exploded in the atmosphere without ever reaching the surface because the team at JPL used metric while Lockheed Martin used imperial."
I've just read the Wiki on the Mars Climate Orbiter and it explains the disastrous implications of that mistake. What's tragic about such errors is that the US keeps repeating them, Hubble was another very expensive Imperial/Metric fuck-up even though it was recoverable.
I've often had debates with Americans about Imperial versus Metric when I was in the US and their retort is usually along the lines "why should we give up God's own units for that nasty French stuff?" or words to that effect.
They gave other specious arguments too, such as cost of new tooling would be prohibitive. That's rubbish† of course (certainly in the grand schema of things as the long-term benefits far outweigh initial costs).
Well, anyway, by the looks of it God is on the side of the French!
What many of us outside the US find odd and can't figure out is that in its early days the American Republic was hand-in-glove with the French against that horrible Imperial island, so why did it reject the French system?
Yes, I know of the early attempt at metricization and the loss of weights and measures at sea whilst in transit from France to the US but given its impact that's pretty paltry excuse.
It really is time you guys caught up with the rest of the world. Surely, it's getting a bit too expensive to continue to lose spacecraft to whims of measurement.
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† Check how well Australia's metric conversion went some 50 years ago. It's a textbook example of how to go about it correctly. I know, I live there—we fuck things up more often than not but this one we got AOK right. If you ask kids at school today what various Imperial units are they'd likely say they've never heard of them.
I'm American, and I fully support moving to the metric system. But it's a tough sell for most people.
If someone is an adult, it's a bunch of new information to learn, and unless they work in a field that involves measurements and math, it probably won't be an obvious net positive for them.
The biggest benefit IMO is for future generations, who wouldn't grow up having to memorize conversion factors for a bunch of ancient legacy units (feet per mile, teaspoons per cup, etc.) as well as having to do the conversions when working with people from outside the US.
I'd greatly appreciate it as someone who does a lot of hobby work in various fields, because metric measurements are something I can use across all of them. But the impression I've gotten is that professionals in a single field are so used to working with whichever specific imperial units are relevant to them that it would be a wash. And since they'd have to redevelop all of that intuitive knowledge for the metric equivalent, they see it as a net negative.
"If someone is an adult, it's a bunch of new information to learn, and unless they work in a field that involves measurements and math, it probably won't be an obvious net positive for them."
Absolutely true! So what does a country do to overcome the problems of familiarity and habit? First thing is not to scare the population and the best way to do that is with a friendly and sophisticated advertising campaign.
Before I go further I must point out that Australia, the UK and New Zealand had a much more difficult task than the US if or when it converts to Metric. Reason: our currency followed the LSD system—Pounds, Shillings and Pence—so we had the double-sized problem of converting both the currency and weights and measures. Right, the US has had decimal currency almost from its beginning. You've already a head start! :-)
Pre decimal currency people in Australia, the UK and NZ had a mad system inherited from history where 12 pence = 1 shilling, 20 shilling = 1 pound (£). And there was an even madder unit called the guinea (gn) which is 21 shillings—that's 1 shilling more than the pound or 252 pence/pennies (that's madness but there are good historical reasons for it that go back centuries).
It used to be commonplace to see ads, store sales etc. like 14gn & 3/- (shillings)—that's 297 shillings or 3,528 pennies (if I haven't screwed the math up).
And that was only part of it, there's a florin, a crown, half crown etc and a halfpenny. Everyone had to know all this stuff (if you didn't you'd likely be robbed). A couple of examples in your parlance:
penny (1d) — 1¢, penny
sixpence (6d) — 5¢, nickel
shilling (12d) — 10¢, dime
10 shillings (10/-) — $1, dollar
Every country that converted from LSD to decimal adopted the preferred 1-2-5 number series to minimize the number of coins, i..e.: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20,…. Same with the Euro. The US has somewhat screwed its coinage up with its beloved Quarter. When those of us who come from 1-2-5 series countries go to the US one of the first things we notice is how much loose change we accumulate in our pockets. The difference is amazing!
It's worth noting that Australia's main currency unit is the dollar (same basic structure as the US dollar) which is half the old pound. That was too much for the UK, tradition held them back, the old 20 shilling pound became the new 10 shilling pound sans name change. That meant a coarser granularity, the smallest unit (the new pence) is over twice that of the old. Of course, that led to price hikes. The UK then went on screw up its weights and measures conversion for the same reason. I'll discuss why in a moment.
As mentioned, everything counts on getting the population on side, here's one of Australia's decimal currency ads (even now it's pretty good):
A similar campaign was waged a little later with the weights and measures conversion. This is where Australia shined and it suggests your worry about conversion being a tough sell—which is true—has to be accepted and tackled head on. And that's how it was done here.
What Australia's Metric Conversion Board did was to cold-turkey the whole country from the outset just as happened with decimal currency—old coins and notes disappeared almost overnight, as soon as 'old' cash was banked new coins and notes were issued.
Almost immediately, grocery items changed from pounds and ounces to kilograms/grams, pints/fluid ounces to litres, feet and inches to metres/cms. Suddenly, kids going back to school after holidays could only buy 30cm rules sans inches—both sides were only metric.
What's more the government made it unlawful to sell new goods with Imperial measurements on them. Right, supermarket goods didn't have both pounds/ounces and kilograms—only kilograms (of course manufacturers had time to tool up).
What happened? Well, a lot of whingeing for a few weeks and it was essentially all over. People adapted remarkably quickly. Teachers got rid of all those Imperial tables, and so on. Lumber changed, a 4x2" (OK, 2x4" in your lingo) became 100x50mm, and so on.
Oh, and I must say I lived though all that, I was a teenager when decimal currency came in. Even I bitched about not being able to buy a rule with both inches and centimeters on it. In fact, I had a friend who worked for the Metric Conversion Board and I used to whinge to him about it. It also worked both ways, I always had the latest lowdown on how the conversion was proceeding.
What happened after that? The country adjusted remarkably well and it now thinks metric by default (and that's absolutely the key point). Both the US and the UK are largely metric in areas but neither think in metric by default. It's not a cultural meme in either.
After everybody in Australia had become fully metrified the government reversed the ban on things marked with Imperial measurements (you'd never see groceries marked in Imperial units but you would see dual units on a 30cm rule nowadays. It was a great success with little pain.
Now look how the UK stuffed it up—or what not to do! The UK started its metrication program in 1965 which is earlier than Australia yet it's still a mess. Officially it's a metric country and yet a huge amount of Imperial activity is still taking place. I recall around the time of Brexit some of Boris Johnson's cohorts were even calling for the reintroduction of Imperial units. Moreover, you see the Imperial mindset everywhere even in the BBC, for example, doctors on medical programs frequently discuss patients weigh in stones—for heaven's sake very few people in Australia would know what a 'stone' is let alone that it's 14lb.
What the British did was do precious little, they didn't ban goods marked with Imperial measurements and so on, 60 years later it's still largely an Imperial country.
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Edit, Ha, I've not seen that clip for many years but looking at it now I realize that it was produced by Artransa Park TV which was a subsidiary of the television network I worked for. I'd probably would never have made that connection if it were not for this post. Small world eh?
> Before I go further I must point out that Australia, the UK and New Zealand had a much more difficult task than the US if or when it converts to Metric. Reason: our currency followed the LSD system—Pounds, Shillings and Pence—so we had the double-sized problem of converting both the currency and weights and measures.
I don’t agree with how you seem to be treating currency decimalisation as part of metrication, when to me it is a completely separate topic: the metric system is a system of units for measuring physical quantities; currencies and units of account are not physical quantities, and as such do not form any part of the metric system.
Also, some other countries who had weird-sized currency subdivisions got rid of them in a very different way: hyperinflation can quickly render currency subdivisions practically irrelevant-if a loaf of bread is a thousand pounds, nobody cares about shillings or pence any more. Of course, if you have the choice, an ordinary currency switchover is much better than hyperinflation.
All I can add is that I lived through both conversions and witnessed them from day-to-day.
They were planned by greater minds than mine to follow one another with the metric building on the momentum of the first. Outcomes are what ultimately matter, both conversions along with those in NZ have been recognized as some of the most successful of all time.
Decimalisation is different to metrication but they were not perceived that way, instead they were a political matter and that required a political solution involving Parliament, and that's an altogether different matter.
BTW, well before the French Revolution when the Franc was set in stone the French currency followed the same divisions as the UK pound, the livre was divided into 20 then 12. Similarly length, the French inch if I recall is marginally longer than the Imperial one. Again, it's politics at work here, both currency and measures are often closely aligned.
My highschool physics teacher had a similar story, he was one of best teachers I ever had. I went from disliking physics to becoming a EE major in college. Doubt I would be where I am today without him coming in at the right moment in my life.
So, yes, a good teacher could inspire 10+ others to make spacecraft, tech startups, etc. Maybe the ROI for humanity is greater if that teacher stayed as an IC in their field.
I think the implication is that a good teacher can inspire more students to take up science and contribute broadly to the field than just one person on a specific field.
Pretty much. Having a working understanding of Newtonian physics, electricity, and other High School physics topics has real-world benefits. Landing a spacecraft on Mars is a remarkable technical achievement, but makes almost no difference in the life of 99.999% of people.
Either could inspire someone to pursue a career in science, I was more thinking of just practical benefits.
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.
At least with the Venus probes they were only publicly announced when they were well on their way to Venus with failures either not getting published or getting assigned alibi mission goals (e.g. if they failed to leave earth's orbit) so failure modes were limited to the destination.
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.
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.
A classic feature of authoritarian governments: when their dumb plans fail, it's because of enemies of the state. Bonus points when the enemies of the state are the ones that warned of the negative effects that would happen (obviously they must have been saboteurs)
As a Russian I will explain my vision: one of the oldest Western traditions is to demonize Russia and Russian people. You can find plenty of examples in the Western literature from 100 years ago, from 400 years ago, and right now on CNN or Bloomberg or in any Hollywood movie.
E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Or you can open just about any publication/movie about Russia/Soviet Union from just about any period of time: there would be not a single good word. Western Media almost never publishes something like: "There's a new school/hospital/stadium/factory opened in Russia". Instead all you can see is "Russian corrupt government officials set a record of eating 100500 babies alive today.", "Weak Russian economy means that Russians will survive on a diet of two rotten potatoes a day in 2026", etc. etc.
It's just that Soviet period is demonized the most.
I spent three years on Africa, and it’s the same story there. Literally everyday millions of africans laugh and sing and cry with joy at weddings, parties, birth of children. New hospitals get built, life is rapidly improving.
Basically nobody in the west has any idea, and people always assume I was in a hell hole the entire time. It’s wild what propaganda will do for knowledge of a place.
So basically you are fine living in a imperialist, totalitarian dictatorship, where the slightest descent is punished by years in prison, because the boot on your neck is Russian made?
The rest of the world having to clean up the mess left by the Soviet Union (paying for the cleanup and decommissioning of nuclear submarines, Chernobyl, rebuilding eastern Europe) may have a lot to do with the anti-Soviet attitude.
Have you ever wondered if maybe that (and by extension your attitude to it) is part of the problem?
Honest question here. What is the Russian opinion about the quality of life in Russia, in Soviet times and post collapse? It seems to me as an observer from North America that the Russian people have had to ensure a lot of violence from their rulers for a long time.
Russian soldiers stole radioactive materials with their bare hands in Chernobyl some years ago. When you steal thousands of children, keep invading neighbors, assassinate people all over europe, its not that weird that you don't have the best PR. The western world tried to get you to join the free world for almost 30 years, so this is all on yourself.
Maybe if not for the majority of Russians actually supporting the brutal dictator ordering ongoing war crimes in Ukraine you could ask for some sympathy.
This isn't just oppressed society afraid to act. This is actual support for the actual killer of the babies. Despicable.
Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans, pervasive disinformation efforts, and aim to destroy the peace and integrity of the countries it perceives as a competition.
For now I'll just agree this is largely deserved, and I'll play the sad tune on the tiny violin.
The USA is the #1 supporter of baby killing in the world right now, by a huge margin. Everyone outside the USA’s imperial propaganda bubble can see it - Americans cannot.
Are all Americans bad guys because of what they are allowing to happen with their countries resources?
Rusofobia started in middle ages, long before Putin was born. And it never ended.
> Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans,
USA started with a genocide of a whole continent. Started more wars than any other nation/state in the human history. Probably killed more civilians than any other nation in history (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, just to name a few countries with huge losses among civilians, not even counting those who died from hunger or illnesses caused by US wars and deliberate destruction of agriculture and infrastructure).
So what? Do you read every day that it is the most belligerent and aggressive state on Earth, although it really is?
> pervasive disinformation efforts
I've already wrote in the original message, how Russia is portrayed by the media and Hollywoold. Is it a really true information? Not propaganda and disinformation?
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.
The mass purges were deliberate, while the famine (polemically called the "Holodomor") was not. The famine was caused by Stalin's disastrous agricultural policy, but it wasn't a deliberate attempt to kill people.
>Broadly speaking, Russian historians are generally of the opinion that the Holodomor did not constitute a genocide. Among Ukrainian historians the general opinion is that it did constitute a genocide.
While I agree that one primary motive was to get more food, Communist atrocities generally start out with noble ideals, at least on paper. Pol Pot also intended to create an ideal society[1], at whatever cost.
Pol Pot actually intended to kill huge numbers of people and wipe out the cities. He had his own crazy philosophy about a peasant Utopia that had nothing to do with Marxism at all.
The Soviets wanted to increase agricultural yield, but the policies Stalin implemented caused the harvest in 1932 to fall by about 20%. In a country already just barely able to feed itself, that led to famine, not just in Ukraine but across the USSR.
> The famine was caused by Stalin's disastrous agricultural policy, but it wasn't a deliberate attempt to kill people.
Neo-Nazis argue the same about the Holocaust, namely, that there is not a single piece of evidence showing that the highest level of the German government, in Hitler's person, ever ordered the extermination of Jews (and this is true). They claim it was merely an unfortunate side-effect of various factors, such as widespread shortages, logistical issues caused by Allied aerial bombings, and so on.
However, when you zoom in on the personal level, the deliberateness becomes obvious in both cases. If someone came to your city, confiscated all the food, harshly punished any attempts to store even a minimal amount for basic survival, caused horrific starvation that killed many, drove survivors to such insanity that parents ate the flesh of their own children in the most extreme cases, and still blocked all foreign aid and prevented people from leaving, then what would you call it, if not deliberate mass murder?
> Neo-Nazis argue the same about the Holocaust, namely, that there is not a single piece of evidence showing that the highest level of the German government, in Hitler's person, ever ordered the extermination of Jews
We literally have the minutes of the Wannsee conference, in which the Nazis decided to kill all Jews.
The German state carried out a massive logistical operation of moving millions of people to specially built camps and gassing them to death. Comparing that to a famine is insane.
You're drawing an equivalence between patently absurd, factually false denialism about the Holocaust on the one hand, and the dominant scholarly view that the Soviet famine of the early 1930s was not a deliberate attempt to kill Ukrainians on the other hand.
Some of them do, but the difference is that their claim is complete and utter hogwash.
On the other side, pretty much everyone accepts that there was a major famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, mostly caused by Stalin's collectivization policy. That's just a fact.
The peak of Stalin's repression is somewhere in 1937-1939 - right before WW2, so you can't write it off to losses in the war. The reason is probably Stalin's paranoia and him seeing traitors everywhere, including his former comrades.
"I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans."
Right, it's time we stopped this stereotyping and looked at this objectively. The Russian Empire and later the USSR has had many, many truly brilliant people over recent centuries. The list of names seems endless, here are few immediately to mind: Chebyshev, Cantor, Markov, Borodin, Köppen, Landau, Cherenkov, Mendeleyev, Tolstoy, Shostakovich, Gagarin, Prokudin-Gorsky, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. And here's just the Wiki list of Russian scientists:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_scientists. Now, there's much more, do the same again for physicists, mathematicians, chemists, composers, writers, novelist and so on. When one looks at the sheer numbers of people it's hard to believe that they all come from Russia.
Morever, it's hard to imagine where the world would be today without these brilliant people. It's almost inconceivable the world would be anywhere near the same without them.
I'd like to think most of us are smart enough to separate the majority of Russians from the small minority of ratbags, sociopaths and psychopathic, paranoid, sadistic monsters such as Stalin, Putin and Ivan the Terrible. There is no doubt that Russia has had a long and terrible history of tyrant rulers whose reign of tyranny has caused great harm to the Russian people. If anything we ought to feel some sympathy and compassion for the Russian population as a whole given the centuries-long turmoil Russia has endured.
Nevertheless, in spite of its long history of adversity Russia has still been able to produce this brilliant body of people and it's done so essentially consistently over recent centuries.
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.
After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken
It was worse than that. He was beaten with rubber hose and wire harnesses, had needles pressed in the body, was urinated on. He then was sent to a gulag where he was left dying from hunger and scurvy. He was saved by a fellow imprisoned engineer who was fortunate to fight his way up though the inmate hierarchy.
The broken jaw, out of the many broken bones in his body is mostly mentioned because it was ultimately the cause of his death in 1960s.
> 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!
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.
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.
It also blew my mind that a human being, John Stapp, survived >40g acceleration and 26g deceleration, in a rocket sled. I believe it was the deceleration that hurt him the most.
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)
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.
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.
When you go around a tight corner and are thrown to one side, what term would you use for the tram's change in motion then?
Deceleration is a useful but non-technical term, like vegetable. A tomato is a fruit which is a tightly defined concept, but it is in this loose category of things called vegetables. It's still useful to be able to call it a vegetable.
From a physics perspective all changes in motion (direction and magnitude) are acceleration, and it's correct to say the designers had to consider acceleration in most (all?) directions when designing the tram. This is including gravity's, as they tend to give you seats to sit on, rather than velcro panels and straps like on space ships.
It is useful to say to your friend in the pub that you got thrown out of your seat due to the tram's heavy deceleration, rather than give a precise vector.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The magnitude of the velocity vector is dependent on the frame of reference.
If you measure the same object's velocity from a spaceship traveling through the solar system, you'll get a different answer from what we measure from Earth.
That's why physics doesn't distinguish between acceleration and deceleration. What looks like acceleration in one frame looks like deceleration in a different frame.
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!
The current propaganda trends of Kremlin are relying a lot on a glorious past. The 9 May is one of the staples of the propaganda, that now represents WWII as a victory over the most of the world, not just a victory on an Eastern European front of the WWII. The USSR space achievements are another reason to boast about the glorious past.
So it would be ironic if glorious past reached through the space to hit those who idolizes it, because they idolize not the historical past but the alternate history past. Reality strikes back.
This spacecraft was part of the Soviet space exploration program, designed to consolidate USSR's World Power status.
The Moscow military parade is meant to demonstrate the neo-imperial Russian military might, on the 80th anniversary of the USSR conquering half of Europe. That's the way it is presented, with slogans like «Можем повторить» i.e. “We can repeat it”.
The former striking the latter would be a bit like a terrorist accidentally blowing up on a bomb of their own making.
You could mention something about "Losing 80% of their population of fighting-age men and nearly losing their capital city to German aggression before turning the tide" and something about the race against the other Allies, but that is what happened.
Victory Day is basically the largest holiday in Russia.
They entered the Second World War as allies of Nazi Germany. When Germany inevitably turned on them, it was we—the collective West, with my own country playing a significant and costly role—who helped drag them out of the mess they’d enabled.
And yet, not long after, they turned on us. They occupied Eastern Europe, ruled it with an iron grip, and spent the next 80 years constructing a narrative in which they were the heroes—and that they’d done it all on their own.
Saying they turned on us is misleading. They were never on our side, but Hitler was the bigger threat.
The US nuked Japan post surrender (go look it up - the documents were declassified a decade ago) as a bluff to convince the Russians that they could not win a war where they attempted to take all of Europe.
"Post surrender" is misleading. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/06/did-the-japanese-... has good coverage of what's known here. There were definitely factions within Japan that wanted to surrender, but there doesn't appear to have been a formal attempt.
As is, there was an attempted coup to overthrow the government due to the first (conditional) surrender.
Ukraine and Belarus suffered the highest losses in proportion of their population. Weird that contemporary Russia tries to take credit for results obtained with the blood of others.
The Soviets did do by far the majority of the fighting. And dying. Of course that was also a symptom of the brutal and inhuman regime: soldiers were sent into battle in suicidal human wave attacks, sometimes even without a weapon, because Stalin didn't care about their lives.
But they were fighting the brunt of the German military machine, and they did defeat them. It wasn't North Africa or Normandy that broke the Nazis, it was Russia.
Then abusing the big win by attempting to absorb all the Eastern European companies as puppet provinces. Let's not act like they weren't doing it for their own ambitions, just like Hitler. A lot of those millions could have been preventable because Stalin had zero concern for the lives of citizens or his military
Yes, the former Nazi allies that the Allies gleefully partnered with as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Of course that was just a one time thing and the West would never again ally itself it forces that openly call themselves Nazis. Oh wait, the West is currently doing that today. Relative moralism is something the West specializes in doing.
There was no glee, it was simply a partnership of convenience to defeat the much worse enemy. The west didn't starve and murder their own people to the tune of 10 million+ like the Soviets did, outside of the losses in fighting the Nazis
Their total losses were about 26.6M. For comparison, German concentration camps killed about 6M, but Russia was on our side, so we don’t like to compare these two numbers.
Solar activity affects the outer layer of our atmosphere which expands with solar activity and affects the drag of satellites. This is how starlight lost a bunch of satellites last year.
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.
“Oscar: Irina, you know that Steve is bionic. If he's careful ...
Irina: You don't understand. I designed that probe for Venus. Venus Oscar. A planet with temperatures of 900 degrees, 300 mile per hour winds, pressures up to 90 earth atmospheres. Even a bionic man couldn't survive under those conditions.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's about angular momentum and happens whenever the axis of rotation differs - even slightly - from the semi-major axis. Interaction with a fluid is not necessary.
You can demonstrate it at home with your smartphone (or, more canonically, a tennis racket), and see for yourself that the tumbling happens much too quickly to be explained by whatever force the air is imparting.
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.
Does it really work this way? If the craft is rotating along any other axis than its direction of travel, wouldn't the matching craft have to be revolving around it, not just rotating?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The space shuttle also captured and returned the long duration exposure facility satellite, a materials test bus for future missions. Extremely uneconomical, however.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've once built a distributed scheduler to run PHP jobs over a cluster of several thousand machines, before Kubernetes was a thing. It's only a few thousand lines of code and perfectly matches the description of being terrible, hacked together, etc. It also rarely broke and the company still uses it to this day, 10 years later, with almost no adjustments. My ex-colleagues are also saying that wherever they go they miss that framework (even though it's technically open source). And yes, I'm Russian :).
"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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
To be responsible for that damage as a successor, one would have to acknowledge that damage was done in the first place, which isn't something that Russia is willing to do.
And it's not even a government thing. One of the very common historical myths in Russia is that it was a net positive force in basically all the territories it ever occupied as an empire. The rhetoric around it is pretty much identical by the one used by European colonial empires pre-decolonization, except that Russia never underwent the latter (for good reasons: if it were to decolonize in proper sense, it would cease to exist as a state).
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)
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.
This thing spent 50 years in high earth orbit. Everything will have received a huge dosage of radiation along with periodic freezing and boiling temperatures.
Something may have survived, life is crazy like that, but it's unlikely it will be a dangerous pathogen to humans. In fact, surviving life will have likely adapted to eat any of the pathogens.
Highly unlikely given sterilization before launch and Venus basically being a deep fryer
But also technically not impossible. For example if the dormant microbes react to prolonged microgravity and radiation in ways we don't understand, perhaps it brings back something we haven't seen before
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.
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.
The purpose of calling Vlad Putin "Vlad Putin" is to show disrespect towards Vlad Putin, which is better accomplished by making the diminutization less linguistically accurate.
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.
Well, If you can't win in the battlefield, I think this is a good cope mechanism.
NATO should have stayed with their time-honored tradition of bombing the shit out of sheep-herders with AKs instead of starting a proxy war with Russia.
> 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.
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