[HN Gopher] Apollo-Soyuz Mission: When the Space Race Ended (2020)
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Apollo-Soyuz Mission: When the Space Race Ended (2020)
Author : diodorus
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-05-29 22:10 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.discovermagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.discovermagazine.com)
| slg wrote:
| Did someone just finish season 2 of For All Mankind?
| jnsie wrote:
| I did! Just last night. Was excited to see this post!
| wyldfire wrote:
| The submitter, maybe. But the article was written before season
| two aired.
| slg wrote:
| That was my point. This is a roughly year old article about a
| relatively minor space mission that mostly served a symbolic
| mission. The question becomes why is this being posted now?
| The answer is probably that For All Mankind rekindled
| interest in this mission over the last couple months and even
| if the submitter didn't see the show, it is possible that
| whoever shared this with them did.
| Belphemur wrote:
| As an avid watcher of the show, I really thought it was just an
| "invention" of the show.
|
| I'm really happy to learn it actually happened! This is
| amazing!
|
| We would need more event like this these days ...
| xony wrote:
| one fake mission ended everyone's aspiration & research
| guscost wrote:
| This framing makes it sound a little like the space race ended in
| a tie.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| It kind of did? The Russians clearly had many more "firsts",
| but the Americans had the first man on the moon, so I'd say
| even though the Russians clearly had won by the numbers, the
| Americans didn't too bad either. Maybe not quite enough for a
| tie, but pretty close.
| ghaff wrote:
| The Soviets were ahead with respect to earth orbit [ADDED:
| for earth orbit manned flight, as well as other probes]. But
| their counterpart to the Saturn V, the N1, was basically a
| disaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
|
| In fact, as I recall S1, For All Mankind is basically
| premised on the notion that the N1 worked and therefore, the
| Soviets kept their early lead and landed on the moon first.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I wonder if the Russians would have managed to get the N1
| under control if Sergei Korolev had still been around to
| lead the project. As far as I understand it, the Russian
| moon project suffered heavily from political bickering
| after Korolev's death, and the technological problems might
| have been a direct result.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly his death didn't help things. But, as far as I
| can tell, the consensus was that it was a much too
| complex (too many engines) approach for the time. So it's
| not clear that once they took that direction, they'd have
| been able to recover in a reasonable timeframe.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> The Soviets were ahead with respect to earth orbit._
|
| Soviets were the first to land on another planet orbiting
| the sun, Venus.
|
| While the moon orbits earth.
| ghaff wrote:
| I was specifically commenting on manned flight but, yes,
| the Soviets had a rocketry lead that also allowed them to
| take the first pictures of the far side of the moon
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_3 which is an
| interesting story of its own. (Basically they shot the
| photos on film and faxed them back to earth.) But they
| couldn't get the bigger rocket needed to send and return
| cosmonauts to and from the moon working.
| KuiN wrote:
| Soviet Mars 3 was also the first probe to achieve soft
| landing on Mars. Like most of the Soviet Mars missions,
| it failed, but it failed only after landing (unlike most
| of the rest ...).
| eps wrote:
| An urban legend goes that at least two Soviet Mars probes
| missed the planet because of a typo in the nav program.
| The code was in Fortran and one of the commas was
| mistyped as a dot (or vice verse).
| f00zz wrote:
| That handshake starts the opening sequence in the (otherwise
| awful) movie "Valerian":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6oTziHKM_c
| kilroy123 wrote:
| It's watchable, but yes, not great.
| d_silin wrote:
| ...that movie is not that awful! It definitely had
| entertainment value for me.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > It definitely had entertainment value for me.
|
| It definitely has nutty energy. I think if you survive the
| lengthy virtual reality sequence near the beginning it has
| some bits that are okay. I was actually quite impressed by
| Rihanna playing the shapeshifting Glamopod entertainer.
|
| And interesting to see a French rather than a Hollywood sci-
| fi film.
| doogerdog wrote:
| Not as good as The Fifth Element, but I liked it a lot.
|
| I don't understand why it gets so much hate. All movies
| have parts that are well done and parts that I would have
| done differently.
| eps wrote:
| Same director.
|
| Apparently Valerian is based on a French comic and it
| doesn't diverge too far from it. Hence the quirkiness.
| ggambetta wrote:
| I was hoping it would be a decent spiritual sequel to The Fifth
| Element... I was severely disappointed :(
| willwashburn wrote:
| It was crazy how the same time this was happening there was a
| space shuttle battle going on over on the dark side of the moon
| because the Americans were bringing nukes and the Soviet's were
| also launching a spec ops raid on the American lunar base to
| recover a potential defector. That was one crazy day y'all.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| What is this a reference to?
| Neekerer wrote:
| The TV show "For All Mankind"
| jgrahamc wrote:
| There are many threads on reddit filled with comments like
| that. This doesn't really work here on HN and I was sad to find
| this as the top comment. I have no clue what you are referring
| to.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The space race seems weird to me. Russia won most of it (first
| satellite, first peraon in space etc). Then the US rushed to
| catch up, but Russia had basically stopped competing already.
| They had no interest in the moon and did a bunch of science based
| missions instead.
|
| Its like having an Olympics where Russia won half the events and
| went home early and the US arrived late and won other events. But
| they didn't really compete directly ever...
| benmller313 wrote:
| That isn't quite how I understood this to have gone. It seems
| like the Russians very much did want to go to the moon, and
| would have beaten the American's there if they had succeeded in
| getting their version of the Saturn V off the ground in one
| piece.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Oh, the N1 rocket is an interesting story.
|
| Originally a design by Korolev, it had to be built by another
| team because Korolev died. It was so big that it needed over
| 160 railway wagons to be transported to Baikonur in piecemeal
| fashion (Baikonur is inland - no water transport available).
| It had an ungodly number of engines for its age, but a very
| subpar computer system (KORD) for monitoring them, which was
| a recipe for disaster. The budgets were so tight that the
| assembled first stage was never statically fired (the engines
| were ablatively cooled, so a static fire would probably
| require a separate set of engines).
|
| And yet the engineers tried their best.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Russia seems to be stuck even today. Roskosmos still launches
| Soyuzes, but their technological progress has stalled. The
| newer Angara vehicle only launched three times since 2014. They
| lost almost their entire share of the private satellite launch
| market, which used to be formidable mere 15 years ago. And the
| new Vostochny cosmodrome seems to be a black hole for shoveling
| money in.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I wonder if "the space race" would still be called the same today
| if soviets got to the moon first.
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