[HN Gopher] One giant leap for tortoise-kind
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       One giant leap for tortoise-kind
        
       Author : renameme
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2021-09-25 00:51 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
        
       | bluescarni wrote:
       | > Korolev and his team made rapid advances. But even with the
       | full weight of the Soviet economy behind them, they struggled to
       | catch up. The main reason for this was organisational. Whereas
       | the American programme was centrally planned and hierarchically
       | managed, their Soviet counterparts seemed to be almost wilfully
       | chaotic.
       | 
       | Oh my the irony.
        
       | hellbannedguy wrote:
       | "It took four days for the Soviet navy to recover it. To
       | everyone's surprise - and their inestimable relief - the
       | tortoises were still alive."
       | 
       | Today, this is all I wanted to know. The hoax part is good too.
        
         | saiya-jin wrote:
         | I guess you didn't get to the part just below it about
         | dissecting all of them...
        
       | makarthikeyan wrote:
       | Space travel history is always fascinating. I wonder if there is
       | any data on using animals with short lifespans to study impact
       | across generations from space travel?
        
         | notanote wrote:
         | Interesting question, I did some searching. I guessed they
         | might have done such research with fruit flies [1], but I can
         | only find one plan to try it for nine generations [2]. I
         | suspect that project never launched because of the end of the
         | space shuttle program. I can't find a relevant paper by the
         | mentioned researchers in any case. All the other Drosophila
         | research seems limited to a single generation in space.
         | 
         | (It seems like C. Elegans has not been studied in space to the
         | same extent as fruit flies.)
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_flies_in_space
         | 
         | [2] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
         | nasa/2004/0...
        
       | areoform wrote:
       | A small timeline clarification, Korolev died on January 14th,
       | 1966. He did not live to see this successful flight.
       | 
       | The Zond mission series is notable because it's the first time
       | the Soviets tried an electronic digital computer on their
       | spacecraft.
       | 
       | > _In August 1964, trying to catch up with the Apollo program,
       | the Soviet Union launched its own lunar landing project. A new
       | spacecraft code named 7K-L1 (later publicly named Zond) was
       | designed, and its control system included, for the first time in
       | a Soviet spacecraft, an onboard electronic digital computer, the
       | Argon-11S. The design and construction of the Argon-11S was
       | completed in 1968 by the Scientific Research Institute of
       | Electronic Machinery (NIEM) in Moscow._
       | 
       | - http://web.mit.edu/slava/space/introduction.htm
       | 
       | As they didn't have the ability to produce integrated circuits,
       | they used something called a "hybrid IC" that is kinda like a
       | shrink-wrapped PCB with extra
       | steps,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_integrated_circuit
       | 
       | These missions were also responsible for other firsts, like the
       | first test of a Pulsed Plasma Thruster. And the Zond 2 & 3 were
       | the first Solar-Electric Propulsion missions ever flown in space,
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_plasma_thruster
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-25 23:01 UTC)