My favorite Six Million Dollar Man episode is where Steve Austin had to fight a Soviet Venus rover that accidently landed on Earth. It was autonomous, obviously, and because it was designed to survive on Venus, it was nearly indestructible.
Also similar to the strange subplot in "Until the End of the World" [1] where a damaged Indian nuclear satellite threatens to fall to earth destroying civilization.
Ah I've been trying to dig up that episode from my faulty memory for years! I was convinced it was an episode of the A-Team fighting a killer tank instead.
The entire Soviet Union Venus missions are absolutely fascinating. "Hardening" takes on a whole new meaning when you're preparing a craft to survive mere minutes on Venus' surface. I'm a little surprised their deep sea craft never got much attention.
USSR focused on Venus, because at that time it wasn't apparent which one would be more interesting/accessible -- Venus or Mars.
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.
The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA. Unfortunately the lander it was tethered to, Mars 3, stopped communicating about two minutes after landing so the rover didn't get a chance to go into action.
Anyway, the Soviet Union's relative lack of success with Mars wasn't really for lack of trying. Space is hard.
Right, NASA's first remote controlled rover (anywhere) was Sojourner in 1997. The first successful remote controlled rover was the Soviet Lunokhod 1 in 1970. That succeeded in driving around the Moon for almost a year.
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.
They always can. But I think it’s sometimes kind of interesting to see the creativity of trying to reconcile such an outlandish belief with the evidence.
Well as always the belief is immutable, the evidence can only serve that belief and so if it doesn't it surely isn't evidence in that confused perspective.
Oh, they will think up something, and gullable useful idiots will continue to believe they actually believe that stuff, whilst they rake in the money from content engagement, laughing at the idiots trying to convince them the earth isnt flat for the 9000th time
I had the live tracking up and went to bed and apparently it fell out of the sky about 90 minutes later :-). I was hoping that if it started burning over North America I'd be able to go out and see it go over. Alas.
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?
There's nothing to indicate there were radioisotope sources on this mission.
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).
[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".)
"...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...."
Too expensive. It's very hard to find even an aircraft carrier at the surface, ocean is just too big. Metallic non-moving things at the bottom is easier, but it still often takes years to find a large sank ship, yet alone a small round spacecraft.
But there are many ocean hunters ready to jump on the assignment, if you secure funding.
There have been searches for years for MH370 airline in Indian ocean and it has not been found. I guess the problem there is getting a more accurate? location where it came down...
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,
USSR scientific accomplishments were amazing, and more considering the lack of resources they had, so bad many of their breakthroughs have been overshadowed or credited to people from other nationalities
There’s a (very slim) chance this one is being preserved at the bottom of the Indian Ocean for whoever invents submersible scanner drone swarm tech to find it.
It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years. In USSR, unlike modern times, all products were made to last, like refrigerators, motorcycles, TV sets or clothes, because there was not enough supply to replace them every year.
I was under the impression that the Soviets launched multiple identical missions to account for failure. In other words: rather than investing a huge effort into reducing the probability of failure of a singular mission, they invested in multiple missions in hopes that one would be successful. If that is the case, it sounds like the had much more confidence in the engineers who did the design work than their ability to do quality control while building.
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.
We are talking about space junk, a dead chunk of metal just orbiting Earth until its inevitable decay. Saying that it was "intact" and "built to last" is disingenuous.
But it wasn't built to orbit Earth for 53 years. It was built to land and survive for a period on the surface of Venus. I can think of few places more difficult to survive, so to say it wasn't built to last is disingenuous on your part.
> It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years.
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".
I saw still working after many years Soviet refrigerators, motorcycles and TV sets, so maybe they were built not that poorly after all. Of course there could be some survivorship bias, but generally modern (inexpensive) things seem to break earlier.
I think "simple but rugged" would be a more apt description. Less moving parts than the US equivalent, easier to maintain, and usually fairly sturdy. On the other hand, since cost was a constant concern, Soviet equipment was generally not designed with aesthetics in mind. So "ugly but reliable" might be another way to put it!
Depends; they might not have had the most expensive materials available, or the trickiest assembly quality, but were often designed so that the inevitable repairs could be made quickly in the field by minimally-trained personnel.
See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.
My favorite Six Million Dollar Man episode is where Steve Austin had to fight a Soviet Venus rover that accidently landed on Earth. It was autonomous, obviously, and because it was designed to survive on Venus, it was nearly indestructible.
No one comes up with plots like that anymore!
Also similar to the strange subplot in "Until the End of the World" [1] where a damaged Indian nuclear satellite threatens to fall to earth destroying civilization.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101458/
Ah I've been trying to dig up that episode from my faulty memory for years! I was convinced it was an episode of the A-Team fighting a killer tank instead.
Its a dalek: Just climb stairs.
The entire Soviet Union Venus missions are absolutely fascinating. "Hardening" takes on a whole new meaning when you're preparing a craft to survive mere minutes on Venus' surface. I'm a little surprised their deep sea craft never got much attention.
USSR focused on Venus, because at that time it wasn't apparent which one would be more interesting/accessible -- Venus or Mars.
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.
The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA. Unfortunately the lander it was tethered to, Mars 3, stopped communicating about two minutes after landing so the rover didn't get a chance to go into action.
Anyway, the Soviet Union's relative lack of success with Mars wasn't really for lack of trying. Space is hard.
>The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA.
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.
Right, NASA's first remote controlled rover (anywhere) was Sojourner in 1997. The first successful remote controlled rover was the Soviet Lunokhod 1 in 1970. That succeeded in driving around the Moon for almost a year.
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.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote a fun book involving Lunokhod: The Apollo Murders.
Soviets won the space race, just lost the cold war. And now we're here fighting another cold war and the US is losing
Losing how?
The other recent threads,
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
I’d love to know (up to a point) how flat earthers / firmament-die hard explain how a Soviet era satellite comes and crashes back on the planet.
<sarcasm>Obviously it hit bounced off the sky dome and came back down.</sarcasm>
They always can. But I think it’s sometimes kind of interesting to see the creativity of trying to reconcile such an outlandish belief with the evidence.
Well as always the belief is immutable, the evidence can only serve that belief and so if it doesn't it surely isn't evidence in that confused perspective.
Nobody saw them falling, so no reason to explain fake news
Oh, they will think up something, and gullable useful idiots will continue to believe they actually believe that stuff, whilst they rake in the money from content engagement, laughing at the idiots trying to convince them the earth isnt flat for the 9000th time
I had the live tracking up and went to bed and apparently it fell out of the sky about 90 minutes later :-). I was hoping that if it started burning over North America I'd be able to go out and see it go over. Alas.
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?
There's nothing to indicate there were radioisotope sources on this mission.
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")
Apparently it crashed near Java in the Indian Ocean [0]. Any news on retrieval efforts?
[0] https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/17407
Any information on ocean depth in that area? Or did it float? for a while?
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...."
Too expensive. It's very hard to find even an aircraft carrier at the surface, ocean is just too big. Metallic non-moving things at the bottom is easier, but it still often takes years to find a large sank ship, yet alone a small round spacecraft.
But there are many ocean hunters ready to jump on the assignment, if you secure funding.
There have been searches for years for MH370 airline in Indian ocean and it has not been found. I guess the problem there is getting a more accurate? location where it came down...
They’ve found debris though, so we know it’s fate.
Darn. Where's an inexpensive carbon fiber based submarine when you need one?
Resting in pieces:
https://www.engineering.com/the-titan-tragedy-a-deep-dive-in...
It's been down there waiting!
They're going to find MH-370 instead...
Coming down at "145 miles per hour-plus" and a "mass of just under 500 kg and 1-meter size" I would imagine there are just pieces out there now.
That's nothing compared to Venus. There it's 500C with sulfuric atmosphere.
A lot like New Delhi...
And ~1,300 psi at the surface, and a few other features.
On the upside - undeveloped property is readily available, and quite affordable.
- "On the upside - undeveloped property is readily available, and quite affordable".
It's a dry heat anyway.
Apparently it was quite dense as to be able to survive the Venetian atmosphere so there has been speculation it may stay somewhat intact.
- "Venetian"
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
Any thoughts about sunken vs sank?
Oh right! I did know that but typo’d it thanks.
It was suppose to come down with a parachute but fingers crossed.
That Italian atmosphere is really rough!
Smells worse than the venereal atmosphere the craft was designed for.
USSR scientific accomplishments were amazing, and more considering the lack of resources they had, so bad many of their breakthroughs have been overshadowed or credited to people from other nationalities
Related:
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
I wish we could push things like this into a higher orbit. High enough to not be a danger and to be preserved for future generations.
There’s a (very slim) chance this one is being preserved at the bottom of the Indian Ocean for whoever invents submersible scanner drone swarm tech to find it.
Doing this requires immense amounts of energy because you need to match its velocity to safely bump it.
Paging Steve Austin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvc-FodxV4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWJc72p2pE
It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years. In USSR, unlike modern times, all products were made to last, like refrigerators, motorcycles, TV sets or clothes, because there was not enough supply to replace them every year.
I was under the impression that the Soviets launched multiple identical missions to account for failure. In other words: rather than investing a huge effort into reducing the probability of failure of a singular mission, they invested in multiple missions in hopes that one would be successful. If that is the case, it sounds like the had much more confidence in the engineers who did the design work than their ability to do quality control while building.
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.
We are talking about space junk, a dead chunk of metal just orbiting Earth until its inevitable decay. Saying that it was "intact" and "built to last" is disingenuous.
Yeah Elons car will last forever in space, but probably won't start. Maybe it will.
But it wasn't built to orbit Earth for 53 years. It was built to land and survive for a period on the surface of Venus. I can think of few places more difficult to survive, so to say it wasn't built to last is disingenuous on your part.
> It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years.
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".
Weren't USSR products rather famously poorly built?
I saw still working after many years Soviet refrigerators, motorcycles and TV sets, so maybe they were built not that poorly after all. Of course there could be some survivorship bias, but generally modern (inexpensive) things seem to break earlier.
A lot of them were built like a tank. Their issue was lack of features, not lack of reliability.
I wonder if they just had a lot of repairs done to them, due to the unavailability of alternatives.
I think "simple but rugged" would be a more apt description. Less moving parts than the US equivalent, easier to maintain, and usually fairly sturdy. On the other hand, since cost was a constant concern, Soviet equipment was generally not designed with aesthetics in mind. So "ugly but reliable" might be another way to put it!
Depends; they might not have had the most expensive materials available, or the trickiest assembly quality, but were often designed so that the inevitable repairs could be made quickly in the field by minimally-trained personnel.
See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.