A little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/

by remarkEon • 7 years ago

145 36 7 years ago

arstechnica.com

car• 7 years ago

Movie about this event:

https://imdb.com/title/tt6537238

hef19898• 7 years ago

Great movie, IMHO. That's how I learned about that mission.

rimliu3• 7 years ago

For me there are too many cringe inducing moments. Acting is not stellar, some cold-war tropes are taken into extreme (one repeated point is that station needs to be solved, because USA is going to steal it with the Shuttle which happens to have cargo bay of just suitable dimensions). Acting is also so-so :( Visuals may be great, but otherwise I would not even call this movie good.

izacus• 7 years ago

This movie has some of the most amazing space shots I've seen (it's worth watching in 4K/HDR).

Example in blog post: https://ghostof82.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/salyut-7-2017/

exhilaration• 7 years ago

Thank you, it's free to watch on Amazon Prime.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0H7JK1304XXVGR09FD0GX...

russh• 7 years ago

Thank you, I'll be watching this tonight after my SO nods off.

dang• 7 years ago

Small thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068017

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744920

truth_be_told2• 7 years ago

Excellent read! Never knew about this. Thanks for posting.

When i read stuff like this, i wonder how much knowledge has been lost due to the Western Press' quest to undermine/badmouth/putdown/hide and label everything Soviet/Chinese/Communist as "bad" simply because they follow a different form of Ideology/Govt. Propaganda is insidious and destructive.

m0zg3• 7 years ago

You're right and there's quite a bit that the US public doesn't know about Soviet space programs, but I'd like to point out that this cuts both ways.

Growing up in the USSR in early 80's, well after the end of the moon landings, for some reason I thought Americans landed on the moon only once. It just wasn't talked about much, and it very much was a sore point for the Soviet space program even many years later.

Turns out US astronauts landed on the moon six times with the longest stay exceeding 3 days, and rode an electric buggy on there. I only found that out much later. NASA rubbed it in pretty good. :-)

varjag2• 7 years ago

Very much so. My uncle, a well educated and curious person had no idea Americans landed on the Moon. He learned that only around 1989 and was profoundly shocked.

There was astronomy course in Soviet high school curriculum in 1980s but no mention of the landings in the textbook. And the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia article on Apollo 11 was probably one of the tersest in the whole publication :)

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

The UK got a decent amount of info about both programmes in the media. Being of the West there was more, and more detail about Nasa missions, but we didn't seem to lack awareness of Russian activities. Especially as they got so many of the firsts.

I remember discussions comparing the Soyuz and Nasa lunar rovers as they were very different approaches. Same for the space stations, and obviously there was the Soyuz-Nasa mission where the two sides docked in orbit. How much we didn't get to know about I couldn't say!

caf• 7 years ago

It's not entirely uncommon for people in the West (at least, those born after the end of the Apollo program) to think there was only one landing, too. The Apollo 11 mission just looms so large in the history that it tends to shadow a lot of other things, even the rest of the Apollo program. '13 would be the next most well-known one, and that because of the Hollywood movie.

greglindahl• 7 years ago

I read about this in the Western press. Too bad you missed it at the time.

orbital-decay• 7 years ago

Little-known ≠ painted as bad. Language is a number one obstacle to the attention. (lack of PR being the second one in this particular case)

amaccuish• 7 years ago

Very true. We're finding this out with bacteriophages, popular in the SU, but virtually unheard of in the West, until it turns out they can solve a problem of our own making.

truth_be_told2• 7 years ago

This sounded interesting and so i read-up a little on "Phage Therapy". From what i could gather, it didn't take off in the West because of its narrow applicability and hence consequent economics weren't profitable. What is its current status today?

Do you have some detailed article, study, research etc. that you could point us to? Love to hear more about it.

dTal• 7 years ago

I think a more likely cause of the obscurity of Soviet technological achievment is the incredible, perverse level of secrecy surrounding everything they did, along with complete control of the media.

FullyFunctional• 7 years ago

Super interesting, but I don't understand the very last comment "We too have mustaches," referring to the controllers who caused the problem. Is he defending them, saying they were experienced? Seems there's more to be said.

benj1113• 7 years ago

I understood it to be a manliness thing. 'we too can do risky things too', that kind of thing. I'm not Russian though.

manuka• 7 years ago

It's from a soviet cartoon. There is a cat and a dog. THey live in a vilige and sometimes they fight. SO the meaning is: "You have mustaches and so do I! I'm no worse than you."

wruza• 7 years ago

I cannot find this phrase in the referenced book (googled pdf). Usually it means “we can think/act on our own, please don’t teach us”, but can depend on context, like “we have our reasons”. What it means in the article, I don’t understand. /native speaker

dmitriid• 7 years ago

It’s the Russian phrase “Мы сами с усами” usually used in the context of “we weren’t born yesterday” and “they tried to trick is/tell us what to do, but we’ve know how to do it ourselves”.

A little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014)

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