A little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014) | Hacker News Reader

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

arstechnica.com

145 pointsremarkEon36 comments

Movie about this event:

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

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.

On the shuttle, it looks like paranoia now, but let’s keep in mind the event occurred only 10 years after project Azorian was made public, which did exactly that.

The movie is very loosely based on the real events though. I think the worst part for me is how incompetent flight control on the ground is portrayed.

"USA is going to steal it with the Shuttle which happens to have cargo bay of just suitable dimensions"

Assuming it would fit, is that completely outside the realm of possibility? There aren't many good reasons for being able to return such a payload from space, capturing enemy satellites seems to me to be a major one.

If I were a shuttle commander, I'd find the idea of bringing a spacecraft inside the shuttle, where I couldn't verify the disarmed/ defueled state of the captured vehicles thrusters, deeply unpleasant.

Possibly, but if for example you suspect it of being a space based weapon (one of the Salyuts did actually have a gun attached), and it needs to be recovered due to threat of a nuclear war...

If I were a pilot I'd find the idea of people shooting at me 'unpleasant'. Its an accepted part of being a military pilot though.

Plus why are you worried about piddly little thrusters on the way down? You realise what you have to sit on top of to get up there... :P

There is a moment in a movie when they talk about it. Soyuz 7 is 6x15 meters and weights 20ton. Shuttle's cargo bay is 6x20 meters and has a capacity of 20 tons. Coincidence? They think not. And there is also a French guy in the Shuttle's crew who flew on Soyuz and is familiar with it.

However! One of the major plot points is how the station is rotating out of control, and that makes docking very, very difficult. In fact, none of the cosmonauts can do it in a simulator, so they have to go back to the main protagonist, who was decommissioned because he saw angels(?) during EVA.

Now imagine how challenging it would be to grab this rotating 20-ton object and put it into a cargo bay.

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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."

This phrase is older than cartoons, it can be found in works of Tolstoy.

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

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”.

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.

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. :-)

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 :)

Glad to see a confirmation I'm not imagining things. My memory of those times has faded considerably, but this is one of those things that shocked me so much that I remember it better than others.

Being born in the USSR, my memories are quite the opposite. Everyone new that Americans have landed on the moon.

What's more, I've never heard about 'moon landing hoax' until the end of 90s.

Yes, moon landing hoax was not a thing. Soviet govt never tried to deny it, just to downplay. And no, "everyone" didn't know that. Space and tech nerds would know that for sure, but outside that it would be spotty: many would have heard of it, some didn't. Certainly not something they'd bring up 12th of April on TV.

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!

I feel like at least in the US very little is known about the Venera missions (and Venus landings, there were several; 2 of the motherships then also approached a comet using Venus' gravity assist), and Buran, which has flown and landed only once, but fully autonomously in 1986 (something we haven't seen until Boeing X-37 24 years later).

The UK might have a more balanced view of events as a non-participant of the hotly contested space race. Hardly anyone in the US today knows about Gagarin (first man in space), not to mention Leonov (first spacewalk) or any of the other Soviet "firsts" besides Sputnik.

Which, to me, is understandable, the Moon landings were such dramatic overkill that they loom large in the public consciousness and overshadow all the other "firsts", even now after five decades, and rightly so.

> The UK might have a more balanced view of events as a non-participant of the hotly contested space race. Hardly anyone in the US today knows about Gagarin (first man in space), not to mention Leonov (first spacewalk) or any of the other Soviet "firsts".

Hardly anyone in the US today knows of comparable US astronauts either.

And in true British style, even fewer people in the UK know that the UK launched its own satellite on its own rocket!

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

Yes, all that and more is described in The Perfect Predator. ThePerfectPredator.com

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.

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