Apollo-Soyuz Mission: When the Space Race Ended (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Apollo-Soyuz Mission: When the Space Race Ended (2020)

discovermagazine.com

31 pointsdiodorus33 comments

That handshake starts the opening sequence in the (otherwise awful) movie "Valerian": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6oTziHKM_c

It's watchable, but yes, not great.

...that movie is not that awful! It definitely had entertainment value for me.

> 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.

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.

Same director.

Apparently Valerian is based on a French comic and it doesn't diverge too far from it. Hence the quirkiness.

I was hoping it would be a decent spiritual sequel to The Fifth Element... I was severely disappointed :(

Did someone just finish season 2 of For All Mankind?

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 ...

The submitter, maybe. But the article was written before season two aired.

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.

I did! Just last night. Was excited to see this post!

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...

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.

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.

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.

No, engines weren't ablatively cooled.

N1 had engines with quite high Isp - the problem for them, NK-15 engines, was that they were single use engines and couldn't be tested beforehand on a stand. They, however, were state of the art, high pressure and regenerative cooling, with oxygen rich staged combustion. However, Nikolai Kuznetsov had relatively little experience with rocket engines, so NK-15 is generally regarded as a failure, and NK-33 didn't have a chance to fly on N1 before the project was closed.

This framing makes it sound a little like the space race ended in a tie.

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.

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.

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.

My guess Korolev would perhaps see earlier than others (he died January 1966) that the current trajectory - 95 tons payload of N1 with 30 engines on the first stage - is too risky, and would turn things significantly.

For example, coming back to 75 tons N1 and dealing with more dockings on orbit. That would at least reduce number of engines on the first stage; maybe not a very good idea though.

Or coming back to another idea, having N2 (which is N1 without first stage) a priority and fly to the Moon with ideas his team had before (in 50-s? there was a plan with multiple dockings and refuelings, which would use more modest rockets, but N2 with ~25 tons of payload would certainly help). N2 was even in a better tested state - it was the first stage of N1 which was the most problematic.

Or making even better with Chelomei (Korolev approved project Zond, which was a kind of joined project between two design bureaus) and use Proton for multi-launch schemas. Plenty of opportunities.

If Korolev would be lucky enough to avoid Komarov's death, Russians would have some spare time - in addition to momentum - to move things forward.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 ...).

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).

I wonder if "the space race" would still be called the same today if soviets got to the moon first.

If you're wondering that, you might enjoy "For All Mankind" mentioned in other threads here as likely inspiration for this post.

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.

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.

What is this a reference to?

The TV show "For All Mankind"

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