Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later | Hacker News Reader

Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later

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125 pointsmbrubeck16 comments

Fascinating chap Sergei Korolev, denounced to the NKVD by colleagues over what sounds like office politics, tortured and sent to the Gulag for 10 years (including the awful Kolyma gold mining camps, which were some of the worst) rehabilitated and goes on to become arguably the greatest ever rocket designer - with a legacy that includes the ancestors of todays most succesful launchers used by the Russians and ESA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESAhistory/SEM7PZP11ZE_0.html

"Following the fall of the NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov, the new chief Lavrenti Beria chose to retry Korolev on reduced charges in 1939, but by that time Korolev was on his way from prison to a gulag camp in the far east of Siberia, where he spent several months in a gold mine in the Kolyma area before word reached him of his retrial. Towards the end of 1939 he was sent back to Moscow, but he had already sustained injuries and had lost most of his teeth due to the labor camp's brutal conditions"

And I thought my life was hard!

I can recommend Anne Applebaum's history in addition, of course, to Solzhenitsyn's works:

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-A-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400...

The offical LRO announcement from March: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/539-Mare-C...

  the spacecraft had tipped over as a result of its landing

I can only imagine the frustration of the engineers and scientists.

Yeah though not as much as that of the Mars Climate Orbiter team who's mission failed due to using imperial rather than metric units in a navigation program.

That failure was somewhat more subtle than that. Someone produced a data file with no information about what the numbers in the file meant. Someone else made an assumption about the meaning of the numbers.

Using a single system of measurement would certainly reduce the chance of negative consequences from such sloppiness, but the sloppiness was the problem, not the units used in the data file.

Agreed. Sorry I phrased my comment poorly.

Or the Genesis spacecraft, which had a sensor designed upside-down and smashed into the desert with the first samples of "solar wind". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_%28spacecraft%29#Misha...

In both cases the space agencies had "fly them cheap and often" philosophies, neither of which panned out.

> I can only imagine the frustration of the engineers and scientists.

I think you mean fear and sheer terror.

I'm not sure if failure of a space probe would have been quite as disastrous for team members as it probably would have been under Stalin. For example, after the first Soviet atomic test the rule for rewards was that anyone who would have been shot if it had failed received a car.

2012 - 1974 == 50 ?

well, not according to google https://www.google.com/search?q=2012-1974&pws=0

What ! Russia landed a probe on the moon during Armstrong's moonwalk!

Incredible. The moon, or Times Square? Who could tell.

Well, I guess they didn't quite land it.

Something tells me that NASA had a team devoted to watching Luna 15 as it orbited and watching out for funny business. Imagine the disaster that could have occurred if the Soviets had decided to use the probe to interfere with Apollo 11.

Of course, judging from the fates of later Luna missions, I doubt they could have pulled that off anyway.

The article seems a bit hastily written??? To say the least?

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