and now it looks like it might just survive anyways. but then according to the article there also seems to be a second (identical?) model. so maybe it's not that important, except for maybe material analysis what does 50 years of exposure to space do to the material.
Even the Space Shuttle wasn't necessarily a perfect fit for the job as-is. Hubble was serviced many times, but it was specifically designed for on-orbit capture and servicing by the Shuttle. Before they decommissioned the shuttle they actually had to install an extra piece of hardware to make it feasible to capture and de-orbit using future non-crewed spacecraft. And even then that's just to make sure it crashes in a safe place, not to bring it home intact.
There was also a mission to service a satellite that wasn't designed for the purpose, and they had a really hard time capturing it and very nearly had to give up after days' worth of failed attempts. It finally took simultaneous EVA by three astronauts to coordinate a successful capture (one to grab it by hand, two to get it onto a specialized adapter rig built just for that satellite so that the Canadarm could hold it), which is quite a thing considering that the Shuttle's only designed to allow two people on EVA at a time.
This craft is likely tumbling, which I presume would make it unacceptably dangerous for a crewed mission (and certainly rules out anyone just going out there and grabbing it with their hands), in addition to making successful capture that much more difficult.
If you know Elite, it has space stations where you dock by going inside, while matching station's rotation. That's only in one axis (and note the hangar goes through the axis of rotation, i.e. centre of mass). To add rotation around another axis would make the task impossible.
Wikipedia talks of "chaotic rotation" of astronomical objects, but only over long timescales due to gravitational interactions and thermal effects. On short timescales, its axis shouldn't change much at all, unless you bump into it and apply an off-axis torque.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession#Torque-free_or_torq...
https://rotations.berkeley.edu/a-tumbling-t-handle-in-space/
You can demonstrate it at home with your smartphone (or, more canonically, a tennis racket), and see for yourself that the tumbling happens much too quickly to be explained by whatever force the air is imparting.
https://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/dev/hillger/Shuttle-related...
When I worked "on Mars" there was a "flight spare" copy of a Viking instrument which was the predecessor to the one we were working on, and of course it was encased in Plexiglas as a museum piece, but it was truly a redundant copy, as NASA was into copying everything they sent into space, (what was the saying in Contact? "Why have only one, when you can buy two at twice the price?") so that if anything needed to be tweaked, or went wrong, they would have this copy on the ground that they could experiment with to their hearts' content.
SpaceX's Dragon 2 easily has enough cargo capacity to bring it down (~3 tons vs 0.5 ton), but there's still the question of intercepting, capturing, and securing it in Dragon's cargo bay. That would still cost something north of $100m to recover the lander.
The lander would easily fit into the unpressurized cargo bay (the "trunk"), that is typically used to launch various vacuum-bound payloads alongside pressurized cargo inside the capsule. However, for a return from orbit, the trunk cannot be used - it is not protected by a heat shield, and is ejected before re-entry.
You are correct that the return payload mass of a Dragon would technically allow it. But you'd need to somehow get the captured object _inside_ the capsule, which may be possible via the EVA front hatch for something smaller, but not 1m in diameter like the Venera lander.
Starship should be able to do it, since it is fully protected by heat shielding and returns in one piece, not ejecting any modules in orbit. But that's quite a while from being operational yet.
*(They're both at exactly the minimum inclination, 51°, achievable by a Soviet launch from Baikonur).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32 brought back the Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment, a bigass science probe the size of a small school bus.
There are still missions that are classified that could have done so as well.
It was something the shuttle was designed to do, with the 60-foot cargo bay requirement and the ability to bring back the mass it flew with coming specifically from the military.
That's very interesting. First time I heard about it. Thanks for the reference!
Tighten down some ratchet straps, wiggle it a bit and say, 'that'll hold it'
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760020214/downloads/19...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93neuter%E2%80%93re...
And Soviets were wondering why their satellite numbers were not growing...
National existential crisis? They'd probably take Dragon and figure out how to make it work.