Lost Soviet Moon Lander May Have Been Found
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We've seen landers in recent years that crashed unintentionally in precise known locations. Does this mean that they were not lost?
It's a net loss to the fleet, the shareholders and the insurer. And of course wives and children.
But, it also depends if you want to know where it is. If you don't know where something is and don't want to, its not lost its discarded.
The authorities would say something about a new food program or a housing program but only as motivational goals. Main players always saw getting people less economically dependent on the state as a major threat.
Making people economically miserable was never a goal, but when building consumer economy would start showing promise the state would reestablish control (see for example Kosygin reforms).
Also see the 'lost years' of the Japanese economy, or the Chinese as they try to make the transition now.
It is terribly hard, but the USSR had their heads well in the sand at that point.
Aside from Ukraine and Belarus these "other satellites" had nothing resembling modern civilization at the beginning of the USSR times.
>Korolev was Ukrainian...
... who finished Bauman's University in Moscow. What does his ethnicity has to do with this? And why him and not Tsiolkovsky?
>they launched from Kazakhstan
And who designed and build Baikonur? Locals?
>most famous USSR planes, i.e. Antonov
"most famous" how? As far as Antonov goes it's mostly famous for An225 and An124.
An225 was a joint affort by at least 8 different entities. Only two of which where in Ukraine.
An124 had a similar story.
Should I even begin to state the obvious and say that not Antonov was not only manned by ukrainians?
Created in Novosibirsk, Russia (Russian SFSR). Later, the Bureau was relocated to Kyiv.
Oleg Antonov (aircraft designer) born in Troitsy, Moscow Governorate.
'Aided and funded' literally a fractional percent of their economies over five years.
> The same block is doing all it can to crash the Russian economy
I severely doubt about "all it can" part.
> Nevertheless, this union of a weak neighbor + 1b block is steadily loosing land.
Less than percent a year since 2023. This is a shockingly bad performance for a country to that considered themselves rival to China/Europe/US.
As to "+ 1b block" it's like that joke goes: "Russia v NATO war. Russian status: 1 mil casualties. NATO status: hasn't arrived yet."
Ukraine is far from being a "weaker neighbor" – it's proven to have more of a backbone than all of NATO.
And that "loosing land" part which seems so compelling: those are strategic withdrawals, forcing russians to haemorrhage men and equipment for Pyrrhic advances. Right now, those advances are being reversed: AFU is making significant gains around Zaporizhzhia, and massing troops near Kharkiv for possibly another major offensive.
So Soviet “heroes” were just a manforce and USSR was a manforce provider for lend lease, right?
Last I saw (this weekend), the union of Ukraine+friends, was losing land at about 50-75 metres a day. As well as bopping off 35,000 enemy combatants a month off the 2026 Christmas party list. And russia can't (or haven't) matched those losses with recruitment.
a single soldier, perhaps two, sent 20km into opposing territory (the advance, the territory gained) doesn't mean actually controlling the ground. Just ask Vlad.
No, in such situation it should be reversed.
And here we are in 2026. An inconsequential country like Ukraine only has to beat people up in the streets and close their borders for men and they can reduce the speed of the Russian bear to meters per day. Make sure all your nukes are working, cause clearly not much else is impressive in your military.
Not just that. A 1b block has to supply it with a huge constant supply of weapons and money, and intelligence, and also some manpower as well.
Russian army is a complete joke. Russia is a raketeer with nukes.
Must be true by how much “meat” Soviets and Chinese threw on their occupiers.
There was a failure of institutional reform - in fact the only institution that seemed to have reformed was corruption, which changed from one elite to another.
A lot of the current state propaganda tries really hard to spin the narrative "democratic reform never again, look at the 90s"!
Like if democracy is something easy, and plug and play... Or like there's some magical impediment that doesn't allow Russians to go from serfdom to free citizens, as if it's too much for them.
For how many centuries did France iterate to implement democracy? The US had a brutal civil war. Japan had to pick itself up after WW2 and change part of the culture. Germany had to be rebuilt.
Now we're witnessing another upcoming 90s in Russia - who knows if it will be worse since Russia folded into a regional power.
Such a missed opportunity right next to a growing European Union, and China.
We'll see how the European Union will "grow" in the next years...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Abkhazia_(1992%E2%80%93...
And many more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_involving_Russ...
And all that ignoring the puppeteering they’re trying to do in post Soviet republics.
All the propaganda I've heard tells me that they are prosperous rich countries now.../s
It's the narrative that Russia is a victim that invades other sovereign countries because of those countries, not because it's a choice, a continuous wrong choice by the way.
> Also how oligarchs came to power from the late 80s to the late 90s. Russia experienced unhinged free market reforms applied by incompetent politicians and opportunists who managed to sell out the accumulated wealth of the former RSFSR in just a few years.
How's that different or worse from the current regime? In fact, how many Russians died in the wars of the 80s and 90s, and how many Russians have died under this regime? And for what - to try to justify a failed military operation in a country where they're unwanted?
If you don't see neighboring countries suffering, it's because you either don't care or you refuse to look.
> e.g. Ukraine got all its debts forgiven and inherited specialized industries which were subsidized by Russia during soviet times.
Yeah, and Ukraine surrendered its nukes, and look at what's happening. And Russia got funding from USA and the perks of the USSR, with all the contributions from other countries of the union.
> They had 25 years to make something out of it and did basically nothing.
Ukraine did basically nothing?
- They have one of the strongest national identities in Europe; Russia doesn't even come close to them in this regard (remember the world witnessed the Wagner coup).
- They have one of the strongest and most competent armies in the world.
- They will join the European Union and NATO;
That's not bad for a country so young.
No, that's not the narrative. It's you assumption.
> How's that different or worse from the current regime?
The current regime made sure that the oligarchic caste doesn't meddle in politics and applied measures that critical resources, money and industries stay within russian borders and don't get off shored. The nineties were wild in that regard. Ukraine never really managed to get oligarchs under control. Look at Poroshenko, Kolomoyski, Mindich and the people around Ze and his party.
> how many Russians died in the wars of the 80s and 90
By supporting radical islamists, I mean "freedom fighters", in Afghanistan the US made sure to bleed out the soviets - good job. It backfired a few years down the road for them. The first Chechen war began when a bunch of radical islamists started to harass / massacre the russian population in Grozny. Bad decisions, a decimated and demoralized army didn't help to win a war which was also side tracked by arms deals to the chechens by some government officials and yet again oligarchs. It counts as a 'forgotten war' in Russia. Read up on what happened during the time when Chechnya was 'independent' and why it led to the Second Chechen war. Exercise for the reader ;)
> If you don't see neighboring countries suffering, it's because you either don't care or you refuse to look.
Sure man, but it's not Russias fault, is it?
> Yeah, and Ukraine surrendered its nukes, and look at what's happening.
It weren't 'their' nukes. Those were Russian nukes stationed there and the ukrainian state didn't have the means or the expertise to maintain the arsenal anyway.
> They have one of the strongest national identities in Europe
Do you mean the partying people in Kiev, the far right nationalists or the poor bastards getting dragged from the streets to fight in the mud for strips of land which were considered full of 'terrorists' from 2014 on. Or do you mean the ethnic russian population in the eastern part which was bombed constantly during the so called ATO? UA is a multiethnic country, it was held together by a constitution which guaranteed the different groups freedoms of language and culture. This constitution was gradually dismantled after the 2014 coup. Don't be fooled by nafo propaganda.
> remember the world witnessed the Wagner coup
Where's the connection between the mutiny of a war lord and national identity?
> They have one of the strongest and most competent armies in the world.
So does Russia. It comes with the fact that both armies are fighting a peer opponent. I don't think that any army right now, besides UA and RF, has this kind of expertise in modern warfare. (Abducting presidents from third world countries and bombing civilians in the middle east for 20 years has no particular training effect, I suppose.)
> They will join the European Union and NATO
I highly doubt it.
I'm constantly in awe by the power of western propaganda, the bigotry and lack of knowledge and respect from people who consider themselves and their culture as the pinnacle of human civilisation. Speaking as a half Russian, half Ukrainian living in central europe, btw.
EDIT: just skimmed through your comment history, fuck me for wasting my time replying to you. even after some really good explanations and hints by other, capable people, you haven't learned a thing during the last months. Don't bother replying.
Russia does not have the strongest army. Blinken summarized it pretty well: Russian Army is not the second strongest in the world, it is the second strongest in Ukraine.
About Ukrainian identity: this type of struggles unite people into a nation.
I do not know you personally, but your writing like a Russian shill.
> Speaking as a half Russian, half Ukrainian living in central europe, btw.
> speaking as someone who has an interest in history
Sure, you can say that their advice was often misguided, but as much as Yeltsin was shocked to see what a regular western supermarket looked like, Europeans and Americans were shocked to see the poverty of the USSR and couldn't even fully grasp that kind of life. You can entertain our western friends by describing how plastic bags with foreign logos like Sony or Adidas were treated like luxury items in the USSR in the 1980s and carefully folded and stored after every use, or how it was children's chore to cut up newspapers for toilet paper because that's the best many could access; or how it was common even for the best and brightest engineers to put in a full day of work, and then go and work on small plots of land in the evening to grow food for their families. It was an unbelievable shithole.
The difficulties that followed the dissolution of the USSR were of your own making, in no way limited to Russia alone. To survive, the entire former USSR and the Eastern Bloc had to pivot overnight to producing something globally useful instead of milling screws at artificial prices for the now-extinct Soviet arms industry. Most swallowed their pride, did what needed to be done, and ultimately saw a meteoric rise in living standards.
Russians turned out to be pussies who balked at the first difficulties and allowed the KGB dinosaurs who had led the USSR into disaster to crawl back and take the lead again. And by the look of it, Russia is heading toward a rerun of the late 1980s and early 1990s, bogged down in pointless wars as its economy rapidly deteriorates.
The narratives you've thrown around are a cheap cope, assigning blame for Russia's failure to modernize to external actors. All of us who lived in the USSR and its aftermath and have an IQ above room temperature know that it is unfiltered bullshit. What interests me is why you cling to it. What would happen if you let go of the victimhood narratives and actually faced the fact that Russians fucked up the ample opportunities they had?
It's the same with the current war against Ukraine, which was lost in the first three weeks, and now is just a meatgrinder with no prospect of success. Why is it so difficult to admit that you fucked up, and let it go? The narratives about coups, Kyiv neo-nazis etc are all obvious cope, and quite pathetic as such. Nobody's forcing you to hold these views in Germany, so why do you hold them?
Interesting where are you from and how old are you?
> The narratives about coups, Kyiv neo-nazis etc are all obvious cope, and quite pathetic as such.
The narratives about the benevolent West reaching out it's hand to help and framing every perspective which contradicts yours as "victimhood" (your post history) is also quite pathetic.
> Nobody's forcing you to hold these views in Germany, so why do you hold them?
Free will? My own opinion? Gut feeling? Literature? Culture? Personal history and experiences? Nobody is forcing you to spew russophobia, insults and outright NAFO propaganda but here you are.
> The narratives about the benevolent West reaching out it's hand to help and framing every perspective which contradicts yours as "victimhood" (your post history) is also quite pathetic.
Enough time has passed that people who were in top leadership positions at the time have retired, and their memoirs and internal documents have been published. None of these sources show any such intentions, quite the opposite, people like Swedish PM Carl Bildt were scared stiff of potential humanitarian disasters and millions of potential refugees and they did everything they could to stabilize the socio-economic conditions in the former USSR. I vividly remember the photo of the first western cargo ship with a grain shipment in the port of Leningrad, and the celebratory tone that accompanied the photo in the newspaper. Now it's suddenly all forgotten.
Instead of getting credit for their hard work, they are blamed for the fact that Russians fucked up the USSR to the point that it was on the verge of starvation.
> Free will? My own opinion? Gut feeling? Literature? Culture? Personal history and experiences?
Here you go, chapter 2.4: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396694016_The_Russi...
coups, nazis, us-meddling...
Lmaooo, who the fuck is this guy, I want to smoke what he smokes.
Was so afraid for his life that you can see more than 10 packed bags, family and multiple pets in the open.
https://youtu.be/DzG6V4PSfa0?si=7y6Wkakg3_hhOU8L
That’s all you need to know about credibility of his opus. It bears as much resemblance to reality as Tom Clancy’s novels.
if you're so inclined, you can just hop his citations. yes, sometimes he cites his own papers but you can follow the path until you'll find the original source. his sources are for the most part stenographs, reputable news articles, witness interviews and for the maidan massacre he analyzed all the footage from news reels and cctvs he and his colleagues could find.
and by the way: he's Ukrainian, lives in a nato country (Canada) and works at a legit university. was it you or libertine who asked me why I think what I think, 'despite' living in Germany - here's another specimen for you.
reality hits hard, boys.
edit: it was mopsi whos mind was blown. fitting name for a shiba inu;)
No, it's a narrative propagandized and rooted, and your replies just show that.
> The current regime made sure that the oligarchic caste doesn't meddle in politics
The current regime is an oligarchy. No one claims Ukraine was perfect, or didn't have corruption. But their people clearly wanted to change that and be part of the EU.
That's the beauty of democracy, you're not stuck with one guy.
> Exercise for the reader ;)
The true question is why are you avoiding talking about the much larger losses in Ukraine? The only comparison are loses from WW2.
How can you even complain about the rest with an abhorrent amount of casualties Russia is suffering, and causing, and again, for what? I mean, Westerners are complaining about importing labor due to the lack of opportunities... and Russia is importing Indian labor because they're losing their young men in a pointless war with a country that was at peace and posed no threat... All because of bad intel and a miscalculation that should have easily ended in a resignation in any other country.
But somehow, you put the accountability on everyone else. The war could have been stopped on the same day.
> Sure man, but it's not Russias fault, is it?
Isn't? What about Moldova? Georgia? Ukraine? The constant meddling in politics, threats of economic and military action?
> Do you mean the partying people in Kiev
No, I mean the people who in the 90's chose to be an independent state, and refused to welcome occupiers. Remember that in the occupied territories, the Russian regime had to organize demonstrations of support for the invasion? That's how absurd this all is.
> Where's the connection between the mutiny of a war lord and national identity?
Well, the owner of a state-sponsored PMC was marching towards Moscow, and some people were cheering for him, and the rest? Silent, no one seemed to care that much for the coup, everyone was waiting on the sidelines. Does that look like engaged people with their national identity? Where were the protests? The revolt for what was happening?
Ukrainians, even during the war shown their protests against the government.
> Abducting presidents from third world countries and bombing civilians in the middle east for 20 years has no particular training effect, I suppose.
Wait but wasn't Ukraine considered a third-world country, where Russia tried to abduct its president and failed? Are you talking about Russia bombing civilians in Syria?
> I'm constantly in awe by the power of western propaganda, the bigotry and lack of knowledge and respect from people who consider themselves and their culture as the pinnacle of human civilisation.
The "west" is too big and too different for a single propaganda thread - that's just an old soviet thought pattern, that the USA controls everyone. And again, here comes the "russophobia" narrative.
Let that sink in into the "russophobia": No one in Western countries cared about NATO until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 (so after Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine in 2014), and the vast majority didn't even know what the point of it was. Russia was supplying energy to German industry, with prospects of expansion. And China, with the Belt & Road initiative linking China to Europe. These are just a few things that were going on before the biggest strategic blunder in modern Europe - and you refuse to see this. In fact, you choose to think it was the other way around lol
Nonsense. That might be the case initially for ICBMs stationed there, but it would be trivial for them to crack tactical nukes and have a bootleg force de frappe. The only reason they fave up nukes is because they’re were pressured by both Russia AND the West. Ignoring the whole economy impact, if anyone could predict full scale Russian invasion.
The Fall dropped Russian life expectancy by six years for males and three years for females.
It was a temporary blip. The most recent life expectancy numbers, published last month by the CDC, show that the life expectancy in the US rebounded, and it is at a historical all time high, for both sexes:
2019 (before Covid): males - 76.3, females - 81.4 ([1], page 5)
2021 (after 2 years of decreases): males - 73.5, females - 79.3 ([2], page 3)
2022 (1st year of rebound): males - 74.8, females - 80.2 [3]
2024 (3rd year of rebound): males - 76.5, females - 81.4 [4]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr71/nvsr71-01.pdf
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr72/nvsr72-12.pdf
In the 1960s, some American economists were starting to argue & beleive that "communism" was just a better economic model. Then it all came to a crashing halt.
Once you get past the basics of industrialising serfs, ie they started from a sadly much lower starting point than most Western economies of the time, and account for the compound growth the West had gone through in the 18th & 19th centuries, and then are finally able to look past their Potemkin villages of the 20th century, they were left with no way to proceed. No market signals, no major improvements in consumption. Yes, they had a large (miltary focused) industrial sector, and a large primary economy (as they do now), but their bureaucracy, nepotism & corruption were always going to catch up with them.
Without economic growth, as they got through the 'easy' phases of industrialisation, the periphery was always going to be a problem, then the core.
I'm not sure the "fully dependent on China" slight is needed though, as it could apply to a good chunk of the West at this point. Still, as Europe has learnt with reliance on Russia, these things can be at least factored in.
As to why why Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are sticking together, it is because they they don't want to hang separately.
As to why the West has lost its proxy war against a petty regional player, that is something for the history books.
Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Only 'special' weapon russia has is a disregard to human life westerners can't even comprehend for some reason. They call it 'winter' or some other silly thing. All their 'achievements' can be traced to inhumane treatment of enslaved peoples. Whatever achievement you think russia had - you just just lift the top soil, no need to dig deep, to be absolutely disgusted by what it was built on.
Ukraine is not weaker, it is smaller. Big difference. It was a powerhouse of the USSR, producing majority of talent. Be it in Ukraine or deported to Siberia. Russia is, and always was, a parasite on other peoples.
South Korea famously did this very well, turning from a war-torn former dominion of Japan into an industrial and cultural powerhouse.
The Soviets went all-in on building a military-industrial complex without growing their civilian economy, basically eating all the gains their growing population provided. Very charitably, you could say they went all-in, expecting to win the conflict with the West and get their economies "for free", but badly miscalculated their chances.
In the Soviet union only half the population was Russian. 15% of the Soviets where Ukrainian for example
Their space achievements are an impressive proof of how far one can go in faking progress at scale by massive technology theft, enslavement, and violence. You can really achieve a lot this way! Rockets and nuclear devices have been designed by captured Nazi scientists and imprisoned engineers (later designs by home-grown engineers have been largely based on those designs). Key technologies were not invented but stolen, copied, and reverse-engineered. Factories designed and built by US design bureaus (before WW2). Cheap labour provided by enslaved peasants who didn't even have the freedom to move to a big city. Borders closed to prevent brain outflow. And lots lots of violence against their own people just for the sake of "looking like a global power".
And since it was always fake, no major technology went out of the USSR and became widespread globally such as computers, networks, internet, software stacks, protocols, etc. Nothing major and widely useful came out of the USSR or post-USSR Russia.
So what you see with Russia happening now, is just the bubble popping. Long due.
It's a ridiculous country in some ways but given what you've said ironic it's one of the few that is genuinely self-sufficient in many regards.
Robots on other planets is a rough process. Most planets, lacking atmosphere, have dust that gets EVERYWHERE, and its really bad for mechanical, electrical operations. The moon has a static charge that causes the regolith powder to seep into the smallest cracks. Humanoid robots will not last long, and all other forms are just a single failure from uselessness. Until they can either self-repair, or repair others (meaning n+1 minimum robots sent), it will not be useful for long exploration. And, honestly, id be pretty worried to find robots that could self-repair or repair others. Thats just a small step away from self-replication, and that leads down other scary paths.
By now, a lot of machinery has operated on Luna and Mars. That seems to be a solvable problem.
Venus, though... That's too hot. Last lander was in 1982 (USSR) and lasted about an hour and a half before overheating.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/science/luna-9-moon-lande...
There's google maps for the moon (https://www.google.com/maps/space/moon) but I'm not sure what resolution that is.
Could be from atmospheric fly-overs.
There are a few high resolution satellites but there frame is very small and not suited for complete coverage. If they are geostationary they cant look anywhere, or they have to look at an angle giving oblique photos. If they are moving then they are only over the part of the earth once per several days (weeks/months?)
So while these images of the landers are from a satellite orbiting the moon, the satellite is orbiting with an eccentric polar orbit, and the images it takes may be perfect for it's mission but might not be good enough to identify small 1960's landers.
Pleiades Neo advertises 30cm resolution with possibility for twice a day visits for a location. They are operating on sun-synchronous orbits with afaik global coverage. They also advertise that they can capture up to 2 million km² daily. So Earth imaging satellites are pretty good these days.
That being said, it is true that Google Maps etc heavily rely on aerial imagery instead of satellites.
Airbus does have some sample images available on their website if you want to see what actual satellite imagery looks like: https://space-solutions.airbus.com/resources/satellite-image...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effec...
Basically the gravitational field of the Moon is "lumpy", resulting in deceleration of low orbiting bodies as they are pulled around in orbit, until they crash into the surface.
There might still be dead probes from the 1960s/1970s orbiting Mars, but there are no inactive spacecraft orbiting around the Moon. There are now some specific orbits known that you can place a spacecraft in to reduce the effects but I don't think even that works to 100% percent efficiency & thing will still go down quite quickly of you loose control and can't do course corrections.
Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong