Did you notice that he “forgot” to mention Mariner 2 in his timeline? It will be against his narrative. So either he did not research , or he did but is doing propaganda.
@@DeepTitanicit doesn't bode well for your mental health constantly whining about 'evil' Americans and Westerners. Make your own content instead of constantly crying in the replies
Some notes: * the R-7 wasn't a V-2 derivative. Earlier rockets like R-1 and R-2 were, but R-7 was a clean sheet design, much larger than a V-2 and using very different engines and propellant * Object D was not Sputnik 1, it was Sputnik 3. It wasn't ready when the rocket was so Sputnik 1 was constructed as a simpler stand in. * At 22:30 you show an image of a Proton but its not carrying a Mars probe, its carrying a prototype manned lunar flyby craft (confusingly also called "Zond")
@@fffUUUUUUMy favorite is: What weighs nine tonnes, burns two liters of fuel per minutes, and cuts an apple into thirds? Soviet machine for cutting apples into 4ths
@@fredmdbud are you talking background or then-current role? As I expressed, his background (as in, schooling and career) were in artillery. His rank was a Marshal. Ofc he (and a few levels of stuff under him) were leadership/operational roles.
Nedelin, Chief Marshal of Artillery, under whose jurisdiction fell the budding Soviet missile program, flew in to address the delays with the ill-fated rocket seemingly with no end in sight. It wasn't a matter of lack of people or materiel or funds - there were a lot of kinks with the new rocket, and fixing one uncovered yet another & another. Nedelin at that point decided not to berate anyone or have meetings - he let everyone do their job, however, requesting a chair be placed for him by the launch pad, in everyone's sight, where he calmly planted himself, telegraphing a sense of urgency: the Chief Marshal wasn't leaving till the job was done, and obviously the pad monkeys knew neither were they. Office politics being what they are, there was soon a small constellation of chairs of Nedelin's staffers sitting next to their Marshal. That added a fair bit of tension for the already fatigued and dismayed pad crew. A member of the launch control team read the next step in his procedure: ensure the manual stage igniter lever was in the initial position. It wasn't - it was at the other end. The lever's positions between initial and final activated backup manual ignitions in turn of the missile's respective stages. The guy returned the lever to its prescribed position as per the letter of his instructions. As it was being reversed to its prescribed initial position, the lever activated the upper stage (being fueled) firing into the top of the already fully fueled first stage within the whole missile's stationery stack being firmly held together by own weight and launchpad hardware. The rest is history. The young Brezhnev (years before his ascend to General Secretary of USSR) was assigned to lead the investigation. His report concluded that no disciplinary action was in order, as the event itself was lesson & punishment enough for all involved who hadn't perished.
To take a line from Yzma’s book, “Why do we even have that lever?” Like, in what universe would manually lighting the second stage of an ICBM make any sense, let alone be possible?
@@mrb692 both Saturn-V and N-1, owing to the urgency of the manned Moon race, had all-up tests. As in, launching the entire multi-stage stack. If the first stage malfunctions as it did on the N-1, it effectively denies any testing of the latter stages - a considerable waste. Some of the failure modes of the first stage may, nonetheless, allow an opportunity to fire the 2nd stage and thus fly it even if below its intended altitude. That can be useful. Another use is if Stage 1 works normally but the automatic ignition of Stage 2 fails. Another is a payload "escape system" having an upper stage take military payload away from the launch pad if there's a problem with the launch. Clearly this is something for a missile in development or initial stage of deployment - but there can be uses.
mrb692 Said " To take a line from Yzma’s book, “Why do we even have that lever?” Like, in what universe would manually lighting the second stage of an ICBM make any sense, let alone be possible? " Well, in case there was some sort of failure and you needed to place a person wearing an oxygen mask in the 2nd stage to manually fire the engines. See also the ending of Dr Strangelove. . .
Actually I prefer he focuses on his usual historic company and business topics. There are already many YT channels with the historic and current-day details of spaceflight.
Not like this, there isn't. He discusses the topic from an unusual third perspective with little bias. Where else is the "race to Mars" even mentioned? And yet Russia/USSR was always competitive to the point of belligerence. @@richardbloemenkamp8532
It is important to note that Martian winds / storms do not matter in any sense of force. The air pressure is so low that no matter the wind speed, it would not exert any significant force on a lander or a rover. It only matters for visibility and solar energy generation, since martian storms are usually very dusty.
This video is very, very good -- but even with all the work that went into it, it is still not easy for one person to do justice to such a complicated subject. Decision making in the USSR was done in great secrecy, among the big bosses of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and it is seldom known why a particular course of action was or was not taken, or why a particular person was promoted. Even when some information is available, it may not always be translated from Russian, or may only be published in some obscure conference proceedings for professional historians. In particular, even though there are many fantastic stories told about this, it is not really known why exactly Korolev was promoted from prison to the leadership of the space program. But we do know that Stalin had very little to do with this. Korolev was picked personally by Lev Mikhalovich Gaidukov, on authority of Dmitry Ustinov, the young People's Commissar of Armaments of the USSR. This did not start as a well thought out strategic plan. Rather, Gaidukov noticed how well a group of Soviet engineers led by Boris Chertok were working in occupied Germany on reconstituting the Nazi V2 program. This large work on V2 was more or less a grassroots project, not specifically authorized by the higher authority, beyond the general mandate to recover from Germany all equipment that could be useful. The progress that the engineers were making in Germany greatly impressed Gaidukov, who was doing an on-site inspection. The report went to Ustinov, who at that time had an enormous clout due to his very successful leadership during the war, and who then authorized a large scale missile program. It started with assimilation of German missile research and technology. Ustinov placed Gaidukov in charge of the overall project. Gaidukov then found and reassigned several recent prisoners such as Korolev and Glushko to lead different parts of project, based on their past work. Then Korolev met Ustinov and was somehow given the authority to serve as the chief technical coordinator of this large and diverse organization. The details of that are rather obscure. Regarding the Sputnik. It was launched not because Korolev could on a whim choose peaceful space exploration, but because there was an unintentional pause in the weapons program. Nuclear warheads burned up on reentry during the previous test launch. While the warheads were being reworked, there was nothing else to launch on the next missile, already being prepared for the test. Thus Sputnik was reluctantly announced as the Soviet contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Many countries had high profile experiments as a part of this loose international collaboration, and Sputnik was one of such projects. Only after the Sputnik caused an international sensation, Soviet leadership took notice, and authorized a larger scale space program which was not 100% weapons related.
Korolev was very well known to top echelons of power (incl to Beriya personally & firsthand) even as he was in prison. Nothing is what it seems in Russia / USSR and those so-called "sharashkas" weren't anything like ordinary prisons. By war time KGB knew full well better than 70% of those prisoners didn't deserve to be there - many being victims of coworkers' jealousy or desire to remove a competitor for a promotion or even apartment. (The same took place in Iraq btw, with Iraqis telling on each other to the US forces). KGB of the late-1930s provided an eager power gradient for those unscrupulous folks to leverage, since KGB was after fear and what better way to instill fear than randomly, irrationally, hastily, and unfairly, and with nary a recourse for the wrongfully accused. But the batsh*t craziness of all this was becoming obvious to even the staunchest disciplinarians within the upper echelons of power, and while outright walking back the entire thing, admitting systenic wrongdoing, and rehabilitating everyone took Khrustchev's b*lls years later, Russians had a classically Russian interim solution: if nothing could be done to the situation with Stalin still in power, KGB & everyone else would just pay it lip service. War further necessitated urgently saving, consolidating, and empowering the engineering cadre, and thense those "sharashkas" were born. Closest English translation is skunkworks (in Kelly Johnson sense). A semi-undercover, sort-of-independent crack engineering team doing leading work sort of off to the side of the bona fide industrial process. Many of those were formed with not just KGB's approval but facilitation. They'd searched the prisoner lists and dossiers for any engineers & while they didn't have the authority to free them all, they'd created these multiple skunkworks in minimal-security type conditions. Sputnik - the military payload wasn't going to orbit and it wasn't a mere matter of putting something else at the top & voila, it orbits. By then, a massive effort was already in a full swing for the manned program, with communication ships and radar & comms ground stations being built. Sputnik II and on with mammals onboard were vital, deliberate stepping stones to chip away huge swaths of uncertainty of what's involved in safely orbiting a human if that were at all possible. Sputnik was just the tip of the iceberg visible to the West of the massive Soviet space momentum already built up. "Space" as in, other than the ICBM use that don't go in orbit.
... so while the extent to which Sputnik resonated with the Western public was, admittedly, a pleasant surprise to the Soviets (they were expecting the Western press to give minimal coverage, maybe same level as Luna-25 is being covered as I type this), they were going full steam ahead with the massive, multi-faceted program - not looking back at what the rest of the world was doing but defining how this brand new field of endeavor ought to be pursued. It fit right in with other Soviet pursuits, incl - mass literacy & free path to higher leraning - public health - electrification - industrialization. Space was like a red cherry on the very top, and even the way those space things looked was becoming the budding Soviet superpower. USSR would've been all-in even if the West pretended Sputnic wasn't there. But yeah, they were happy the West noticed.
@@doodlebug1820 It's an autobiographical novel, but a novel nonetheless - by someone who was no big fan of Stalin, obviously. Without confirmed numbers of folks who'd gone from sharashka's back to gulags, "failure or displeasure meant being sent to a gulag" is conjecture - outside of the obvious fact that at war time (of any nation) if one's failure exceeded a certain level of gravity and lives were lost, there'd be consequences to match. Not saying that never happened - but the devil's in the details. On the flip side, the actual physical locations of sharashkas aren't set up for prison type security, other than what'd be considered minimal security by the standards of the time and place at wartime.
All those other pursuits were far more important @@AlexKarasev. If space exploration was a prestige project, then they should have chosen a single target for a decisive "win." The whole thing is an example of what happens when you politicize engineering. The current folly of re-usability and controlled landing of launch vehicles is another example, in those cases with partially governmental and partially corporate politics driving them.
@@taxirob2248 >"If space exploration was a prestige project, then they should have chosen a single target for a decisive "win."" This was the strategy Kennedy had adopted with manned Moon landings - he asked what would be sufficiently spectacular to make up for Sputnik etc, and sufficiently far off to overtake the Soviets, and the answer was the manned Moon landing. And they sold that singular goal to the US public as "the space race". However that strategy isn't necessarily right for when you're in a genuine strategic leadership position, deliberately developing a broad field, which is what the Soviets had been doing - not trying to score temporary "wins". The Soviets weren't just going to the Moon (landers, 2 rovers, robotic sample return missions) and Mars - they also went to Venus (incl landing the only nation to have done so to this day ua-cam.com/video/UEmlOjKmL68/v-deo.html ) >"The whole thing is an example of what happens when you politicize engineering." And science. 100% agree. Both are long-term fields whereas politics inherently is short-term.
Nedelin was the "cause" of the disaster , the whole debacle is described in a book based from old sovjet material. Brezhnev's comment on Nedleins behaviour causing the explosion is telling.
This is a fantastic video. All things Soviet-history interests me. Thank you for doing an incredible amount of research and making such an enjoyable video!!
If I recall one Soviet Satellite was sent on a worldwide tour. And while it was in the United States, the CIA was able to get a chance to get their hands on it. And so during one night they had the truck driver deliver the satellite to another location and they then meticulously took it apart and studied every single component it had, but then they ran into problems as to putting it back together turned into a race against time as some of the parts wouldn’t go back together or they had to replace some of the components with US Made equivalents, and they also installed American Made screws. And when the Satellite made it back to the Soviet Union, the engineers had discovered that it had been tampered with when some of their tools didn’t work on some of the screws.
So you can't recall what video you saw it in but you can confirm it. And where do you get your expertise to be the end authority to confirm that story? It's a Great fairy tail. But don't you think we have some extra Soviets screws lying around if we were able to intercept this satellite 📡?? But people just can't let it be that the US whip them in the total race for space 🚀. Yeah like my emojis.
Loved the longer and very detailed video. Definitely one of your best ones to date and I’ve seen the majority. Keep it up, you are a great history buff and my small circle of friends loves your content
If you think going to the moon with the American rocket wasn't risky as hell you don't know what you're talking about. Its a miracle nobody died (except for the first Apollo crew that burned alive in their module, but that was on the ground) Then came the Space shuttle, an extremely unsafe vehicle. With two crews lost.
Wonderfully done! To even mention the "Race to Mars" is all but unique, and yet wasn't it the race that mattered most? As grande as the Lunar landings were, I can still recall the unspeakable elation that I had when the Viking landers set down on the plains of Mars.
This is the one that finally made me sign up to your Patreon, but I should have done it long ago. Your takes on geopolitics, chips, and space are always fascinating and funny. Looking forward to more.
They won the race to Venus. The lack of landers to that planet irks me. Yeah it's a worse than hell place but if Soviet 70s tech could at least do it, we should be able to do something decent now.
Your review of modern Korean political economy won you a subscription. This review wins you a like. When you got to the part about the substitution of the gold transiators for aluminum, you had me wanting to volunteer to round up the culprits for 10 years hard labor in Siberia.
2:16 The Soviets knew perfectly well what kind of hubbub Sputnik would cause. It’s why they did it. The USA had announced an intention to put an artificial satellite into orbit to study space as part of the International Geophysical Year. That announcement is what spurred the Soviets to develop Sputnik. They wanted to beat the US to space. They figured out that they couldn’t make the planned research satellite with all of its instruments ready in time to beat the USA, which is why Sputnik was so simple.
Intentionally sacrificing specifically weak built walls is an old but life-saving standard "trick" in chemistry when dealing with potentionally unintentional explosions. Ask people from fluorine or explosives labs.
I'm not really sure I agree about the failures having anything to do with bad luck.. It seems to me that while the design/engineering might have been sound (debatable), the hardware/components were inconsistent and unreliable, the political leadership only hindered success with the extreme pressure they applied due to unrealistic goals and timelines, and it seems as if the Soviets were always making these extreme gambles that rarely paid off instead of carrying out tasks with a methodical, ordered approach. For example, it just seems like absolute madness to place your brand new, extremely expensive space probe, that you've dedicated so much time and effort into, onto a brand new rocket that has never been tested/launched before. The pressures that cause this type of thing to happen are indicative of how broken the system is. It just isn't a logical, reasonable thing to do and there should be someone in the chain of leadership with the authority and influence to prevent such a silly thing from taking place.
Agree. Soviets methods were just proven to not be as good. This is hardly debatable with hindsight. Americans ended up accomplishing more, much more safely and less wasteful than the soviets did. The soviets had their accomplishments for sure and that shouldn't be taken away from them but the cost was greater.
Isn't it much better if you can slow it down and smooth it out for everything to work properly... The thing is, the Soviet leadership had their ideas, with propaganda victories in mind, all the while oblivious to what it would take to send a probe successfully to another planet. They probably said something like "C'mon comrades, just do it! It's not rocket science!" They pressed the engineers to crawl out of their skin to deliver, but the rest of the industry didn't follow. Comrade Ivanov from 79th factory still would deliver a part that was manufactured from what was available because "A mne pohui" and then that part would fail at the most critical point of operation.
1:58 from my knowledge, Sputnik is not Object D, but rather a stopgap satellite to make the USSR the first nation to launch a satellite in the International Geophysical Year, since object D was too complicated. Eventually Object D was launched as Sputnik 3. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The Mars program was over-ambitious relative to the capabilities the Soviets (or the US) had at it's time. Especially regarding the level of automation required to do a successful landing-you can't remote control the probes real time. The growing Soviet lag in electronics took it's toll here. The US Mars program (Mariners and Vikings) was more realistic with it's goals and they landed with the Vikings when they were ready (after the Soviets closed the Mars program). The Soviets tried the Phobos program but it required integration with western systems (the Soviet original electronics industry was near death at this stage) so it failed. You can see that all the Soviet missions had control or communication failures.
Actually, on both accounts it is just an Internet meme that sounds great. The more recent story that everybody repeats, goes as "precious metals were stolen from manufacturing of rocket engines, causing massive failure". In reality exactly the opposite has happened -- some dumbass used lower temperature precious metal based solder instead of high temperature manganese based solder. This was not caught, and a bunch of rocket engines were brazed with inappropriate material. Ruined. It is bad, and is an embarrassment for Russian space industry. Of course, since it is about Russia, it is a lot easier to make a viral story about precious metals that were supposedly stolen, rather than to explain that correct solder must be used for a particular purpose, no matter whether it is more expensive or less expensive! With the "aluminum transistors" the story is also a complete fairy-tale. It comes from a Russian planetologist who heard it from someone. Either he misremembered the story, or did not understand it in the first place. But after his account was published in a book, now everybody repeats it as coming from an authoritative source. In reality the leads of 2T312 transistors were never made from either gold or aluminum, but from a special NK29 alloy, similar to Kovar, to provide compatibility with glass insulation between the leads and the transistor case. The leads were gold-plated to increase corrosion resistance. Silicon crystal had aluminum metallization and required bonding specifically with aluminum bonding wire. *If* gold wire had been used, this would have caused a chemical reaction with a formation of gold-aluminum intermetallic compound -- an effect which plagued early US chips and was known as "Purple plague". Maybe that is what really happened, but it is impossible to know.
@@cogoid Perhaps the replacement with aluminium part is indeed wrong, but it doesn't sound implausible (to my admittedly lay ears) that perhaps the gold plating for the leads was omitted by means of theft somewhere along the pipeline. The leads supplied may well have been the NK29 alloy, if mistaken for aluminium, but nonetheless still corroded without the gold.
@@fistsofham8474 The story comes from the book "Russian Planetary Exploration History, Development, Legacy and Prospects" by Brian Harvey, where it is attributed to the Soviet astronomer Mikhail Yakovlevitch Marov, remembering about it almost 50 years after the events. I think all we can be reasonably certain of is that there was a reliability problem with the transistors. If the Soviets were following American technology, then the most likely cause would have been using easier to use gold bonding wire instead of more difficult to use aluminum bonding wire. In the USA this has also caused widespread equipment failures, until Tom Longo and B. Selikson published an article explaining that gold wire was not compatible with aluminum metallization, and one had to use aluminum wire. There is a short discussion of this in the "History of Semiconductor Engineering" by Bo Lojec.
I absolutely love this content Its so good I really hope this would get more views I love videos about space race And rare asian scandals and details You have such an obvious name but Probably one of the most unique content on this platform
I loved your episode about the Venus missions, so I was excited to see this one! Thank you for another excellent video. God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)
Great video as always. One minor correction "Object D" refers to Sputnik 3 not the original Sputnik a.k.a. Sputnik 1. Object D was not ready in time so they decided to proceed with a simpler satellite first.
The Soviet space program always reminds me of what my dad said once many years ago. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, out in the yard was my 1990 Lada 2104 and my fathers Belarus 350 tractor from 1983. He sat silent for a while and just said: "Well.. how the hell did the russians get to the moon?"
I wonder if anyone has tried to calculate the total cost of all these missions and infrastructure, which really seem to be propaganda first and science second.
Salutations to you, Mr. Asiano'! I appreciate your work, on YouselessTube, immensely, so thank you! Your humour is not lost on me either, and yes, the deer... but where's the headlights? Something about the "space race" & the Soviets that is often not realised, is that they didn't do so well due to their poor ideological choice of Germanium semis', instead of Silicon! Germanium, lower "barrier" voltage sure, but leaks current notoriously by comparison! On earth, no biggy... but for spacecraft, (both senses of the word) that sure sucks on power sources! Again thanks, & keep it up, if you dare! Mogfets?
Well, the Soviets were the first to transmit photos, sound and videos from Venus, including in color, and that was much more difficult than doing it from Mars.
@@olasek7972 - - You really have no idea what you are writing about. Do your homework about what's happening at the surface of Venus. Type in UA-cam "How the Soviets Landed on Venus", by Asianometry.
IMO sending probes to Venus played to the Soviet's strengths much more than sending probes to Mars did. Venus was easier to get to, but once there any probe had to be extremely rugged to survive even a short period of time. Soviet technology tends to be somewhat crude compared to western technology, but they were great at making things that are simple but extremely durable.
This information is so very important, especially now. So many amazing stories probably exist buried in the minds of the Russian and ex-Soviet citizenry.
Amazing, yeah. Like the story of Serhiy Korolyov who's been repressed and put in GULAG camp, where red komissar broken his fingers and lower jaw during the interrogation. Or how GULAG system is responsible for the murdering of about 40 000 000 of USSR citizens. "Amazing" stories, мать його в йоб!
The public toll of Soviet space program: there's no toilet paper in USSR until 1969. So all those soviet heroes, incl. Gagarin, wiped up themselves with crumpled Pravda newspaper. No generally available color television sets nor freely available cars for average Ivan.
@@fffUUUUUUtop 5% of folks in the USSR were only enough for space, sciences, arts, sports, military gear. As for the avwrage folks, socialism indeed lacked capitalism's carrot & stick to make them work their tails of. So yeah, soviet consumer goods were meh & in a short supply - but it wasn't because of their space program. And since you've brought up bodily functions, it was Alan Shepherd who went up swimming in his own urine whereas Gagarin's far superior scaphander anticipated such a need & Yuri indeed used the feature, relieving himself before boarding, onto the bus's wheel.
@@AlexKarasevщо ти совкові байки тут травиш, лапоть? Думаєш я вестерн?😂 All the soviets economy was targeted towards one thing - military build up. And space program was the part of it. Since the economy wasn't a free market - its resources were planned and redirected from the Gosplan in Moscow. Hence, no family cars, home AC, color TVs, toilet paper for ivans. 'Cause Communist Party needs "dognat i peregnat Ameriku" 😆 Lies about Shepherd. Then, if Gagarin's space suite was so well designed, why he had to pee on the road side and then hold it till the landing just 1 hour later? Soviet clown 🤡🤣
@@fffUUUUUU And sadly we do now see the same in the US with it's national debt of $ 34 trillion and 80 million people living underneath the povertyline. So despite the fact that we ended the cold war decades ago nothing much did change thanks to the brain death leaders on both sides. 😥
To sum it up - Famous Soviet proverb says: *_"It grunts and buzzes but doesn't deflorate - what's that? The newest advanced and unrivaled Soviet deflorator!"_*
Standby for the next Space Race… Over the next 10 days… Russia vs. India… Goal: Landing a space craft on the Moon… Expected winner…. Program with the best Plan B. India is getting better with their Plans B. This could be interesting…. 😀 Edit: Time has passed…. The Russian Luna has impacted the moon in pieces…. The Little Space Craft that Couldn’t… just another sad tale of failed Russian hubris….
I didn't know much about soviet space history. We don't learn much about it in the uk. Sputnik and that's it. I knew about the abandoned Shuttle type crafts. These videos are fantastic.
Maybe that you are still young, but I am an old men now. The Soviets did beat the Americans in everything, first men in space, first women in space, first spacewalk, first satelite, first lander on the moon, first lander on Venus, first spacestation, etc etc etc etc. In fact there are only two things that the Americans did first : To put a lander on Mars succesfully and people on the moon. So if ever there was a race the score would be Soviet Union 200 vs the United States 2. But that is not what you will hear in the mainstream western media, we only mention two things. And this is one of them. But it is not even important.... far more important is that we should live in peace together and maybe stop listening to our brain death leaders.... 40 years ago Sting brought out this song and sadly not much has changed thanks to the leaders on both sides. 😢ua-cam.com/video/wHylQRVN2Qs/v-deo.html
Simultaneously a great video and a huge disappointment that the USSR didn't match delivery with intent. The damn gold leads!! Enjoyed tbe long form video. Greetings from Spain.
There’s some tubing on the M-69 probe that looks like the Roland Corporation logo, in reverse. Roland was founded in 1972 in Osaka, Japan. I actually bet this is not a mere coincidence. Japanese designers are very clever.
This puts into perspective the talk of how difficult it is to go to Mars, from some years ago. If the Soviet teams would have had more time, they probably would have been more successful, but they had to rush it, due to political pressure.
Surely the Nedelin disaster was caused by the time on the 2nd stage failing to reset after a launch abort and firing int the now dormant but fully fuelled 1st stage. Also most of the casualties died from inhaling the fumes from its hypergolic fuel (Nitric Acid & Hydrazine aka the Devils Venom)
TBF I don't think the Russians did lose the space race they may have lost a few heats (1st docking in space, 1st manned moon landing) but over all they've been winning hands down (1st ICBM, 1st Satellite, 1st Man in space, 1st Space walk, 1st Woman in space, 1st Lander on the Moon and Venus and that was all in the 60s & 70s) They've had an almost constant manned presence in space since the mid 70s. Mean while Nasa has almost constantly been playing catch up and rarely taken the lead. So no I don't think Russia has lost the space race. I think the Space race has now shifted anyway its more between China and Spacex but after 70 years of being the dominant force in space I wouldn't rule them out just yet
SpaceX dominates in launch vehicle development and launches and also in Starlink, but they do not really do any "scientific space exploration" -- that is still the domain for the publicly funded NASA. Its laboratories, mainly the JPL are still unrivaled in exploring the solar system with automatic probes. Of course, China is catching up in this very rapidly, with their recent Mars rover, back side of the Moon rover, return of samples of lunar soil, etc.
@@leeswecho true and multiple moons landing on titan 1.5 billion km distant around saturn "tasting" enceladus , buzzing kuiper belt objects, comets asteroid and ceres, exiting the solar system, creating all the great space observatories(cobe,hubble,jwst,wmap etc and deep space network etc NASA literally did several orders of magnitude more science for humanity....
1:56 Naturally, the Sovs didn't mention _their_ launch failures... 2:29 200,000 NYC students out with the flu. 21:16 Gotta love that Soviet love of the Working Man and his environment.
*Another channel told me Russia was investing in some new technological approach to achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductors. I was wondering if anyone on Asianometry might know what technology Russia is investing in for this? Any ideas?*
Russia has a few fabs, Belarus has some, and the rest they buy from China. The radiation hardened chips for the space applications come from the same Voronezh plant which is mentioned in this video as the producer of 2T312 transistors. It is a very low volume manufacturing and not very modern technology. They actually have a channel on UA-cam, there in the past they were showing practically the whole production process.
@@cogoiddamn, you know seem to know a lot about this stuff, I see you everywhere in the commene section, each comment being more interesting than the last!
42 mins. Let's blast. 🚀
Blast away like team rocket!
43
So how far
you mean “поехали”
You love farts
I am perpetually impressed by how frequently you can put out content like this.
It pays well to tell American's what they want to hear
@@DeepTitanicsad truth
Jon has a twin. Or clones.
Did you notice that he “forgot” to mention Mariner 2 in his timeline? It will be against his narrative. So either he did not research , or he did but is doing propaganda.
@@DeepTitanicit doesn't bode well for your mental health constantly whining about 'evil' Americans and Westerners. Make your own content instead of constantly crying in the replies
Some notes:
* the R-7 wasn't a V-2 derivative. Earlier rockets like R-1 and R-2 were, but R-7 was a clean sheet design, much larger than a V-2 and using very different engines and propellant
* Object D was not Sputnik 1, it was Sputnik 3. It wasn't ready when the rocket was so Sputnik 1 was constructed as a simpler stand in.
* At 22:30 you show an image of a Proton but its not carrying a Mars probe, its carrying a prototype manned lunar flyby craft (confusingly also called "Zond")
7:21 Nedelin was not a missile's designer. He was the head of Strategic Rocket Forces. He was a military, not an engineer.
His background was artillery.
Famous Soviet proverb says: *_"It grunts and buzzes but doesn't deflorate - what's that? The newest advanced and unrivaled Soviet deflorator!"_*
@@fffUUUUUUMy favorite is: What weighs nine tonnes, burns two liters of fuel per minutes, and cuts an apple into thirds? Soviet machine for cutting apples into 4ths
@@AlexKarasev his background was operational, not technical. for technical details, that's what his staff was for.
@@fredmdbud are you talking background or then-current role? As I expressed, his background (as in, schooling and career) were in artillery. His rank was a Marshal. Ofc he (and a few levels of stuff under him) were leadership/operational roles.
Nedelin, Chief Marshal of Artillery, under whose jurisdiction fell the budding Soviet missile program, flew in to address the delays with the ill-fated rocket seemingly with no end in sight. It wasn't a matter of lack of people or materiel or funds - there were a lot of kinks with the new rocket, and fixing one uncovered yet another & another. Nedelin at that point decided not to berate anyone or have meetings - he let everyone do their job, however, requesting a chair be placed for him by the launch pad, in everyone's sight, where he calmly planted himself, telegraphing a sense of urgency: the Chief Marshal wasn't leaving till the job was done, and obviously the pad monkeys knew neither were they.
Office politics being what they are, there was soon a small constellation of chairs of Nedelin's staffers sitting next to their Marshal.
That added a fair bit of tension for the already fatigued and dismayed pad crew. A member of the launch control team read the next step in his procedure: ensure the manual stage igniter lever was in the initial position. It wasn't - it was at the other end. The lever's positions between initial and final activated backup manual ignitions in turn of the missile's respective stages. The guy returned the lever to its prescribed position as per the letter of his instructions. As it was being reversed to its prescribed initial position, the lever activated the upper stage (being fueled) firing into the top of the already fully fueled first stage within the whole missile's stationery stack being firmly held together by own weight and launchpad hardware. The rest is history.
The young Brezhnev (years before his ascend to General Secretary of USSR) was assigned to lead the investigation. His report concluded that no disciplinary action was in order, as the event itself was lesson & punishment enough for all involved who hadn't perished.
To take a line from Yzma’s book, “Why do we even have that lever?” Like, in what universe would manually lighting the second stage of an ICBM make any sense, let alone be possible?
@@mrb692 Every doomsday machine needs a self destruct switch.
@@mrb692 both Saturn-V and N-1, owing to the urgency of the manned Moon race, had all-up tests. As in, launching the entire multi-stage stack. If the first stage malfunctions as it did on the N-1, it effectively denies any testing of the latter stages - a considerable waste.
Some of the failure modes of the first stage may, nonetheless, allow an opportunity to fire the 2nd stage and thus fly it even if below its intended altitude. That can be useful.
Another use is if Stage 1 works normally but the automatic ignition of Stage 2 fails.
Another is a payload "escape system" having an upper stage take military payload away from the launch pad if there's a problem with the launch.
Clearly this is something for a missile in development or initial stage of deployment - but there can be uses.
Yes, the Soviets didn't suffer from lack of knowledge. Their demise was ideological and leadership in nature.
mrb692 Said " To take a line from Yzma’s book, “Why do we even have that lever?” Like, in what universe would manually lighting the second stage of an ICBM make any sense, let alone be possible? "
Well, in case there was some sort of failure and you needed to place a person wearing an oxygen mask in the 2nd stage to manually fire the engines. See also the ending of Dr Strangelove. . .
Please do more discussion on space topics! Your narrative was excellent, would love to see more.
Actually I prefer he focuses on his usual historic company and business topics. There are already many YT channels with the historic and current-day details of spaceflight.
Not like this, there isn't. He discusses the topic from an unusual third perspective with little bias. Where else is the "race to Mars" even mentioned? And yet Russia/USSR was always competitive to the point of belligerence. @@richardbloemenkamp8532
Agreed, it would be better than astrum imo!
To bastardize an idiom, Soviets come from Venus, Americans come from mars.
Americans came from Uranus
@taxirob2248 better then ur mom
@@taxirob2248 ah, that explains their insufferable assholery.
Dude how do you make so many bangers this fast, don't burn yourself out please.
"Rapid, unscheduled disassembly" is now my favorite phrase for an explosion.
Well researched high quality Videos frequently with a long duration, this is the channel we needed🔥
It is important to note that Martian winds / storms do not matter in any sense of force. The air pressure is so low that no matter the wind speed, it would not exert any significant force on a lander or a rover.
It only matters for visibility and solar energy generation, since martian storms are usually very dusty.
This video is very, very good -- but even with all the work that went into it, it is still not easy for one person to do justice to such a complicated subject. Decision making in the USSR was done in great secrecy, among the big bosses of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and it is seldom known why a particular course of action was or was not taken, or why a particular person was promoted. Even when some information is available, it may not always be translated from Russian, or may only be published in some obscure conference proceedings for professional historians.
In particular, even though there are many fantastic stories told about this, it is not really known why exactly Korolev was promoted from prison to the leadership of the space program. But we do know that Stalin had very little to do with this. Korolev was picked personally by Lev Mikhalovich Gaidukov, on authority of Dmitry Ustinov, the young People's Commissar of Armaments of the USSR. This did not start as a well thought out strategic plan. Rather, Gaidukov noticed how well a group of Soviet engineers led by Boris Chertok were working in occupied Germany on reconstituting the Nazi V2 program. This large work on V2 was more or less a grassroots project, not specifically authorized by the higher authority, beyond the general mandate to recover from Germany all equipment that could be useful. The progress that the engineers were making in Germany greatly impressed Gaidukov, who was doing an on-site inspection. The report went to Ustinov, who at that time had an enormous clout due to his very successful leadership during the war, and who then authorized a large scale missile program. It started with assimilation of German missile research and technology. Ustinov placed Gaidukov in charge of the overall project. Gaidukov then found and reassigned several recent prisoners such as Korolev and Glushko to lead different parts of project, based on their past work. Then Korolev met Ustinov and was somehow given the authority to serve as the chief technical coordinator of this large and diverse organization. The details of that are rather obscure.
Regarding the Sputnik. It was launched not because Korolev could on a whim choose peaceful space exploration, but because there was an unintentional pause in the weapons program. Nuclear warheads burned up on reentry during the previous test launch. While the warheads were being reworked, there was nothing else to launch on the next missile, already being prepared for the test. Thus Sputnik was reluctantly announced as the Soviet contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Many countries had high profile experiments as a part of this loose international collaboration, and Sputnik was one of such projects. Only after the Sputnik caused an international sensation, Soviet leadership took notice, and authorized a larger scale space program which was not 100% weapons related.
Korolev was very well known to top echelons of power (incl to Beriya personally & firsthand) even as he was in prison. Nothing is what it seems in Russia / USSR and those so-called "sharashkas" weren't anything like ordinary prisons.
By war time KGB knew full well better than 70% of those prisoners didn't deserve to be there - many being victims of coworkers' jealousy or desire to remove a competitor for a promotion or even apartment. (The same took place in Iraq btw, with Iraqis telling on each other to the US forces). KGB of the late-1930s provided an eager power gradient for those unscrupulous folks to leverage, since KGB was after fear and what better way to instill fear than randomly, irrationally, hastily, and unfairly, and with nary a recourse for the wrongfully accused. But the batsh*t craziness of all this was becoming obvious to even the staunchest disciplinarians within the upper echelons of power, and while outright walking back the entire thing, admitting systenic wrongdoing, and rehabilitating everyone took Khrustchev's b*lls years later, Russians had a classically Russian interim solution: if nothing could be done to the situation with Stalin still in power, KGB & everyone else would just pay it lip service. War further necessitated urgently saving, consolidating, and empowering the engineering cadre, and thense those "sharashkas" were born. Closest English translation is skunkworks (in Kelly Johnson sense). A semi-undercover, sort-of-independent crack engineering team doing leading work sort of off to the side of the bona fide industrial process. Many of those were formed with not just KGB's approval but facilitation. They'd searched the prisoner lists and dossiers for any engineers & while they didn't have the authority to free them all, they'd created these multiple skunkworks in minimal-security type conditions.
Sputnik - the military payload wasn't going to orbit and it wasn't a mere matter of putting something else at the top & voila, it orbits. By then, a massive effort was already in a full swing for the manned program, with communication ships and radar & comms ground stations being built. Sputnik II and on with mammals onboard were vital, deliberate stepping stones to chip away huge swaths of uncertainty of what's involved in safely orbiting a human if that were at all possible. Sputnik was just the tip of the iceberg visible to the West of the massive Soviet space momentum already built up. "Space" as in, other than the ICBM use that don't go in orbit.
... so while the extent to which Sputnik resonated with the Western public was, admittedly, a pleasant surprise to the Soviets (they were expecting the Western press to give minimal coverage, maybe same level as Luna-25 is being covered as I type this), they were going full steam ahead with the massive, multi-faceted program - not looking back at what the rest of the world was doing but defining how this brand new field of endeavor ought to be pursued. It fit right in with other Soviet pursuits, incl
- mass literacy & free path to higher leraning
- public health
- electrification
- industrialization.
Space was like a red cherry on the very top, and even the way those space things looked was becoming the budding Soviet superpower. USSR would've been all-in even if the West pretended Sputnic wasn't there. But yeah, they were happy the West noticed.
@@doodlebug1820 It's an autobiographical novel, but a novel nonetheless - by someone who was no big fan of Stalin, obviously. Without confirmed numbers of folks who'd gone from sharashka's back to gulags, "failure or displeasure meant being sent to a gulag" is conjecture - outside of the obvious fact that at war time (of any nation) if one's failure exceeded a certain level of gravity and lives were lost, there'd be consequences to match. Not saying that never happened - but the devil's in the details. On the flip side, the actual physical locations of sharashkas aren't set up for prison type security, other than what'd be considered minimal security by the standards of the time and place at wartime.
All those other pursuits were far more important @@AlexKarasev. If space exploration was a prestige project, then they should have chosen a single target for a decisive "win." The whole thing is an example of what happens when you politicize engineering. The current folly of re-usability and controlled landing of launch vehicles is another example, in those cases with partially governmental and partially corporate politics driving them.
@@taxirob2248 >"If space exploration was a prestige project, then they should have chosen a single target for a decisive "win.""
This was the strategy Kennedy had adopted with manned Moon landings - he asked what would be sufficiently spectacular to make up for Sputnik etc, and sufficiently far off to overtake the Soviets, and the answer was the manned Moon landing. And they sold that singular goal to the US public as "the space race".
However that strategy isn't necessarily right for when you're in a genuine strategic leadership position, deliberately developing a broad field, which is what the Soviets had been doing - not trying to score temporary "wins". The Soviets weren't just going to the Moon (landers, 2 rovers, robotic sample return missions) and Mars - they also went to Venus (incl landing the only nation to have done so to this day ua-cam.com/video/UEmlOjKmL68/v-deo.html )
>"The whole thing is an example of what happens when you politicize engineering."
And science. 100% agree. Both are long-term fields whereas politics inherently is short-term.
Nedelin was the "cause" of the disaster , the whole debacle is described in a book based from old sovjet material. Brezhnev's comment on Nedleins behaviour causing the explosion is telling.
Ooh summary please?
They did very well with their copy cat nuke. Their spies probably didn’t deliver well enough for this.
@@blink182bfsftw Have a look at @AlexKarasev comment for the summary.
This is a fantastic video. All things Soviet-history interests me. Thank you for doing an incredible amount of research and making such an enjoyable video!!
If I recall one Soviet Satellite was sent on a worldwide tour. And while it was in the United States, the CIA was able to get a chance to get their hands on it. And so during one night they had the truck driver deliver the satellite to another location and they then meticulously took it apart and studied every single component it had, but then they ran into problems as to putting it back together turned into a race against time as some of the parts wouldn’t go back together or they had to replace some of the components with US Made equivalents, and they also installed American Made screws. And when the Satellite made it back to the Soviet Union, the engineers had discovered that it had been tampered with when some of their tools didn’t work on some of the screws.
Damn, I misread it and was wondering how US captured a satellite and launched it without the Soviets discovering their satellite went missing.
@@mirasolovklose3888lmao
Source: Trust me bro
@@Orange-po6qv Can't recall in what video I heard this story, but can confirm it
So you can't recall what video you saw it in but you can confirm it. And where do you get your expertise to be the end authority to confirm that story? It's a Great fairy tail. But don't you think we have some extra Soviets screws lying around if we were able to intercept this satellite 📡?? But people just can't let it be that the US whip them in the total race for space 🚀. Yeah like my emojis.
Loved the longer and very detailed video. Definitely one of your best ones to date and I’ve seen the majority. Keep it up, you are a great history buff and my small circle of friends loves your content
-To the Moon! To Mars!
-Safety? Redundant, duplicate security systems? What’s that?
If you think going to the moon with the American rocket wasn't risky as hell you don't know what you're talking about. Its a miracle nobody died (except for the first Apollo crew that burned alive in their module, but that was on the ground) Then came the Space shuttle, an extremely unsafe vehicle. With two crews lost.
Wonderfully done! To even mention the "Race to Mars" is all but unique, and yet wasn't it the race that mattered most? As grande as the Lunar landings were, I can still recall the unspeakable elation that I had when the Viking landers set down on the plains of Mars.
This is the one that finally made me sign up to your Patreon, but I should have done it long ago. Your takes on geopolitics, chips, and space are always fascinating and funny. Looking forward to more.
They won the race to Venus. The lack of landers to that planet irks me. Yeah it's a worse than hell place but if Soviet 70s tech could at least do it, we should be able to do something decent now.
there was no race to Venus, America decided it was too much effort and doing mars was easier and safer.
What would we learn by doing so though?
By this mindset: What do we "learn" with Mars landers?
so can you answer that question yourself or ?? @@bigjared8946
Your review of modern Korean political economy won you a subscription. This review wins you a like. When you got to the part about the substitution of the gold transiators for aluminum, you had me wanting to volunteer to round up the culprits for 10 years hard labor in Siberia.
This is hands-down my favorite UA-cam channel. Thanks for the hard work.
I really like your videos no fluff just facts and some joke perfect
2:16 The Soviets knew perfectly well what kind of hubbub Sputnik would cause. It’s why they did it. The USA had announced an intention to put an artificial satellite into orbit to study space as part of the International Geophysical Year. That announcement is what spurred the Soviets to develop Sputnik. They wanted to beat the US to space. They figured out that they couldn’t make the planned research satellite with all of its instruments ready in time to beat the USA, which is why Sputnik was so simple.
Love the long ones, Thank You for television well worth watching.
Intentionally sacrificing specifically weak built walls is an old but life-saving standard "trick" in chemistry when dealing with potentionally unintentional explosions.
Ask people from fluorine or explosives labs.
Great video as always. Thanks for your hard work!
This must be the best videos you've made so far. Super interesting!
I'm not really sure I agree about the failures having anything to do with bad luck.. It seems to me that while the design/engineering might have been sound (debatable), the hardware/components were inconsistent and unreliable, the political leadership only hindered success with the extreme pressure they applied due to unrealistic goals and timelines, and it seems as if the Soviets were always making these extreme gambles that rarely paid off instead of carrying out tasks with a methodical, ordered approach. For example, it just seems like absolute madness to place your brand new, extremely expensive space probe, that you've dedicated so much time and effort into, onto a brand new rocket that has never been tested/launched before. The pressures that cause this type of thing to happen are indicative of how broken the system is. It just isn't a logical, reasonable thing to do and there should be someone in the chain of leadership with the authority and influence to prevent such a silly thing from taking place.
Soviets sound like tech bros with kalishnikovs.
Agree. Soviets methods were just proven to not be as good. This is hardly debatable with hindsight.
Americans ended up accomplishing more, much more safely and less wasteful than the soviets did. The soviets had their accomplishments for sure and that shouldn't be taken away from them but the cost was greater.
Isn't it much better if you can slow it down and smooth it out for everything to work properly... The thing is, the Soviet leadership had their ideas, with propaganda victories in mind, all the while oblivious to what it would take to send a probe successfully to another planet. They probably said something like "C'mon comrades, just do it! It's not rocket science!" They pressed the engineers to crawl out of their skin to deliver, but the rest of the industry didn't follow. Comrade Ivanov from 79th factory still would deliver a part that was manufactured from what was available because "A mne pohui" and then that part would fail at the most critical point of operation.
Excellent overview of the program and the technical issues
Fantastic work!
A very nice review. I shared it with one of my rocketry groups on FB.
Thank you for your service. The detail and eclectism of your content is infinitely soothing.
They made it to Venus, significantly harder than mars
It's almost legendary how much it went wrong. The streak didn't even end with Phobos Grunt
That fourth stage is some bad omen for the soviets
I thoroughly enjoy ALL your productions, thank you. Always something to learn. You always amaze me. Thank you again.
The quality of writing is astounding
1:58 from my knowledge, Sputnik is not Object D, but rather a stopgap satellite to make the USSR the first nation to launch a satellite in the International Geophysical Year, since object D was too complicated. Eventually Object D was launched as Sputnik 3.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Apollo is a hoax
The Mars program was over-ambitious relative to the capabilities the Soviets (or the US) had at it's time. Especially regarding the level of automation required to do a successful landing-you can't remote control the probes real time. The growing Soviet lag in electronics took it's toll here.
The US Mars program (Mariners and Vikings) was more realistic with it's goals and they landed with the Vikings when they were ready (after the Soviets closed the Mars program).
The Soviets tried the Phobos program but it required integration with western systems (the Soviet original electronics industry was near death at this stage) so it failed.
You can see that all the Soviet missions had control or communication failures.
No, someone stole the gold and replaced it with aluminum. Great work, as usual.
Actually, on both accounts it is just an Internet meme that sounds great.
The more recent story that everybody repeats, goes as "precious metals were stolen from manufacturing of rocket engines, causing massive failure". In reality exactly the opposite has happened -- some dumbass used lower temperature precious metal based solder instead of high temperature manganese based solder. This was not caught, and a bunch of rocket engines were brazed with inappropriate material. Ruined. It is bad, and is an embarrassment for Russian space industry.
Of course, since it is about Russia, it is a lot easier to make a viral story about precious metals that were supposedly stolen, rather than to explain that correct solder must be used for a particular purpose, no matter whether it is more expensive or less expensive!
With the "aluminum transistors" the story is also a complete fairy-tale. It comes from a Russian planetologist who heard it from someone. Either he misremembered the story, or did not understand it in the first place. But after his account was published in a book, now everybody repeats it as coming from an authoritative source.
In reality the leads of 2T312 transistors were never made from either gold or aluminum, but from a special NK29 alloy, similar to Kovar, to provide compatibility with glass insulation between the leads and the transistor case. The leads were gold-plated to increase corrosion resistance. Silicon crystal had aluminum metallization and required bonding specifically with aluminum bonding wire. *If* gold wire had been used, this would have caused a chemical reaction with a formation of gold-aluminum intermetallic compound -- an effect which plagued early US chips and was known as "Purple plague". Maybe that is what really happened, but it is impossible to know.
@@cogoid Well, that's just what happens when you have a system that has endemic graft.
@@cogoid Perhaps the replacement with aluminium part is indeed wrong, but it doesn't sound implausible (to my admittedly lay ears) that perhaps the gold plating for the leads was omitted by means of theft somewhere along the pipeline. The leads supplied may well have been the NK29 alloy, if mistaken for aluminium, but nonetheless still corroded without the gold.
@@fistsofham8474 The story comes from the book "Russian Planetary Exploration History, Development, Legacy and Prospects" by Brian Harvey, where it is attributed to the Soviet astronomer Mikhail Yakovlevitch Marov, remembering about it almost 50 years after the events. I think all we can be reasonably certain of is that there was a reliability problem with the transistors.
If the Soviets were following American technology, then the most likely cause would have been using easier to use gold bonding wire instead of more difficult to use aluminum bonding wire. In the USA this has also caused widespread equipment failures, until Tom Longo and B. Selikson published an article explaining that gold wire was not compatible with aluminum metallization, and one had to use aluminum wire. There is a short discussion of this in the "History of Semiconductor Engineering" by Bo Lojec.
Brilliant deep dive, as usual. Can you by-chance pass on where you got that amazing video of the moon rotating, 14mins in?
I absolutely love this content
Its so good
I really hope this would get more views
I love videos about space race
And rare asian scandals and details
You have such an obvious name but
Probably one of the most unique content on this platform
Nice Firefly reference bro!
By far the best explanation of the Soviet mars missions I Have seen. great detail.
This video was so great I didn't even realised it was 40 minutes long. Thank for these videos.
Love the topic & channel
Solution: "Listen to the Engineers!"
Famous Soviet proverb says: *_"It grunts and buzzes but doesn't deflorate - what's that? The newest advanced and unrivaled Soviet deflorator!"_*
I loved your episode about the Venus missions, so I was excited to see this one! Thank you for another excellent video.
God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)
Great video as always. One minor correction "Object D" refers to Sputnik 3 not the original Sputnik a.k.a. Sputnik 1. Object D was not ready in time so they decided to proceed with a simpler satellite first.
Amazing content, as always. I find it funny when you say these sadly failed. I'm so glad they did!
thankyou.very interesting!love your work!
I have to wonder how many people got your Firefly/Serenity Easter Egg? Shiny. Thank you for that.
Another great video. Good job.
The Soviet space program always reminds me of what my dad said once many years ago.
We were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, out in the yard was my 1990 Lada 2104 and my fathers Belarus 350 tractor from 1983.
He sat silent for a while and just said:
"Well.. how the hell did the russians get to the moon?"
I wonder if anyone has tried to calculate the total cost of all these missions and infrastructure, which really seem to be propaganda first and science second.
love that Big Smoke line you did there XD
Great video as always. Thanks for your hard work!. Great video as always. Thanks for your hard work!.
You did an incredible research. Great story. 😊
YES
New space episode!
Love you man
Love the detail!
imagine having a space program while a large portion of your population still has no proper toilet. #china #india
The 1976 Viking photo might be the coolest digital photo ever.
I agree, it was revolutionary in many aspects.
Salutations to you, Mr. Asiano'! I appreciate your work, on YouselessTube, immensely, so thank you! Your humour is not lost on me either, and yes, the deer... but where's the headlights? Something about the "space race" & the Soviets that is often not realised, is that they didn't do so well due to their poor ideological choice of Germanium semis', instead of Silicon! Germanium, lower "barrier" voltage sure, but leaks current notoriously by comparison! On earth, no biggy... but for spacecraft, (both senses of the word) that sure sucks on power sources! Again thanks, & keep it up, if you dare! Mogfets?
Well, the Soviets were the first to transmit photos, sound and videos from Venus, including in color, and that was much more difficult than doing it from Mars.
but getting to Venus was a lot easier, only parachute required and then you just send a couple photos and it is a success 😅
@@olasek7972 - - You really have no idea what you are writing about. Do your homework about what's happening at the surface of Venus. Type in UA-cam "How the Soviets Landed on Venus", by Asianometry.
@@olasek7972- this clearly shows you have no idea whatsoever about Venus landing. Please educate yourself and try again. Parachute 😂 my @$$
More space topics man, this one went really well, maybe an insight into the chinese space program?
IMO sending probes to Venus played to the Soviet's strengths much more than sending probes to Mars did. Venus was easier to get to, but once there any probe had to be extremely rugged to survive even a short period of time. Soviet technology tends to be somewhat crude compared to western technology, but they were great at making things that are simple but extremely durable.
Mars 4 or 5 DEFINITELY looks like Dr. Wiley’s Space Capsule
This information is so very important, especially now. So many amazing stories probably exist buried in the minds of the Russian and ex-Soviet citizenry.
Amazing, yeah. Like the story of Serhiy Korolyov who's been repressed and put in GULAG camp, where red komissar broken his fingers and lower jaw during the interrogation.
Or how GULAG system is responsible for the murdering of about 40 000 000 of USSR citizens. "Amazing" stories, мать його в йоб!
The public toll of Soviet space program: there's no toilet paper in USSR until 1969. So all those soviet heroes, incl. Gagarin, wiped up themselves with crumpled Pravda newspaper. No generally available color television sets nor freely available cars for average Ivan.
@@fffUUUUUUtop 5% of folks in the USSR were only enough for space, sciences, arts, sports, military gear. As for the avwrage folks, socialism indeed lacked capitalism's carrot & stick to make them work their tails of. So yeah, soviet consumer goods were meh & in a short supply - but it wasn't because of their space program.
And since you've brought up bodily functions, it was Alan Shepherd who went up swimming in his own urine whereas Gagarin's far superior scaphander anticipated such a need & Yuri indeed used the feature, relieving himself before boarding, onto the bus's wheel.
@@AlexKarasevщо ти совкові байки тут травиш, лапоть? Думаєш я вестерн?😂 All the soviets economy was targeted towards one thing - military build up. And space program was the part of it. Since the economy wasn't a free market - its resources were planned and redirected from the Gosplan in Moscow. Hence, no family cars, home AC, color TVs, toilet paper for ivans. 'Cause Communist Party needs "dognat i peregnat Ameriku" 😆
Lies about Shepherd. Then, if Gagarin's space suite was so well designed, why he had to pee on the road side and then hold it till the landing just 1 hour later? Soviet clown 🤡🤣
@@fffUUUUUU And sadly we do now see the same in the US with it's national debt of $ 34 trillion and 80 million people living underneath the povertyline. So despite the fact that we ended the cold war decades ago nothing much did change thanks to the brain death leaders on both sides. 😥
A shame, I still have two calculators from the 80’s, one with a membrane. I remember Sharp products as having good design.
Im shocked you didnt mention more about the phobos 2 probe, that had a interesting story behind it
To sum it up - Famous Soviet proverb says: *_"It grunts and buzzes but doesn't deflorate - what's that? The newest advanced and unrivaled Soviet deflorator!"_*
This is gonna be a banger
Amazing contant... Was waiting for similar video....
Standby for the next Space Race…
Over the next 10 days…
Russia vs. India…
Goal: Landing a space craft on the Moon…
Expected winner…. Program with the best Plan B.
India is getting better with their Plans B.
This could be interesting…. 😀
Edit: Time has passed…. The Russian Luna has impacted the moon in pieces…. The Little Space Craft that Couldn’t… just another sad tale of failed Russian hubris….
This episode would be quite different in tone if it were made by the Paper Skies guy.
Great show
I didn't know much about soviet space history. We don't learn much about it in the uk. Sputnik and that's it. I knew about the abandoned Shuttle type crafts. These videos are fantastic.
Maybe that you are still young, but I am an old men now. The Soviets did beat the Americans in everything, first men in space, first women in space, first spacewalk, first satelite, first lander on the moon, first lander on Venus, first spacestation, etc etc etc etc. In fact there are only two things that the Americans did first : To put a lander on Mars succesfully and people on the moon. So if ever there was a race the score would be Soviet Union 200 vs the United States 2. But that is not what you will hear in the mainstream western media, we only mention two things. And this is one of them.
But it is not even important.... far more important is that we should live in peace together and maybe stop listening to our brain death leaders....
40 years ago Sting brought out this song and sadly not much has changed thanks to the leaders on both sides. 😢ua-cam.com/video/wHylQRVN2Qs/v-deo.html
This channel is a lot of fun.
"rapid unscheduled disassemblies" love it :D
Simultaneously a great video and a huge disappointment that the USSR didn't match delivery with intent. The damn gold leads!! Enjoyed tbe long form video. Greetings from Spain.
There’s some tubing on the M-69 probe that looks like the Roland Corporation logo, in reverse. Roland was founded in 1972 in Osaka, Japan. I actually bet this is not a mere coincidence. Japanese designers are very clever.
Such a great video
Was it pronounced “thermo nukuler” around 10:40?
Fascinating vid none the less
That's the Texas pronunciation
This puts into perspective the talk of how difficult it is to go to Mars, from some years ago. If the Soviet teams would have had more time, they probably would have been more successful, but they had to rush it, due to political pressure.
Surely the Nedelin disaster was caused by the time on the 2nd stage failing to reset after a launch abort and firing int the now dormant but fully fuelled 1st stage. Also most of the casualties died from inhaling the fumes from its hypergolic fuel (Nitric Acid & Hydrazine aka the Devils Venom)
TBF I don't think the Russians did lose the space race they may have lost a few heats (1st docking in space, 1st manned moon landing) but over all they've been winning hands down (1st ICBM, 1st Satellite, 1st Man in space, 1st Space walk, 1st Woman in space, 1st Lander on the Moon and Venus and that was all in the 60s & 70s) They've had an almost constant manned presence in space since the mid 70s. Mean while Nasa has almost constantly been playing catch up and rarely taken the lead. So no I don't think Russia has lost the space race. I think the Space race has now shifted anyway its more between China and Spacex but after 70 years of being the dominant force in space I wouldn't rule them out just yet
The Soviet leadership literally said themselves that they lost.
Soviets, not Russians
SpaceX dominates in launch vehicle development and launches and also in Starlink, but they do not really do any "scientific space exploration" -- that is still the domain for the publicly funded NASA. Its laboratories, mainly the JPL are still unrivaled in exploring the solar system with automatic probes. Of course, China is catching up in this very rapidly, with their recent Mars rover, back side of the Moon rover, return of samples of lunar soil, etc.
the Soviets only "got" to the Moon and Venus first. The US (and Europe, and Japan) "won" every other planet, and recently, the Sun.
@@leeswecho true and multiple moons landing on titan 1.5 billion km distant around saturn "tasting" enceladus , buzzing kuiper belt objects, comets asteroid and ceres, exiting the solar system, creating all the great space observatories(cobe,hubble,jwst,wmap etc and deep space network etc NASA literally did several orders of magnitude more science for humanity....
Thoughts on using music in the background?
Guess which probe first softlanded and sent an image from Mars ? Yep, it was the USSR with Mars 3.
1:56 Naturally, the Sovs didn't mention _their_ launch failures...
2:29 200,000 NYC students out with the flu.
21:16 Gotta love that Soviet love of the Working Man and his environment.
That joint Apollo Soyuz mission had one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, Deke Slayton.
EPIC. my favorite subject x my favorite tech youtuber
What are your sources?
Might have a spec of Mars dust in my eye at the end there :)
They really made a penis shaped probe and called it Mars-69 huh
*Another channel told me Russia was investing in some new technological approach to achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductors. I was wondering if anyone on Asianometry might know what technology Russia is investing in for this? Any ideas?*
Russia has a few fabs, Belarus has some, and the rest they buy from China. The radiation hardened chips for the space applications come from the same Voronezh plant which is mentioned in this video as the producer of 2T312 transistors. It is a very low volume manufacturing and not very modern technology. They actually have a channel on UA-cam, there in the past they were showing practically the whole production process.
@@cogoiddamn, you know seem to know a lot about this stuff, I see you everywhere in the commene section, each comment being more interesting than the last!
24:45 the Kerbal way !!!
Excellent detailed descriptions and explanations of Soviet failureskis.
@14:25 good motivational speak!
Thank you! Kinda missed Leica though..
7:21 an unknown number of Soviet rocket technicians became good Communists.