Space History for December 21: a birth, the moon, and more

[CalliArcale]

There's an interesting potpourri of stuff for today.<br /><br />On December 21, 1879, a man was born who would later grow up to be a Soviet government official with a substantial impact on the birth of the Soviet space program, although he would not live to actually see the fruits of it. Born in Georgia, his name would become infamous in years to come: Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. There is a lot that can be said about his life. He took control of the Soviet Union in 1924 following the sudden death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, due to a stroke and became a terrifying dictator. Like most dictators, he was both fiercely loved and fiercely hated -- loved for his strong leadership and intense desire to see the Soviet Union as the greatest nation on Earth, and hated for the devastatingly brutal ways in which he pursued that goal. He created the gulags, work camps where political dissidents and other prisoners could be sent to work on projects for the betterment of the Soviet people. That was the theory, anyway; in reality, the gulags were little better than the concentration camps of Hitler, and the prisoners were often innocents caught up in Stalin's paranoid purges. A pair of Ukrainian engineers were thrown into one of these gulags during such a purge: Valentin Glushko and Sergei Korolev, the latter a man often called the Soviet Von Braun. Korolev in particular fared badly, sent to the Kolmya gold mines. This was usually considered a death sentence, but Korolev survived long enough for another prisoner, Sergei Tupolev, realized who he was and requested his help in an aeronautics sharashka (a prison design bureau). Glushko eventually escaped in a similar fashion, and Korolev and Glushko would go on to make enormous advances in Soviet spaceflight -- a destiny which Stalin very nearly denied. Until his death in 1953, Stalin pushed heavily for the assimilation of German rocket technology to acheive a military advantage over the capitalist powers of the Wes <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[jmilsom]

Fascinating as usual Calli - keep these posts going they are great!<br /><br />- Interesting that Stalin may have limited the development of the Russian space programme by sending key minds to the gulags<br />- Interesting note on Luna 13 - is archival footage available from any of these early landings?<br /><br /><font color="yellow">In fact, the landing was so close to the aim point that one of the mission planners actually started to worry about future Apollos actually hitting the recovery ships!</font><br /><br />- Apollo8 was an amazing mission. I hope we can recapture such amazing achievement as we head for the moon again.<br /><br />Great stuff! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[JonClarke]

Quite a day!<br /><br />One nit to pick is that Vega-2's descent probe did land successfully, like all Russian Venus landers from Venera 7 on. It analysed the surface with GRS and XRF, showing it as an olivine-norite. Wikipedia says Vega-1 had this problem, but it too returned surface data, although not XRF,<br /><br />Jon<br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em>Whether we become a multi-planet species with unlimited horizons, or are forever confined to Earth will be decided in the twenty-first century amid the vast plains, rugged canyons and lofty mountains of Mars</em>  Arthur Clarke</p> </div>

 

[gunsandrockets]

Interesting stuff. I had never heard of the X-22 before.<br /><br />Funny thing. A person last month told me the first successful soft-landing on the moon was by Surveyor 3. Turns out he was wrong and you are right.

 

[JonClarke]

There are some photos on the net from the Luna 9 site, first first photos returned from the lunar surface. But none from Luna 13 I can find. But the results of both thes elandings were published in a 2 volume book (in Russian). It's also very rare.<br /><br />Interestingly Luna 9 and 13 used a combination of airbags and petals that was very influential in the design of Pathfinder and then of course the MERs.<br /><br />Jon <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><em>Whether we become a multi-planet species with unlimited horizons, or are forever confined to Earth will be decided in the twenty-first century amid the vast plains, rugged canyons and lofty mountains of Mars</em>  Arthur Clarke</p> </div>