These are really interesting pictures on the 'Wired' website.
Enjoy! I had not seen any of these before.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2...ission/?pid=428

Sure makes one appreciate the attention to detail and workmanship of NASA at the time! I mean, this thing looks like it was put together from a junkyard of parts.
Even the weld joints look attrocious!

Allen

Wow. That spacecraft looks like it has more in common with the 19th Century than the 20th Century.

It doesn't instill a lot of confidence that it could perform the "get me where I'm going" thing. But, then again, NEVER underestimate the Soviets to make even the most derelict of contraptions to work by sheer force of will.

I like the last quote:

Not all of the other pieces are easily identifiable as more than “satellite” or “Soyuz spacecraft” or “awesome and Soviet.”

Greg

Part of me thinks that. But keep in mind, our lander was pretty ungainly looking itself. And, while Apollo stuff certainly looks antiquated today, I remember crawling around on some of that stuff back in 78. Even then, it looked old - think military surplus. Sorta had that smell, too

So I'm hesitant to be too critical of 40+ year old Soviet stuff that's been collecting dust (and oxide layers) for all that time.

OTOH, reading thru some of the posts on the linked site, I am amazed at the ignorance of so many folks when it comes to understanding who was actually in the lead in the space program. While there's no doubt the Soviets had an early lead, we very quickly caught them, and were well ahead of them in the early days of our Gemini program.

While they frequently beat us to the punch on "firsts", theirs were often one-off stunts pulled off at great risk and were all timed by our widely publicised schedule. We'd announce an operation (eg, space walk) 18 months in advance, and they'd pull a barnstorming stunt and beat us to the punch with some half-baked effort that contributed 0 to advancing the state of their art, but showed us up in news.

Their rendezvous consisted of two space vehicles passing each other a few miles apart, unable to keep station with each other and actually rendezvous. Ours parked two capsules in space a few yards apart where they maintained their relative positions as they orbited.

We weren't really behind all that long after Sputnik, but, I'll concede, us maintaining the appearance of being (way) behind surely helped draw the tax dollars that got us to the moon.

</rant>

Doug

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Try as I might, I just couldn't get this guy to smile.

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Yeah, as the saying goes, form follows function, but I have to admit it's kinda hard to figure the exact function of this part....maybe a series of umbilical connections on the side of the lander, but who knows.

Still, would have been interesting to see how successful this hardware would have been, had they actually been able to get the issues with their N-1 booster straightened out and put this hardware in orbit.

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One example of Soviet technology that I have great respect for is the Lunokhod robotic lunar rover (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod ). Described as "bug-eyed monsters" and "Victorian bath tubs on wheels," the Lunokhod 1 and 2 rovers operated for 322 days and about 4 months, respectively, on the Moon. Although they did carry Polonium-210 radioisotope heat sources to keep their internal components warm, the ability of their wheel axles and drive motors to survive the extremes of temperature (two-week -250 degree F. nights and +250 degree F. days, with these temperature extremes occurring even between sunlit and shaded sides of the rovers in daylight) and function in a hard vacuum for months at a time is nothing short of remarkable.

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When you read what was going on back in the 50's in US rocketry, it always amazes folks that vehicle used to launch our first satellite was ready to go in 1956 and it was prohibited from being used to launch a satellite. There was even an official independent inpsection to insure that the 4th stage was a dummy or that the trajectory would not support a satellite launch. What is even more amazing is that all the hardware was available in the early 1950's.

Amazing, or disappointing, knowing we could have easily spanked them?

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Both actually. There were articles written taking information from Korelev's organization on how worried he was that Von Braun's team would be given the go-ahead to launch a satellite in 1956 and early 1957.

Good one, Tim.

For some reason, that reminds me of this from RoboCop:


Doug

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