A little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014) | Hacker News Reader

A little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014)

arstechnica.com

73 pointsSvetlitski21 comments

A great story!

> Without waiting for the specialists to arrive, or perhaps not bothering to call them in the first place, the controllers on the next shift decided to reactivate the primary radio transmitter.

This reminds me of the failure at Tchernobyl.

One thing I admire about Russia is a happy-go-lucky, almost amateur attitude (combined with the more widely discussed melancholy). It seems like a more whimsical version of the UK “muddle through”. Compare that to the extreme professionalism seen in Apollo 13. It’s not really clear which is better, in general.

But this story is a good example of where it can be disastrous.

to a certain degree, SpaceX is so successful, because they allow themselves to have that attitude.

There's a Russian movie about this, called Salyut-7. It's basically the Russian Apollo 13.

I won't pretend it's perfect, there's some drama thrown in, but it's well worth watching if you're a space fan. Lots of spaceships and docking and practicalities of living and working in space.

The director is apparently flagged to shoot a movie on the real ISS soon, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_7_(film)

I think the movie is pretty cool. Special the special effects, they look very good. Sadly almost nobody now this movie here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IIdP9sFvOHE

It looks excellent. I guess it would make more sense to watch the original dub, the English dub seems a bit off to me.

And yes, not many people will watch Russian or even Chinese movies here in the West. People prefer to watch Hollywood - and the exotic tastes watch Japanese anime productions.

Some past threads:

A little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489142 - July 2019 (36 comments)

Little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068017 - May 2018 (3 comments)

The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744920 - May 2016 (10 comments)

Can you please un-flag my comment about dietary animal fat? Someone keeps on flagging my posts about the nutritional value of meat even though it doesn’t even come close to breaking guidelines.

I'm sorry, but you've been breaking the site guidelines so frequently that we're pretty likely to ban you.

I'm not going to ban you right now because I don't think that would be quite fair thing to do in response to a post like this. But you've definitely not been posting in a good way for HN. We really don't want flamewars here. Also, comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27637580 are bannable offenses in their own right.

If you don't want to be banned on HN, your best bet is to read the site guidelines, internalize them, and completely change how you've been commenting. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

What about the person who flags comments that don’t even come close to breaking guidelines? He doesn’t get anything? I’m sick of comments being flagged incorrectly. People are flagging because they are vegans who get triggered or because of their personal political views and you guys don’t do anything to stop it.

Mir was a small space station. Consider its size compared to the space shuttle: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/st... . Now consider the size of the space shuttle compared to a 747: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/336613main_E... .

Skylab, launched in a single piece was bigger than Mir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_stations

Size is different in space. Something that feels cramped on the ground become spacious in zero gravity. It's hard to translate how to transit from life on 2-d surfaces to life in a 3-d floating space. A small car would suddenly feel huge of you can stretch out by hovering in the space above the seats. Skylab had lots of empty space, space that was never properly utilized. And many of its features were found useless in space. Skylab famously had a dining table with a rudimentary chair arrangement, something no other station has used.

Indeed skylab had a good volume: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1sr6aVzW9M

This is a great article and if people are interested there is, in my opinion, an awesome Russian movie adoption. It came out in 2017 so isn’t mentioned in the article.

I saw it on amazon prime video a couple years ago and it looks like it is still there.

https://www.amazon.com/Salyut-True-Story-Soviet-Apollo/dp/B0...

Great movie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBV52quByPE

The subtitles are a bit painful / "Someone set us up the bomb", but looks interesting, thx

MAIN SCREEN TURN ON.

Those subtitles on the youtube trailer video are not good. The movie itself had good subtitles.

More on Salyut 7 from 2 great resources.

http://www.astronautix.com/s/salyut7.html

http://www.spacefacts.de/salyut/english/salyut-7_6.htm

Saving Salyut-7 is vaguely similar to booting up Skylab, which had problems when entering the orbit.

Overall, Soviet manned (and unmanned) space program had its share of dramatic events. Risky first flights, like Voskhod-2... Problems with dockings with first stations, which e.g. cemented Rukavishnikov's name in folklore... Dogged pursuit of Americans in the Moon race with failing N-1, successful LK and bold Zond flights to the Moon with tortoises onboard... How well they are known, depends on the reader.

Don't forget to mention having and firing a 23mm cannon (Salyut-3)!

"Docking with a non-cooperative object!"

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