The Massive Molniya Satellites - How The Soviet Union Solved Satellite Communications Their Own Way.

Hi Scott, thanks for the video about the Molniya satellites. I built a receiver & tracking system using an 8 ft dish (1987 to 1991). They also broadcast Radio Moscow on a subcarrier. One day in 1991 I tuned in and heard Rod Stewart and realized that things really were changing in Russia. My article about how to track Molniya satellites was in the August 1989 issue of Circuit Cellar Ink magazine.

That poor technician with the tape. All the hard worked and money wasted because you did a quick fix with some tape. That must have been a rough week at the office.

I love that they had to start the first satellite like a 59' chevy with a bad starter solenoid

-What is Scott´s today´s video about? -The Molniya -Is it a launch system, a spacecraft or an orbit? -Yes

All those hundreds of Molniya launches are why one of the most common "satellites" you can see flying overhead anywhere on Earth are spent Russian rocket bodies in polar orbits. You will know these by the fact that they're always traveling directly north/South and they tend to slowly fluctuate in brightness as they tumble. You're pretty much guaranteed to see them on any summer evening after twilight.

Another interesting property of those satellites was that they actually had a sealed capsule with an atmosphere inside them, where the electronics were located. So some of the problems of having electronics in a vacuum (like no convection cooling possible and problems with outgassing of some components) were avoided, of course at the expense of a huge mass increase.

Sting, the singer, was shown a Molnia receiving station on an American university by a friend and watched some Russian cartoons (it was Saturday evening in the US and Sunday morning in Russia). This was the inspiration for his song "Russians with the refrain "Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too".

A lot of amateur radio satellites used the Molniya orbit. It worked very well, since amateurs could have a satellite that would stay up in the sky over a certain position for hours at a time and then go back to another position over a different part of the sky for hours at a time allowing amateurs all over the world to share the satellites to make contact.

I was in SATCOM in the US Army in the mid-1980s. We used the TWT amplifiers to transmit. They were cooled by pure water and laboratory pure (99.6%) Ethylene Glycol (antifreeze). Even with a continuous flow of liquid around the pass tube it still glowed cherry red on the outside so I can imagine what all that heat was doing to that equipment...

Молния / Molniya = "Lightning" if anyone wanted to know.

Thanks for a great video series on communication satellites, and particularly appreciate your explanation of the unique Molniya orbit! I did internships for Ford Aerospace (later renamed SSL) while in college in the 1979 and 1980 and worked on the first 3 Intelsat V satellites, so com sats are near and dear to me (lots of memorable stories from that time, not the least of which was when I had inadvertently changed the software constants for the flight-ready F-2 spacecraft while it was undergoing final testing in their large vacuum chamber, causing the senior managers to get woken up at 3 am due to telemetry readings being way off... all was well once they figured out what had caused the problem, but it's a miracle that as a lowly intern I wasn't fired on the spot 😲)

the soviet space hardware always looked cool and characteristically soviet. I think it must be the symmetrical pressure vessels.

GREAT explanation of the Molniya orbits. Wikipedia is not nearly so cogent and easy to understand. Plus you always make talk about the Russian achievements so interesting. I am constantly amazed at how brilliantly people used mathematics to achieve exact solutions to problems before computer power got so strong as to make simply modeling the behavior and observing the solution a possibility. That period after Newton and Leibnitz where they exploited Calculus to solve so many problems is such an amazing period. Clearly, the Soviets had very smart mathematicians to make up for their primitive computers. I guess we also had a lot of advantages with our better miniaturization and those hydroLOX upper stages.

The Soviets were never short on ideas, or even expertise to pull those ideas off. The Soviet government just didn't have the money to spend. Or would not spend it. For as much as NASA has it's hands tied by politicians, the US managed to get a lot of stuff done. And most (if not all) of it was stuff the Soviets could have pulled off, had they had the money. Much respect to the engineers and scientists behind the iron curtain who did what they could with what they had. Very capable people.

1:50 - "Strategic Rocket Forces" is the most awesome name for a military branch ever. (It also makes much more sense than lumping in satellites and ballistic missiles with the Air Force like the U.S. did for the longest time.)

Now I understand why Ken Schaffer, an inventor at the University of Columbia, could pick up the soviet TV program with his self built satellite receiver. One day someone came to visit him, saw what the Russians had as their children's program, and was deeply impressed by the care that was put in the creation of these animations. So he wrote a song about it, and called it 'Russians'. The author was Sting.

As a suggestion, I think a video explaining the Van Allen radiation belts themselves would be helpful. Not everyone knows.

It's amazing how quickly the space program moved back then.

Great video, Scott. Well presented, with suspense about whether they’d ever get a successful deployment. You not only have vast technical knowledge, you also tell a story well.

We started with a masters program in aerospace engineering one week ago and one of the first things that were mentioned in orbital dynamics was Molniya. So it was really exciting to see you post a video about it just a few days after the lecture. I saw the youtube notification a few hours ago and watched it with great interest as soon as I got home. Thanks! 💙