The Soviet Obsession With Venus Revealed

Still blows my mind that they successfully landed a space probe on the least hospitable place in the inner solar system; and with 1970s tech. I love those photos of what looks like a yellow tinted Earth-like rocky landscape.

"Venera 13 carried a microphone. So we can listen to the sounds of Venus..." Me: 👂 "Venera 14..."

One of the greatest Space projects ever. Venus is amazing, and so was the Soviet passion for space exploration.

You didn't show the best image from the Venera-14 mission, it's a color image that actually shows the Venusian horizon, it's honestly an incredible sight, even though it's extremely flat and barren, the fact that it's the only clear image taken on Venus is incredible in and of itself. I'd highly recommend anyone that hasn't seen it to look it up, as it's likely the best we're going to get for a very long time. Fantastic video otherwise though, I've been fascinated by the various missions to Venus for a long time now and you summarized it very well.

They probably just told us its too hot, meanwhile they have a whole planet to themselves

The Soviet Venera probes were amazing.

The U.S. decided it was not possible to keep a lander cool enough to work on venus. The Russian lander got around this with a very simple system. They had radiator devices that were filled with excess rocket fuel. The devices were deployed enroute to super cool the fuel from the coldness of space. The fuel was pumped through the lander to cool it upon landing.

Imagine if US and USSR had thrown their differences aside and worked together for science and space exploration they wouldn't have done many good discovery.

It is not obsession but perseverance.

"Apple updates ALONE would make that impossible..." Truer words have never been spoken.

The USSR was obsessed not with Venus, but with space. Space travel, scientific breakthroughs, other planets, first contact. This ideology permeated the entire Soviet society. Pioneer ascent.

The designs are absolutely marvelous

You have to hand it to the soviet scientists, they didn't give up even when the Intel they had meant that their probe would melt under the brutal conditions of Venus.

It's not uncommon for households in the former Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc to still have working machines or household appliances from the Soviet era that are in working condition. In Eastern Europe, we have the saying, “built like a Soviet tank” to refer to these almost indestructible pieces of engineering.

"Let's listen to the sound of this planet." "DO NOT LOOK CLOSER!" "Aight, we'll head out bye..."

the Soviets were legendary for that. Venus is so overlooked

When i was working as a mechanic, one of my customers was an engineer who had done lots of development on the computers they put in cars. Its a very tough environment for a computer, extremes of hot and cold, corrosive chemicals, vibration etc. So they use carbide chips if my memory is working, instead of silicon chips, like in your desktop. They are much tougher than silicon chips, and deal with extreme heat better, which is key for being able to "pot" them in a lump of epoxy resin, to keep bad chemicals and vibrations away. Its really hard to seal up a computer with a big cooling fan vent. The russians had to use carbide chips for their venus probes, and i remember our customer, the engineer, was blown away by how short the lifespan was for a computer on venus, minutes or hours. Cant remember. This is with cutting edge version and big old budget version of car computer technology that lasts decades in a car.

I love how the Soviets didn't give up easily.

The beautiful part about all this is that even though both countries were in the cold war against each other, they still pushed toward human progress and innovation by competing with each other.

I'm not sure why you thought venera had film cameras. It would have been ridiculous to somehow automate a film camera, processing, and then scanning system at that time, in a venusian probe with a lifespan of 53 minutes. It used the same kind of cameras we'd always used in space, electronic TV cameras. Not digital cameras mind you. Now some of NASAs missions did use film cameras for rocket stage footage, and it was then manually recovered, but electronic imaging using things like cathodes tubes existed back then. It's how we were able to live broadcast the moon walk.