
Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on The Moon in 1976 - Anon84
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27883/
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unreal37
How easy it is to forget the cold war. In 2012, we cannot look back at
scientists of 1976 and say "you should have read and believed this obscure
Russian science journal and the argument would have been put to permanent
rest". 1976 was a different time in Russian-American relations especially when
it came to space.

The article ends by saying our belief of water on the moon has improved from
"one part per billion" in 2006, to "one part per million" today, like it's a
huge revolutionary improvement. I know it's 1000x, but its still just one part
per million. So it takes a million gallons of moon rocks to extract one gallon
of water?

Which makes me wonder what the water ppm of Earth is.

~~~
huhtenberg
Psst...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Proje...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Project)

Note the date.

~~~
Create
I think that mission "only" came to be, because both sides had to have a
backup/rescue kit. The hot-spare became useless when both capsule-based
(Soyuz/Skylab-Apollo) programmes came to an end with their last flight. By
combining, they both got another "free" flight: it was too good to pass up the
billion dollars found free with the deal.

~~~
huhtenberg
Interesting, haven't heard this before.

My point was that there was far more cooperation going on in the space
exploration area, despite of the Cold War.

~~~
lotharbot
I once had the privilege of driving a bunch of astronauts and cosmonauts
around town. They all expressed the attitude of "regardless of our political
differences, we've all experienced the same extraordinary thing, and that
makes us brothers." Though the space programs in the 60s were very competitive
in a political sense, those who were actually dealing with the realities of
space (including the engineers on the ground) had tremendous respect for each
other. There was a huge amount of cooperation between the two sides.

~~~
someperson
Wow, that's so cool. Could you tell us the entire story about driving the
astronauts/cosmonauts around together? :-)

~~~
lotharbot
There's not much to it. It was a few years back at one of the annual Space
Congress events (<http://www.spacecongress.org/> ). I was working for an
aerospace museum and was tasked with picking up some of our VIPs at the
airport and taking them to their hotel and then to our museum. Most of them
had met at previous events, and treated each other like old friends. Two of
them (IIRC, Dirk Frimout and Yury Usachev) got into an extended discussion
about places they'd visited in my hometown. I don't quite know how to
communicate how normal it all seemed -- as if they were family members talking
about childhood, rather than members of opposite sides of what had been a
bitter rivalry.

If you ever have a chance to talk to an astronaut or cosmonaut, don't pass it
up. They are all incredibly brilliant people.

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noselasd
As we're on the topic of the Soviet space program,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1> is worth a read - they were driving
rovers around on the moon in 1970

~~~
endlessvoid94
Is that still on the moon?

~~~
mongolinux
Of course it is still on the moon )) It was lost and forgotten in 71, but
rediscovered recently: [http://www.space.com/8295-lost-soviet-reflecting-
device-redi...](http://www.space.com/8295-lost-soviet-reflecting-device-
rediscovered-moon.html)

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Jun8
Another example of just what a huge goldmine Russian technical journals can be
for researchers, if you can read them.

~~~
Create
They were being read, even at the time. Although an NLP disaster at the time,
it was a boon for programming languages. Old story in new package:

[http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120529-a-cold-war-
google-t...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120529-a-cold-war-google-
translate)

(Chomsky and all the compiler people got their funding from there)

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ig1
Surely the cross-contamination arguments apply to the Soviet sample as well ?

~~~
rbanffy
How many container designs were tested? Between 11 and 17 there were 6
landings. Did they notice the problem on 11?

It's an interesting problem. The sample container will have to hold the
external pressure out and, depending on the container temperature, deal with
condensation around the seal.

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themstheones
The soviet space program sure is standing the test of time.

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mukaiji
Yet another sad example of how ideology got the best of science.

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ck2
I wonder what kind of war moon-water will start.

The first country to start using it is going to cause an uproar.

~~~
run4yourlives
You're going to start moon wars when Canada has 10% of all the freshwater on
the planet?

~~~
scarmig
"Water on the moon" and "water on the earth" have very different values: the
cost of transport dwarfs the cost of the water. A barrel of water on the moon
is worth millions because of those costs. Beyond that, "water on the moon" is
relatively cheaply converted into "water in space."

I still doubt that a war would end up happening over it, if only because it
appears relatively cheap enough to extract that it's not worth the effort and
risk to build a war-making apparatus to prevent other people from extracting
it.

~~~
ktizo
There is surface water on the moon that is constantly replenished when the sun
rises. Not loads, and most of it gets boiled off again as the sun gets higher
in the sky, but it is there. Is formed by hydrogen ions in the solar wind
reacting with oxides in the rocks.

