
Soviet Moon Mystery Solved By NASA, 50 Years Later - mbrubeck
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/3/27/soviet-moon-mystery-solved-by-nasa-50-years-later
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arethuza
Fascinating chap Sergei Korolev, denounced to the NKVD by colleagues over what
sounds like office politics, tortured and sent to the Gulag for 10 years
(including the awful Kolyma gold mining camps, which were some of the worst)
rehabilitated and goes on to become arguably the greatest ever rocket designer
- with a legacy that includes the ancestors of todays most succesful launchers
used by the Russians and ESA.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev>

<http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESAhistory/SEM7PZP11ZE_0.html>

~~~
nodemaker
"Following the fall of the NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov, the new chief Lavrenti
Beria chose to retry Korolev on reduced charges in 1939, but by that time
Korolev was on his way from prison to a gulag camp in the far east of Siberia,
where he spent several months in a gold mine in the Kolyma area before word
reached him of his retrial. Towards the end of 1939 he was sent back to
Moscow, but he had already sustained injuries and had lost most of his teeth
due to the labor camp's brutal conditions"

And I thought my life was hard!

~~~
arethuza
I can recommend Anne Applebaum's history in addition, of course, to
Solzhenitsyn's works:

[http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-A-History-Anne-
Applebaum/dp/1400...](http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-A-History-Anne-
Applebaum/dp/1400034094)

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hartror
The offical LRO announcement from March:
[http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/539-Mare-C...](http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/539-Mare-
Crisium-Failure-then-Success.html)

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rollypolly

      the spacecraft had tipped over as a result of its landing
    

I can only imagine the frustration of the engineers and scientists.

~~~
hartror
Yeah though not as much as that of the Mars Climate Orbiter team who's mission
failed due to using imperial rather than metric units in a navigation program.

~~~
maxerickson
That failure was somewhat more subtle than that. Someone produced a data file
with no information about what the numbers in the file meant. Someone else
made an assumption about the meaning of the numbers.

Using a single system of measurement would certainly reduce the chance of
negative consequences from such sloppiness, but the sloppiness was the
problem, not the units used in the data file.

~~~
hartror
Agreed. Sorry I phrased my comment poorly.

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franze
2012 - 1974 == 50 ?

well, not according to google
[https://www.google.com/search?q=2012-1974&pws=0](https://www.google.com/search?q=2012-1974&pws=0)

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lifeisstillgood
What ! Russia landed a probe on the moon _during_ Armstrong's moonwalk!

Incredible. The moon, or Times Square? Who could tell.

~~~
rylz
Well, I guess they didn't quite land it.

Something tells me that NASA had a team devoted to watching Luna 15 as it
orbited and watching out for funny business. Imagine the disaster that could
have occurred if the Soviets had decided to use the probe to interfere with
Apollo 11.

Of course, judging from the fates of later Luna missions, I doubt they could
have pulled that off anyway.

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whackberry
The article seems a bit hastily written??? To say the least?

