Friends, today — April 12 — the country in which I live — Russia — celebrates "Cosmonautics Day". It's strange — to wage war and be proud of space achievements at the same time. Personally, I can't understand it. But nevertheless, the first manned flight into space — it was performed by Yuri Gagarin in 1961 — is a world achievement, and our common big step into the Universe.
But on this day I decided to tell you a slightly different story — the story of the exploration of Venus by the space stations «Venera 13» and «Venera 14». There is a rather lengthy story about them in the description of this single.
Venera 14
If the aliens found us right now and made contact with us, they would hardly consider us sentient beings.
Judge for yourself:
Mankind has populated almost the entire planet leaving no room for the existence of other living beings. Some inhabitants of the earth live in futuristic skyscrapers, while others hardly have a hut, but they all strive for equality and justice. Some work for money, others play with money. If suddenly a world epidemic occurs, they blame those who are healthy and do not want to use an untested vaccine, instead of looking for treatments for those who are sick and weak. Every day on the planet somewhere there is a war - big or small. And someone will definitely call the war holy, and someone else will wait until the warring parties destroy each other, in order to ultimately dominate both...
And at the same time with all this, humanity is striving to the Cosmos - to a place where everything that has already happened on Earth has not yet come.
Formally, mankind escaped into space on October 4, 1957 - then many people on the planet learned the Russian word "Sputnik". Since then, the Russians have considered this victory theirs. Although experts know that the author of this technology is a German engineer and SS officer Wernher von Braun. But Russians don't like to talk about it too much. However, like the Americans, the success of their Apollo lunar program is also due to Wernher von Braun, who directly worked for the United States after the war. But the Apollos are still far away.
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a citizen of the USSR and a military pilot, flew around our planet in space orbit. It is this day that is now celebrated in Russia (and throughout the world) as “Cosmonautics Day”. And the inhabitants of Russia are very proud of this achievement of theirs - as if each of them only dreamed of how to master outer space as soon as possible, worked at a space factory, made space rockets.
In reality, of course, things were a little different.
In pre-revolutionary Russia there were quite a few educated people, and some of them were literally seers - they understood that sooner or later Man would step towards the Stars. A revolution broke out, and the smartest of the Russians were forced to leave the country. By the way, about the same thing is happening now - Russia is again losing its intelligence.
Of course, not everyone left then. The world famous founder of cosmonautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, remained, but this helped the scientific and technological development of the country. Russia has focused on increasing its military force. The development of science was not included in government plans.
Later, in the 30s of the XX century, the jet propulsion laboratories, in which scientists developed the first liquid-fuel rockets, were ruined by NKVD raids, and scientists were sent to camps and prisons.
Sergei Korolev spent many years in prison, later becoming the chief designer of Soviet missiles. The government became needed he when the question arose of delivering nuclear weapons to the United States. Korolev managed to transfer the focus of his engineering activities to a peaceful space channel. The launch of the first "Sputnik" was a risky and bold "amateur" - his personal initiative. But the success had a wide international resonance. And from that moment on, the Soviet government began to allocate relatively small funds for the so-called “peaceful space”.
And it must be said that the Soviet Union succeeded in this direction. Space engineers of the USSR were the first to photograph the far side of the Moon, make a soft landing on the celestial body closest to the Earth, and then Soviet automatic stations rushed to other planets - to Venus and Mars.
Failure followed in the Martian direction, but the Soviet program for the exploration of Venus was absolutely triumphant. Of course, the citizens of the USSR did not know that only one of the three launch vehicles was on the right course, but in total over three decades - the 60s, 70s and 80s - more or less successfully officially sent to Venus two dozen automatic stations. Well, unofficially - three times more.
I'm sure it will be hard for you to imagine all this huge space fleet.
However, even with a significant loss of vehicles, the survivors demonstrated the ability to dive into the dense acidic and very hot atmosphere of the planet Venus. And some got to the surface and transmitted signals to the orbital module, and from there to Earth.
The most successful episode was the study of the planet closest to Earth by a pair of automatic stations “Venera 13” and “Venera 14” in 1982. Both stations flew safely to Venus, entered the atmosphere, opened their parachutes, got rid of them at the right moment, and through aerodynamic braking in a dense atmosphere made a soft landing.
It must be said that a soft landing on Venus was made through a collision with the ground at a speed of about 20 miles per hour, but it was planned. And all the devices withstood the landing, immediately began to work and transmit information to Earth.
Time was very limited. At a temperature of +500 degrees Celsius and a pressure of 100 atmospheres, each of the stations had to last only 30 minutes. But in fact, one device worked for two hours, and the other for almost an hour.
During this time, color photo panoramas of the landing site were obtained for the first time, soil samples were taken, the composition of the atmosphere was studied, dozens of lightning discharges were recorded. Even the noise of the Venusian wind was recorded - the first and last time so far. This has never happened again.
It was an amazing scientific experiment. And when people remember the flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, I remember the exploration of Venus by fearless space robots. By the way, this spring marks the 40th anniversary of this Venusian expedition.
In subsequent years, skepticism about space research intensified in Soviet society. This activity seemed wasteful to people, and few people understood what the exploration of Venus gives humanity - after all, we will never be able to move there.
In fact, the exploration of Venus is very important for humanity. This planet is located in the so-called “belt of life” and, according to all the laws of nature, should be suitable for life. But for some reason this is completely wrong - Venus is literally Hell - instead of the expected Paradise.
A legitimate question arises: “What could happen on the planet closest to the Earth, that literally turned all the conditions on it?” Looking at Venus, it is important for people to realize a lot in their behavior. Otherwise, we run the risk of turning our beautiful earthly world into a similar World of Venus, in which we will not have a single chance to survive.
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