The Soviet Venera program was really fascinating. It is quite impressive that they managed to build landers that survived even a short period on the surface of Venus, let alone return photographs.
> The Soviet Venera program was really fascinating
Reading my uncle’s old tech magazines and sci-fi from the 70’s was fascinating. Eastern European sci fi was all about colonizing Venus and the Venera landers. The way kids in USA are obsessed with Mars, kids in my part of Europe used to be obsessed with Venus before the influx of Western media.
Getting to grow up on the cusp of that vibe shift was cool.
Življenje in tehnika[1] – popular science magazine in Slovenia that's been running since 1950. Grandparents used to have my uncle's collection from I guess his high school years. Spanned from the mid 70's and into the 80's.
I used to read random issues when I'd go visit. My favorite were the 70's stories about "We are imminently going to have AI cars. Experiments are underway and trucks can now autonomously drive long distances on the highway! Humanoid robots are coming soon look at this super dextrous hand!!".
On the sci-fi side one notable example is The Land of Crimson Clouds (Страна багровых туч, 1959) by the Strugatsky brothers. Unfortunately, there’s no official English translation that I can find.
There's a collection of images returned by the various Venera probes (including the surface photos from Venera-9, -10, -13, and -14) restored from tapes of the original transmissions here: http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
Edit: Oop, missed that someone else posted a link to that same site (different page) a while before me. Well, nevertheless.
The Soviets literally beat the US to every single major milestone in the space program, up through the 60's, except for literally landing men on the moon.
That was deliberate for propaganda purposes. They rushed many of their programs (and got a number of people killed by doing so) and simply never told anyone about the failures. Besides which Sputnik 1 wasn't very useful, but it was what they could rush out the door once they knew the US launch schedule.
Not to say the US Apollo program was fundamentally different... it was just much much bigger. And unlike the Soviets the US published their failures (see the Apollo 1 fire).
Odd to think about how much progress was generated thanks to national pride and propaganda. What a strange time in the history of the world.
Such an incredible mixture of badass achievement and hilarious failure. I guess that's kind of in character for the Soviets, but you don't usually see the two ends of the spectrum mixed so closely.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-venera-program-interpl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera