Soviet Engineers Turned Yuri Gagarin's Spacecraft Into A Spy Satellite 

hmmmm and Kerbal sounds so much the same

thanks that's kind of cool

As a Russian, I know most of it from Mark Wade's _Encyclopedia Astronautica._ BTW, craft: (countable, plural craft) A vehicle designed for navigation in or on water or air or through outer space [since the 17th century].

@@b1laxson unfortunately not if you pronounce korabl' properly :) not kurbl but closer to kuh-rub-bl' with the stress on the "rub" syllable...... oh well, it's impossible to explain this way

I always like hearing details like that. Thank you. :)

I thought that was Orbiter game play.

@@ByAnyMeansNecessary. it was orbiter gameplay up until about 7 minutes in.

@@ByAnyMeansNecessary. ah, Orbiter. A gem. It's a plan one day to make a functional delta glider in KSP

I myself like ksp stockalike graphics (scatterer+waterfall+restock)

Does RO stand for realism overhaul?

Now you know why nobody behind the iron curtain owned a refrigerator.

@@alman5568 and why nobody (well, most people) in North Korea never will.

North Korea should start a space program

Imagine if they spent that money on their people. But you know, communists.

@@alman5568 your lack of knowledge about the USSR is very cringy, and your assumptions are actually quite insulting.

Our balls are always launching, to the left and to the right. It's my belief that our big balls should be launched every night.

I wonder how many people will get that reference.

Did you ever see the shuttle fly?

@@sidv4615 I got to tour Cape Kennedy twice while a young Civil Air Patrol cadet in the early 70s. Once a Saturn V was on the pad. But I've never seen a live launch. Except for the hundreds of my homemade ones!

@@terryboyer1342 wooow, you got to see the Saturn V on pad, thats awesome. how far were you from it? did it really seem 300ft+ tall?

@@sidv4615 Didn't get right up to it. Hard to estimate how close we were as so young and many years ago. I thought at the time it didn't look as big as expected so maybe we were a ways away.

@@terryboyer1342 do you remember where you were when challenger happened in ‘86? What was it like?

They had center of mass in a spot designed to orient it properly I believe. Maybe Scott can comment on that.

Was thinking the exact same thing, JombieMann!👍

The streamlined look was probably due to limitations of the _animation_ technology of the day!

It's their approach in all of their technology and it causes me to deeply respect them.

That’s a very good approach, if you ask me.

This might work but daring innovation done right is much better. Just compare SLS and Starship!

@@SteenLarsen SLS is just refurbish parts from Shuttle tho

@@LuigiToby That's exactly my point.

"do everything they can" as in "do not have money for anything else" :)

@@randomnickify yeah, pretty much :D it drives innovation in a... "Russian" way

I do the same thing in KSP. Add a fuel tank here, delete an RCS pod or landing legs there, covers all the contracts.

not Russian, but Soviet. Korolev was Ukrainian by the way

It’s called an evolutionary approach, you make a good design, and keep refining and improving it.

But probably not with cameras in an acid bath at several hundred degrees Celcius.

The Venusian princesses flew up on their dragons to put lens caps so their secret wouldn't be exposed.

When it got to Venus, it just couldn't handle the pressure.

Petition to make sure it's doesn't work like cryptocurrencies.

Petition to make the coins shaped like astronaut wings, so Bezos' billionaire friends can't feel cool about their fake pins anymore!

Petition make it NFT so the NFT cunts can't monetize it.

They already are. You just have to save up enough space nerd points until you can cash them in for a salary.

He mentioned a while back the Russians tend to name their rockets after the first payload they carry.

Thanks for that. You have some deep subject matter knowledge I’d say.

Ahhh😊, my first slr was an EM. I remember it with affection as it was as tough as you said but you needed to learn how photography worked to get good results from it, a fantastic teacher! I still use the skills I learned on that camera with my current dslr 😊.

@@andrewnewstead4367 My first SLR was also a Zenit EM. I got it for free (broken), repaired it and shot about 40 rolls of film before switching to Praktica L line (with the MTL5, later sold for a VLC2). If you learned to take good pictures with a fully manual camera, e.g. Zenit EM, you can take pictures with anything. I keep my old Praktica VLC2 and VLC3 out of nostalgia. And I also got another Zenit EM (the original one I sold, and this second I traded for some lenses) just to add to the collection as the first camera I had, although I had a fully black version, this one is the more typical silvery-gray and black. Also keep a few old M42 lenses. Once in a while, about once a year, I take out the old cameras and shoot a roll of BW film, develop it and scan the negatives. Just for fun. This year I will take the VLC2 with Pentacon lesnes out. My most recent addition to the collection is an Opema II with Meopta Belar f2.8 45mm lens, which I got for free from a friend, who found it. He did not want it, although I insisted that I will just clean and service it (the lens focusing was stuck) and give it back to him. He refused, now I consider myself as having it in long term lease. The interesting thing is that this camera has a picture format of 24x32, so you can get 40 shots on a 36 frame film. And since I managed to get 39 shots at 24x36 constistently, I expect to get 44 or 45 frames with the Opema II.

There are a lot of different products/vehicles/companies named Zenith in the English speaking world, I guess it's not too surprising that there are 2 different Zenits in Russia.

My first camera when I was about 13 was a Zeiss Ikon, I desperately wanted a Zenit E but could not afford one. Life is cruel!

Technically the main vehicle did re-enter after all canisters were expended, it's just that unlike the film canisters, it didn't have to *survive* that re-entry so it didn't have heat sheilding or parachutes, and wasn't as particular about the re-entry location, since it was supposed to burn up. But using the small rcs thrusters that it would normally use to orient itself and to adjust timings so it would be over the intended target to take pictures, it would also be left in a degrading orbit on purpose. Not one that would re-enter immediately, but one that would re-enter eventually after enough passes. To get good film shots, the satellite was as low altitude as possible, so it didn't take much to make it scrape a little atmosphere to get the orbit to degrade.

Anything capable of being a space launcher is also capable of being an ICBM.

@@akulkis But from the point of view of standing alert and being combat ready, the R7 sucks. It's huge, requires LOX and needs to be sitting at the pad. for a long time. Easy to catch it on the pad with a bomber dropping a nuke on the site. I'll bet the 1950's prelaunch sequence was so long, Penkovsky could radio word of a pending first strike, and SAC would have a nuke on the site within 15 hours, catching it on the pad not ready for flight. Meanwhile Atlas was silo stored and only needed to be above ground 15 min before launch.

@@AndrewTubbiolo The Atlas was coffin-stored, not silo-stored (the silos were for the Titan I, which entered service slightly later), but the rest of your points are of course valid.

@@vikkimcdonough6153 Early Atlas was coffin stored the Atlas F was silo based. Stored and elevated vertically. Granted the F went operational in '61. I'm not sure when the R7 started standing alerts.

The US did this early on with the Ranger platform. Ranger was just to crash into the moon. It didn't need to be complicated. But JPL wanted to design a core platform that could easily be adjusted for other missions. So while Rangers were still failing to crash into the moon, a differently outfitted version of it flew successfully by Venus as Mariner 2. The platform didn't have a long lifetime but Nasa and JPL learned a lot from it.

It works for people too. 😎

Look up Manned Orbiting Lab MOL. It was to be a manned variant of a Gemini spacecraft with a small workspace where astronauts could operate spy telescopes. It was never built because remote control of spy satellites was advancing so rapidly having two astronauts on board was not necessary.

Like the CORONA satellites?

@@executivesteps I'm aware of the MOL, what I meant is an unmanned Gemini spacecraft .

I'm sure McDonnell Aircraft (later McDonnell Douglas) would have been glad to keep building them!

@@executivesteps There were manned and unmanned versions of MOL. MOL didn't die because of the development unmanned satellites, it died because the NRO could not justify the simultaneous development of a wide-area search system (KH-9 Hexagon) and a Very-High-Resolution system (KH-10 Dorian/MOL) coupled with the fact the Nixon desired a realtime reconnaissance system (which eventually became the KH-11 Kennan but a wide variety of options were considered). MOL also had the problem of offering very little in the way of improved performance for great investment. It was supposed to achieve a resolution of 4 inches/10cm, the maximum which could be achieved due to atmospheric interference, but KH-8 Gambit-3 turned out to be capable of already achieving these resolutions at low altitude.

It was not super cost-efficient by any means. The military tends to spend money like crazy. Same for US early space satellite program.

Such a technological superpower it’s first plant to produce toilet paper was built in 1969 😅 The Soviet government didn’t have the same level of income Western governments did, so while it was able to keep up militarily and in high technology, consumer technology was severely lacking in comparison with the West.

Not just early. The DoD has their own version of Hubble in the KH-11 and it's derivatives. It's hard to pin down how many there have been, but it's at least a dozen and likely several dozen. NASA has been given three KH-11 chassis over the years. One is Hubble, one will be the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the third is in storage.

@@Hevach Hubble isn't a KH chassis. The influence the DOD had was in telling NASA "we reccomend these contractors who may or may not have some experience in building satellites and mirrors of approximately this size."

Bears mentioning that the soviets manufactured 35mm film cameras branded Зенит, which translates into Zenith

Tell me a letter in Russian alphabet, and I give you a common word that is a curse or private human parts. We wouldn't be able to name anything! Nah, most likely there was an side idea that got a letter but went nowhere.

@@vladimirdyuzhev Это *г* , а не объяснение.

@@vladimirdyuzhev Ь

@@wilfriedklaebe You got me there. We should name our systems Объект Ь and Обьект Ъ, but nothing else.

@@vladimirdyuzhev (linguanerd glasses on) Ъ and Ь were bona fide vowels in Russian all the way into the XIII century, no matter how short they were. Even today e.g. the preposition *с* is pronounced in that ancient way in slow speech: */съ/* So using Ъ and Ь in names like that isn't exactly as absurd as it might seem. Of course, it's got nothing to do with Г being a very common and very recognizable euphemism for *говно*

Presumably, you mean the Apollo Lunar Module (LM), initially designated the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). I live in a rather small house (approx. habitable volume 150 cubic metres), but I'm sure it's much bigger than the LM, so I find your comment puzzling. The habitable volume of the LM Ascent Stage was only about 4.5 cubic meters! The volume of the entire pressurized compartment was about 6.5 cubic meters.

@@robst247 The LM had a length (or height, depending on how you look at it) of 7.04 m, a width of 9.4m with the landing legs extended, and a diameter 4.22 meters, excluding the landing gear. So it had a base of about 88 square meters, with the landing legs extended. That's about the same area as my 3 room apartment. And my rooms are not 7.04 meters tall like the LM, they are only about 2.5 meters tall. So yes, it was about the size of a 2 story house, looking from outside. Nobody talked about habitable volume, or claim it had a lot of space inside. And, even if we ignore the landing legs, you could only fit it in a cylinder with a volume of about 100 cubic meters, so comparable to your small house. And if you think your house is small, you should read about the subdivided apartments in Hong Kong, they have an average area of 4.5 square meters per person, so you barely have have enough space for a bed and a desk.

@@VladimirNicolici The LM had two parts: the lower, octagonal part was the Descent Stage and the upper, more complex-shaped part was the Ascent Stage. The two astronauts were accomodated in the roughly cylindrical pressurized compartment of the Ascent Stage, which -- in terms of volume -- was only a very small fraction of the total you have calculated.

That's supposed to be the 1975 Kosmos 782 Bion satellite, I thought the Yantar instrument module was only recently used.

Best maps, because Soviet Union was planing to conquer the World, put everywhere red flag, make everyone speak russian and forget about any religions and gods.

And breed bears and give everyone free bothle of vodka every hour

Bro the video released 50seconds ago, and is 18min long. How did you see it so fast😅

That's interesting. Did they actually have to verify that some silos were empty?

@@rpbajb They were counting missiles, missile type which would give them a warhead count. They could tell by re-entry vehicle type on the tip of the missile. Ours had a silver shroud which housed 3 warheads.

@@ammoguy76 Do you know how they verify the number of warheads in the Trident IIs on the boomers?

@@rpbajb At every military installation that houses nukes, the base lodging has rooms that are used to house Salt Treaty Inspectors. The inspectors can show up unannounced at any time. So it's my guess that with subs the inspection is done when the sub is in port.

@@ammoguy76 That's interesting, thanks for the info. I always thought nuclear subs were surrounded by super tight security. That is, until recently a guy in a barber shop told me about the time he got a ride from Maui to Pearl in a fast attack sub (USS City of Corpus Christi). It was "family day", and his son was the weapons officer. Surprising to me, but I've never been in the Navy.

I get the feeling the Surveillance Community wasn't happy with CORONA, and hence the quick progression to GAMBIT and then onto HEXAGON (possibly via other spy satellite families/demonstrators).

@@vicroc4 There were some other things going on too though. And I recalled that the fact that satellites didn't " pick up" details/hints of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact build up for going into Czechoslovakia in 1968, which led to certain recriminations. Now that last bit is recalling to points that came out back in the late 1980s. So maybe issues around managing orbits, optics, resolution, other sensors came into play. I would have too look. But a pretty interesting history, and they must have moved forward enough to head the Manned Orbital Laboratory off at the pass (it got cancelled in 1969)....

Well, it was involved in "Lost cosmonauts" hoax, so it already has a horror movies based on different aspects of that mission.

@@averageeclairenjoyer3010 i was thinking more like Andromeda Strain, or mutated space chimp. Maybe both

**Some what