Slashdot Mirror
Soviet Space Battle Station Images Published
An anonymous reader writes "Images of the Soviet Union's laser space battle station Skif and its prototype Polyus have been published on the web. Polyus-Skif was the Soviet response to the American 'Star Wars' program of the 1980s. The Polyus was launched in May 1987 but a faulty sensor caused it to de-orbit into the South Pacific. More information can be found at Encyclopedia Astronautica."
...yes, I would pretend this as well ;-)
I especially like this picture, which seems to almost be a spy shot froma James Bond movie, or as one of the posters commented, "Looks very Thunderbirds-ish."
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
here, just in case that one gets Slashdotted. It's already starting to look beat-up.
Interesting comments.
And they said that movie with Clint Eastwood in space was farfethced. Hah!
*ahem*
We do have a cowboy in office, don't we?
Why iss this photo up on the Latvian army's website? anybody find any other goodies there?
I'd bid at least $50 bucks for it on eBay
War Stars You!!
:p
What it had to be said.. at least it's out the way now
Comments at the website (yes I RTFA) say it wasn't a faulty sensor but a software error which caused the Polyus to turn 360 instead of 180 degree upon reaching orbit, and it boosted itself back into the atmosphere. Oops!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
What ifn dem turrizts got hold of dat? They'd shoot lasors right at our testic^H^H^H^H^H^Hgon^H^H^Hballs and we wouldn't have a goll durn chance. Better tell Senator Frist it's A-OK to appropriate 300 mill for that Star Wars whatjamagig even if it don't work! Gosh!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
>Isn't it great that that dictatorship spent itself into bankruptcy?
On a completely unrelated note Bush just signed a bill putting the US 800 BILLION in debt.
... it's a moon.
...we'd just have to get George Lucas to go back and edit it so that their space station fired first.
~BSHome of the EULA shirt
This will not bode well for us geeks! Does anybody have a laser proof tin foil hat I can borrow??
Taco Bell could have put a big target out in the South Pacific and if it hit it we would have all won free tacos!
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Leads one to ponder about the relative computing powess against the counterpart in those times.
Just how far the computing differences were, considering that a probable computation error caused the machine to orbit incorrectly.
Sunset over the lake, cool mist over the bridge; A leave upon the ripples, the snow reflects its glow.
Soviet propaganda did a really good job of pumping up their apparent strength, but their economy was in dire straits since the mid-1970s. By the time Carter and Reagan had maneuvered the US into backing Iraq vs. the nominally Soviet supported Iran, the Soviets were already well on their way to bankruptcy. The Star Wars program and the resultant Soviet reaction to it probably only hastened the demise of the country by a year at most, according to many economists.
workin on Mars mission."
/. interview?
A most interesting comment from the guy who provided the photos.
Perhaps he woudl be willing submit to a
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Isn't it great that that dictatorship spent itself into bankruptcy?
.4 trillion dollar deficit and growing. Which country are you talking about?
Hmm, George W Bush, a
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Is that just scientist speak for CRASHED? Damn, you guys think you can make poo-poo smell like roses with words can't you? The damn thing crashed into the ocean, it didn't de-orbit. Its like a salesman saying he didn't get the account because the customer de-bought the product.
...just imagine what the USA might just have up there right now.
It's a Bagel.
That's a nice euphism for crash and burn.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
There is a theory the lunch failure was intentional.
Gorbachev had just come to power and wanted to make peace overtures to the West. A giant space battle station was not going to help this endeavour so a deliberate "launch failure" would be the simplest and easiest way of getting rid of the darn thing and shutting down the program.
As I said, it's nothing more than a theory I've heard articulated. I've no idea how much credability or plausibility it has.
Funny that the History Channel ran a show last night on disasters in the Soviet space program. What was very interesting was some seriously devistating disasters that the world at large never knew about until years after the wall came down. One was really impressive, the rocket exploded on the pad killing over 150 people and burning for hours. In another the rocket began to launch, but flipped sideways and dropped. The damage to the launch facility was so bad it took two years to get in back into usable shape. All the while Khrushchev was mocking the US efforts as backwards and offering assistance to a "backwards" nation. Meanwhile covering up their mega-disasters. So it makes you wonder what "really" happened to this thing.
Ya know, the Bush administration really fascinates me. It really shows that although the Cold War is over, the USA hasn't lost its Cold War modes of thought. We're spending so much money and pulling so many dumb stunts in part because we seem to think that we're still standing off against some monolithic enemy that spans 10 time zones. (And yes, I mean to say "we." Don't forget who vote him in.)
I mean, this is the administration that was honestly pushing for the ballistic missile defense shield. And I think that this idea that the only way to make sure a country isn't going to stab us in the back is to make sure it is a republic comes straight out of a 15 years obsolete line of thinking that says that anything that isn't a democracy is going to be much more vulnerable to falling into the USSR's camp.
You step back for a moment, and it almost looks like the USA is some poor traumatized vet who still sometimes sees visions of a battlefield from long in the past and dives under tables to take cover from imaginary grenades and the like. Only you can't take time to feel sorry for him, because for all his raving lunacy, he's still the guy holding the biggest gun in the room.
I always thought it was called Peter the Great...
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
Even while it was an awfully managed country, economically, the Russians pulled out some impressive engenieering feats, specially in the field of aeronautics. In the cold war days, it was all about conquering space, for some reason, and the USSR was right there - neck to neck with the USA. And they had the military power indeed, so they were, arguably, powerful.
If anything, the fall of the USSR saddened me for that very reason. It seems the true technological progress comes in times of war, even when it's a "cold" one.
Skif just seems like a particularly wimpy name for a "laser space battle station".
Skif means "Scythian" in the native tongue.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
In Democraticic America, a de-orbit into the South Pacific causes faulty sensor.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Many Bothans died to bring us this information.
Yikes!
Nuclear space mines, self-defense cannon!
Thunderbirds 1 is go!
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
That's because what it looks like you're seeing in those pictures is the orbiter on its launch vehicle. The orbiter alone (the black thing, if I'm reading things correctly) is probably what those measurements you have are referring to, so that expains the disparity between the pictures and the numbers.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
considering the time & a probable computation error
./ ... "Seems as though the Genesis spacecraft was able to launch from earth, travel through space, avoid aliens, and cruise back into the atmosphere to be caught by stunt pilots waiting patiently with their helicopters. Alas, the brakes didn't work because a sensor was designed upside down.
from
With all the advanced technology, nothing similar or remotedly comparable happens in the new millenium.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
No member of the Reagan or Bush administrations ever admitted or revealed publicly any knowledge of Polyus. The US Navy has made no statements about any attempts to investigate the wreckage of Polyus, which lies on the floor of the South Pacific.
For some reason the phrase "been there, done that" comes to mind.
Considering the amount of money spent on SDI, I can't imagine the US not going to great lengths to try to salvage the wreck in order to see what countermeasures the USSR was working on.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
That's because SKIF is an acronym. It stands for "Super Killer Ignito-Flash".
The rumor is that it crashed into the ocean because of a sensor failure. The truth is it suicided because they gave it a really sucky name.
Yes. A previous poster mentioned a large rocket prototype exploding on the launchpad and killing 150 people. That rocket was supposed to do the same job as the saturn rocket, but failed due to vibration problems ( I think it had 11 engines ). Energia is the rocket that they wanted to build in the 1960's. Its a fantastic design. It can loft Buran into space, or just a giant container, so it can lift quite a bit more than the shuttle could. If the russians can ever fund a major mars mission, Energia can launch just about anything they can think of.
the latest peice of crap we found floating around in low orbit (that noone had a record of being up there
I'd say that was fairly unlikely. See, there are these satellites called 'launch detectors' the US military has that picks up rocket heat signature blooms within seconds anywhere in the world. So they know at least something is taking off and where it is going. And then there are these other things called 'telescopes' that let people on the ground look at things in space. Combine the two and while there might be some military satellite whose exact use is secret, there really isn't anything in orbit that isn't well known.
Not this time. The treaty forbade launching armed craft, but although this thing was slated as a weapons platform, the first unit was sent up without armaments, and no others went up because the project was scrapped with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Virg
Ballistic missile defense makes alot more sense today than it did during the Soviet era.
The Soviets had something like 12,000 warheads pointed at the US. A ballistic missile system that intercepted 98% of them (which is nothing like the actual ABM system being tested) would still leave two hundred or more nuclear detonations in the US.
If you consider the current threats from relatively poor states in the Middle East, North Korea or China, ballistic missile defence makes a hell of alot more sense. Even China only has a couple hundred ICBMs, and a credibile defence renders those launchers obsolete.
The popular notion that the demise of the Soviet Union has resulted in nuclear weapons going away is a dangerous illusion.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You ever thought to think that two launches can be seen as one? This practice of double whammy launching is so old I wonder if they still bother... In those days (early 80's) bloom recognition was in such a sorry state that you couldn't tell the difference between a significant fire and a launch.. Norad had so many freakin' alerts because of forest fires in the soviet forests you wouldn't believe it..
anyway, funky shots of a funky vehicle from a funky time... glad those days are over. I like Russians and I am happy to be their friend. For the others? Yab t'vayuh Maht!
The problem with throwing an ICBM into the air, is that everyone will know where it came from, and you'll have them coming right back at you.
Build a weapon inside the country you want to attack, set it off, never claim responsibility. Then no one knows who did or how to get them back for it.
These types of threats are a lot more scary than China or North Korea throwing nukes around. They know we'll just throw some back at them. When we don't know who attacked us; or it wasn't a country, but a small group of people scattered around the earth, it's a lot harder to take any kind of retaliatory action.
What?
you mean with "president and congress"?
What?
No accident, that. The strategy is known as "arm the enemy to death." If your economy can support a faster arms race than the other guy's for longer, you win.
The designation 'MNP-2' can be seen on the side of the booster rockets in some of the photos. MNP is the Russian 'Mir', or 'peace'. Why would 'peace' be on this machinery? Sarcasm? Camoflauge? (after all, you would expect something like 'KillBot' on the side of a combat vehicle) Simple re-use of boosters from the Mir program? Or maybe hoax? ;-)
"There's lots of junk up there."
And the majority is being tracked by NORAD down to the size of around a basketball; which is the major reason why they actually justify the Cheyenne mountain budget. No. No points for Stargate jokes. Note that this addresses your point about tracking being limited; the military stares outwards.
Civilian tracking is generally a matter of watchin g for new stuff. "we still don't know where the radioactive material on the spacecraft landed."
It's the largely technical problem of finding an object the size of a basketball in an oval area 150 miles wide in the minor axis by 7000 miles in the long axis, the majority of that being water. 270 grams isn't much, and it's probably fairly safe for the moment.
"Maybe not so much with something this big, but you could always claim that it's an expended booster or maybe a failed research satellite if you didn't want anyone paying attention to it."
This was what they said about some Bigbird satellites, except someone did point out that failed satellites don't change orbit. I think that the veil of secrecy surrounding KH lasted for all of five years.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
That sucker is impressive!
While the USSR was already on the way out due to the failings of numerous things (It wasn't just the Soviet economy, mainly it was that the people were simply tired of the Soviet loonies. The Soviet economy could have lasted a lot longer given that it was based on an active imagination and not an actual market), they certainly managed a number of fascinating things technically, such as the Energia rocket and Buran and the Venera venus landers.
Mainly though, this Polyus battle station shows what a waste the SDI initiative was in the first place, and more importantly, for today's world of Texas cowboys, what a waste the missile defense shield is. The huge amount of money wasted on lunatic plans to conquer space is easily countered with comparitively cheap countermeasure, be they a space based laser battlestation (why does the US think that China could not build one itself, with the same lack of hoo haa that the Russians had?) or a manouvering warhead.
But those big defense companies need to justify their existences, employees salaries, and profits, don't they?
And speaking of people, amazing how not one photo has a single person in it. Giant boosters, complex machinery, huge manufacturing centers... And no one single person. Not even independent ground vehicals.
And yeah, it does look like the Thunderbirds. If I stare long enough, I could swear I see the strings.
I'm calling BS Flag, 30 yard line. It may be legit, but somebody is gonna have to do better than those photographs.
You need a FREE iPod Nano