Tag: Soviet

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Found: Soviet Moon Rover

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Lunokhod 1

Above is Lunokhod 1, a Soviet robotic rover that landed on the moon in 1970 and eventually died, leaving its final resting place unknown. That is, until a few months ago when UC San Diego astrophysicist Tom Murphy fired off laser pulses at the moon and detected the photons reflected back in the ultrasensitive telescope at the Apache Point Observatory. It turns out that Murphy had found Lunokhod 1. Now, he’s planning to use it to precisely measure lunar motion and test theories of gravity. From IEEE Spectrum…

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Animals, Architecture, Globalism, Plant Life, Science & Technology News

Europe’s Biggest Oceanarium Will Be Located In Moscow

Europe’s Biggest Oceanarium Will Be Located In Moscow 

Duman Oceanarium

It is expected that the proposed enormous oceanarium in Moscow will form part of an amusement complex complete with a cinema, hotel, business center, shopping mall and many restaurants. According to news sources, the Eurasian country of Kazakhstan, which is the world’s largest landlocked country, is financing the construction of one of the new oceanarium.

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Alternative Transportation, Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Historical Perspectives, People Making a Difference

Homemade Soviet-era Russian Submarine

 

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Rub a Dub Dub a post-Soviet Sub

40-year-old Mikhail Puchkov decided to design and build a personal submarine during the stifling era of Leonid Brezhnev’s regime when he was barely twenty years old. He built it secretly in an attic in Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow.

“I was not satisfied with the fate that was laid out for me. I wanted to satisfy myself and to have some respect for my life. If I learned to respect myself, I felt it would be easier to find my niche in life. I didn’t know it would work. I just hoped.”

His family, particularly his father, condemned him and his submarine flights of fancy, and the longer the construction took, the more he complained. The first test of the sub came in 1984 and it “sank like a stone,” in Puchkov’s own words, breaking a rudder in the process and setting a climate for the early dives, which were always a bit tense. He said of those times:

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Analysis, Architecture, Crazy Stuff, Historical Perspectives, New Viewpoints

Abandoned Nuclear Lighthouses Of The Soviet Empire

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Abandoned Autonomous Polar Power

English Russia is hosting a fantastic gallery of abandoned Soviet nuclear lighthouses, which were strung in the polar regions off of Russia’s northern coast. A rather Russian-Engrishy description, but you get the idea:

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses.

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