The Soviet R-7 icbm was almost three times the size of the American Atlas, designed to carry a heavy hydrogen bomb. Let's digress into the history of the Soviet H-Bomb. The core of RDS-1, the first Soviet A-bomb, a 22 kiloton fission device. Russian physicists were hoping to play a more creative role, but Beria ordered them to build copies of the American bombs, whose plans had been delivered by the Rosenberg spy ring.

November 10, 1970, the Soviet Union launched the first lunar rover called Lunokhod. Seen here is an illustration of the upper stage of the Proton rocket, carrying the landing platform and the rover. The rover's batteries were charged by gallium arsenide solar panels. It had four cycloramic cameras that scanned panoramic images, and two television cameras in front used for navigation. The wheel and motor assembly, and the cycloramic camera shown here.

Through friends in the Russian science community, I was able to get the raw telemetry from Venera-13 and 14. I funded its recovery from old tapes and conversion to TIF format. It consisted of multiple transmissions with considerable noise. For redundancy, the radio system used two completely different schemes: pulse code modulation at decimeter wavelength, and an old system of pulse-position modulation at centimeter wavelength (with orthogonal coding).

Venera-13 and 14 landed on Venus in 1982 (March 1 and 5 respectively). The lander was contained in the spherical heat shield seen at the top of the spacecraft. The full spacecraft was over 4 tons, launched by the Soviet Union's large Proton rocket. The lander housed a number of scientific experiments in a spherical titanium pressure vessel, surrounded by silica insulation. Temperature inside was also controlled by a phase change material that absorbed heat as it melted.

Let's talk about the Relativistic Rocket Equation.

This can be used to study the problem of reaching very high speeds for interstellar travel... As a rocket consumes its fuel, it becomes lighter and accelerates faster. It's a simple calculus problem to find the final speed V, given the final mass M and initial fully-fueled mass M1, and the exhaust velocity Vex.

This is Tsiolkovsky's classical rocket equation:

Came across some of my old CCITT/OSI books. I think the theory of the OSI stack is still taught in the classroom, but I suspect a lot of the lore will be forgotten. The Internet was starting to spread rapidly in the 1980s. Finland was buying CISCO routers like crazy. In the USA, TCP/IP was taking over as the preferred network protocol. But in Europe and Japan, there was a decision to define their own data network standard.

Soviet flight computer S-530 built by NPO AP (Automatics and Instrument Building). 100 KHz clock, 45,000 operations per second. This was used in the 1970s and 1980s to control Mars and Venus probes. Here is one of two redundant arithmetic-logic units. 8K of 20-bit micro-program instruction ROM was implemented as core-rope memory. Wires threaded thru or around sensors represented rows of 1's and 0's. The large power transistors driving it were the cause of failure in Mars-4,5,6, and 7 in 1973.