Posted by Davin Flateau on 10 Jun 2005 at 3:12 pm.
Filed under Astronomy.
It looks like a stormy weekend here in Kansas, which means that stargazers will be staring at ceiling tiles rather than stars. In between reading through the latest issues of your favorite astronomy magazines, take a trip with us to the past.
Gander at a collection of translated Soviet press reports from 1961 about the Venera 1 mission, the first probe ever to try and fly by Venus (contact was lost en route). At the height of the space race, NASA compiled a variety of print and radio reports about the mission to “present information on Soviet deep space research and of affording an estimate of the Soviet press and general reaction to such research.”
It’s fascinating to look at how the new adventure of space exploration was seen in 1961. As I read through the old typewritten pages, the little movie player in my head starts to play those space educational films from the 60s and 70s. You know the ones - with shiny probes landing on Chelsey Bonestell painted planetscapes, and where interplanetary rockets with sleek fins are bombarded by weird animations of cosmic rays. Even though the Universe seemed more mysterious and romantic back then, there was a supreme confidence that science and engineering would answer all questions posed to it. I think that was true for both sides of the cold war. From the Venera 1 documents:
We must be patient and wait for the valuable information about our cosmic neighbor, which will begin to arrive to us in May of this year. We should also keep in mind that one such slight will not solve all problems which are placed before science. The first flight will be followed by more such interplanetary stations. The scientific instruments will become more perfected. The time is not far away when Venus will not have any mysteries hidden from mankind.
It’s a tribute to the process of science and its spirit of cooperation and peace, that you can’t tell which superpower was responsible for that statement. I think a lot of Americans in 1961 would have viewed the Soviet Union with different eyes if they could see that at least on these scientific levels, we were working toward the same goals.
You can leaf through more old space documents as they’re rotated over on File of the Week, and over at Unmanned Spaceflight PDF Documents.
Davin Flateau
