drew@drewexmachina.com
Recent years has seen a marked increase in the planetary community’s interest in Venus after decades of near-neglect. Part of this renewed interest is to understand […]
In recent years, we have grown used to seeing a stream of new pictures taken from the surface of Mars and the Moon from advanced landers […]
During the summer of 1990, I got a chance to check out a large exhibit of Soviet space hardware at the Boston Museum of Science (see […]
During the opening years of the Space Age, the Soviet Union took an early lead with an impressive series of space firsts: the first satellite, the […]
One of the most crucial phases of many interplanetary missions is orbit insertion. Everything must go right the first time, or the spacecraft fails to enter […]
On October 18, 1967 the sole 1V spacecraft to survive launch for the Soviet “V-67” mission to Venus, called Venera 4, finally reached its target. The […]
By the beginning of 1963 as the crippled Mars 1 was making its way towards the Red Planet, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev and his team at […]
As anyone with even a passing knowledge of spaceflight can tell you, space is an unforgiving place. While the majority of space missions launched today are […]
The Venera program was undoubtedly the most successful and best known series of Soviet planetary missions. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a succession of spacecraft […]
In recent years it seems that Mars has dominated NASA’s planetary exploration program while proposals to study our twin-planet-gone-bad, Venus, are being repeatedly rejected. Something similar […]
Over the last half a century or so, NASA has managed to land operating payloads on a number of bodies in our solar system. Naturally the […]
Ask any serious space enthusiast about the exploration of Venus and the Soviet Venera missions immediately come to mind. During the 1970s and first half of […]
