Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads, where we take the most dense,
complex stacks of information, the deep history, the surprising science,
the forgotten stories, and we really just pull them apart
to find the essential fascinating nuggets of knowledge you need.
Speaker 2: Today, we are pointing our intellectual radar out a world
that I think represents the ultimate planetary betrayal.
Speaker 1: Betrayal, I like that, What do you mean, well.
Speaker 2: Venus, it was once imagined as Earth's tropical sister, you know,
a twin of warmth and maybe even water, but it
was revealed to be well, the Solar System's most hostile environment,
just an absolute healthscape.
Speaker 1: It's a planet that I find utterly captivating because it
presents this profound paradox. We're talking about our closest neighbor,
a world almost identical to Earth in size, in density, basic.
Speaker 2: Composition, building blocks are there.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and yet it's catastrophically violently different. I mean, the
surface is hot enough to melt lead, the atmosphere is
ninety two times heavier than ours.
Speaker 2: And those beautiful impenetrable.
Speaker 1: White clouds furic acid. Just wow.
Speaker 2: What's truly fascinating, though, is the history in the early
days of space exploration. Mars, which is so popular now,
was actually kind of a known quantity. Telescopes could see
its surface. Its thin atmosphere didn't hide much.
Speaker 1: Right, You could see the polar caps, the darker regions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but Venus was a total enigma. That dense, bright,
uniform cloud cover didn't just obscure the view. It led
a lot of twentieth century scientists to assume it must
be trapping moisture and.
Speaker 1: Warmth, which sounds logical, it does.
Speaker 2: They thought it could lead to a tropical Earth like surface. Yeah,
and this very mystery made it the premiere target, the
great unknown, the obvious next step in the space.
Speaker 1: Race, and that is our mission for this deep dive.
We're plunging headfirst into the staggering achievements and the repeated,
often immediate failures of the Soviet Union's ambitious Venera program.
Speaker 2: They were the only ones really determined to pierce that
deadly veil.
Speaker 1: So we're going to uncover the brutal secrets they ultimately
found on Venus, and crucially why, after decades of heroic engineering,
humanity has essentially abandoned the Venusian surface.
Speaker 2: And you have to connect this to the bigger picture,
the Cold War imperative. I mean, the early nineteen sixties
were less about high minded science, oh much less, and
more about demonstrating political and technological superiority. Every first first satellite,
first person, first to the moon, was a monumental propaganda victory, and.
Speaker 1: The Soviets were just dominating that early scoreboard. Yet Spotnick,
then Eureka Garin, first man in orbit. They were the
absolute masters of early rocketry.
Speaker 2: They were so for the Soviet leadership. Venus was simply
the logical geopolitical check mark that had to be secured.
They had to be the first to reach another planet.
Speaker 1: Even if the technology wasn't quite ready for the challenge.
Speaker 2: That's the thing. The scientific data was almost secondary to
the historic milestone. It was about planting a flag metaphorically speaking.
Speaker 1: So let's start with that atmosphere speculation in the scientific
community at the time, what was the great debate? Was
it a jungle or a furnace?
Speaker 2: Well, the optimistic view was incredibly compelling, built on the
limited beta they had. Since Venus is closer to the
Sun and the cloud's trap heat, many believed that warmth
and the dense atmosphere would mean high humidity.
Speaker 1: Okay, a planet wide tropical zone.
Speaker 2: Exactly, steaming jungles, swamps and possibly even you know, slow
moving alien life forms. People were talking about large insects
or reptiles, things that could be protected by the heat
and humidity.
Speaker 1: It's so wild to think about now, but that view
was it was understandable, right right, especially when you contrast
it with the frozen, dry conditions they already knew about
on Mars.
Speaker 2: It was. However, even back then, there was a skeptical
minority view, and it was most famously championed by a
young Carl Sagan.
Speaker 1: Ah Sagan, of course.
Speaker 2: He argued that the very feature that made Venus seem habitable,
that dense, unbroken blanket of clouds, was actually conclusive evidence
of something else, entirely, something much worse, much worse, an unstoppable,
wildly out of control greenhouse effect. He predicted the surface
would be an arid, superheated healthscape, not a paradise.
Speaker 1: But the scientific community of the day they were slow
to accept just how severe Sagan's theory was.
Speaker 2: Well, they clung to the possibility of liquid water. They
needed proof, and the Soviets were the first to make
a serious attempt at getting.
Speaker 1: It, which brings us to Venera one in nineteen sixty one,
and just the sheer audacity of these attempts. I think
we have to appreciate the technological gap here we do.
Speaker 2: People often forget that these early interplanetary emissions were launched
using the R seven, the same massive ballistic missile that
was designed to carry nuclear warheads.
Speaker 1: It was reliable as a rocket, but the guidance systems
were archaic by today's standards completely.
Speaker 2: When we talk about guiding interplanetary flight with effectively nothing
more sophisticated than a calculator, we're talking about inertial measurement
units I amuse, coupled with basic onboard processors that had
less computing power than a modern digital watch.
Speaker 1: So once that probe left Earth orbit and fired its
final burth to head towards Venus, that was pretty much it.
Speaker 2: That was it. There were very limited opportunities for course
correction over tens of millions of kilometers. If your initial
velocity or your angle was off by just a fraction,
the probe would miss the planet entirely.
Speaker 1: It's like trying to hit a bullseye on the Moon
with a slingshot from Earth.
Speaker 2: A very good analogy, and that's why these missions were
always launched in pairs like Venera one and Venera two.
It wasn't about redundancy in the modern sense.
Speaker 1: It was an emission of failure.
Speaker 2: Almost It was an acknowledgment that the likelihood of one
mission failing was almost one hundred percent. So Venera one launched,
and predictably, it suffered a system failure.
Speaker 1: En route, but it did fly past Venus.
Speaker 2: It did, which was later confirmed, making it the first
probe to do so, but it sent nothing back, no data.
Speaker 1: And then Venera two in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2: Five, same story. It also suffered a catastrophic system failure
before reaching its destination, zero usable data. So, after two
years to immense rockets, two very expensive failures, the Soviet
Union learned nothing about the planet itself.
Speaker 1: They only learned how incredibly difficult interplanetary navigation really was.
Speaker 2: Right, and while the Soviets were regrouping, the US seized
that window of opportunity. In nineteen sixty two, NASA launched
Mariner two.
Speaker 1: This was a much lighter, simpler probe, a.
Speaker 2: Flyby mission, it was, but it achieved a historic milestone,
the first successful close up observation of another.
Speaker 1: Planet, and Mariner two delivered the ultimate reality check. It
basically proved Sagan's grim prognosis correct. How did it do that?
How did you get that temperature data from orbit through
those thick clouds.
Speaker 2: It carried a microwave radiometer. This was the key piece
of tech because microwave radiation can actually penetrate the cloud
layers that visible light can't I see. So as Mariner
two flee past the planet, it performed a forty two
minute scan measuring the radiation being emitted from the surface
and the lower atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And the numbers it sent back were damning. They called
it the Mariner shock.
Speaker 2: It was brutal. The radiometer measured temperatures from orbit up
to four hundred and fifty nine degrees fahrenheit. That's two
hundred and thirty seven degrees celsius, so not just warm,
not even close. It was double the boiling point of water.
It told scientists definitively there could be no liquid water
on the surface. Anything organic would be instantly incinerated. The
myth of the tropical paradise was.
Speaker 1: Dead, buried under extreme heat and beyond just the heat,
Mariner two also quantified the atmosphere sheer scale.
Speaker 2: It did. It discovered an incredibly tall cloud layer extending
eighty kilometers above the surface.
Speaker 1: And to give you some perspective on that on Earth,
eighty kilometers is approaching the official boundary of space. It's
like having a cloud layer that stretches from the ground
to the edge of space.
Speaker 2: The implications were immediate for NASA, based on the insanely
high temperature, the crushing pressure they now suspected, and the
sheer height of these toxic clouds.
Speaker 1: They pivoted.
Speaker 2: They pivoted heart They decided that building hardware capable of
surviving that environment was prohibitively difficult and expensive, especially.
Speaker 1: When the Moon was right there a more immediate and achievable.
Speaker 2: Political prize exactly so, they largely switched their focus to
the Moon and Mars, and they essentially left the exploration
of the Venusian surface to the Soviets.
Speaker 1: The Americans were out and the Russians were doubling down.
Speaker 2: This really marks the beginning of the Soviet Union's true
commitment to Venus. They were persistent, maybe even stubborn.
Speaker 1: Well, they viewed Venus as theirs. Now a monumental discovery
just waiting to happen, especially now that the US had
basically conceded the planet. They weren't deterred by the Mariner shock.
Speaker 2: No, they just knew they had to build bigger and stronger,
and that decision led to the second wave of probes,
Venera three and Venera four.
Speaker 1: So the engineers realized the R seven booster could handle
much larger payloads.
Speaker 2: Right, So the probe mass jumped significantly from around six
hundred and fifty kilograms to over nine hundred kilograms, and
that increase in mass allowed for some crucial design improvements.
Speaker 1: These weren't just bigger, heavier shaite, though there were scientific upgrades.
They were instrumented much better.
Speaker 2: Far better. They were carrying radar, altimeters, barometers to measure pressure,
gas analyzers to study the atmosphere's composition, and most importantly,
a sophisticated detachable descent module.
Speaker 1: Which was designed to parachute down and take those crucial
readings all the way to the surface.
Speaker 2: That was the plan, and Venera three, which launched in
nineteen sixty six, achieved what you could call a historic failure.
Like that term, it experienced a system failure during its flight.
It lost communication, but its game was true. It slammed
directly into the surface of Venus.
Speaker 1: And that crash landing made Venera three the first man
made object to ever impact another planetary body. It's such
a strange distinction to hold, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is the Soviet Union ended up scoring this unfortunate
but significant hat trick of crash landings, first on the Moon,
first on Venus, and later first on Mars.
Speaker 1: It really just underscores the difficulty of engineering a true
soft landing. With the technology of the nineteen six sixties,
You're relying so much on timing and luck.
Speaker 2: But the real breakthrough the moment that delivered the first
true scientific data from inside the Venusian atmosphere. That was
Venera four in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: So this probe successfully deployed its capsule, the parachutes opened,
and it began this slow, deliberate drift downward, taking those
first ever in situ measurements.
Speaker 2: And the data it's sent back created what you called
the atmospheric paradox. High up, the probe experienced temperatures around
ninety two hundred degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: Surprisingly hospitable, like a warm summer day in the tropics.
Speaker 2: Exactly what they'd hoped for, just in the wrong place.
But as it descended, the climate violently ramped up a
dramatic increase, not just in temperature, but crucially in atmospheric pressure.
Speaker 1: And the engineers had just severely miscalculated the density and
pressure profile of that lower atmosphere.
Speaker 2: A massive underestimation. At sea level on Earth, we experienced
one bar of pressure based on their pre flight estimates.
The Venera four capsule was built to withstand maybe ten
to fifteen.
Speaker 1: Bar, which is a substantial amount it is.
Speaker 2: But it was nowhere near enough. The reality was far
more extreme. As the capsule descended, the atmosphere became so
dense that the pressure was likened to the experience of
diving deep into the ocean.
Speaker 1: Where the air isn't just heavy, it feels like it's
crushing you from all sides.
Speaker 2: Yes, like a liquid rock pressing down. And then, after
ninety minutes of descent at an altitude they believed was
around twenty five kilometers above the surface, transmission abruptly and
violently died, just gone gone. The widely accepted analysis, which
was confirmed by later data, was simple. The capsule was
structurally insufficient for the environment.
Speaker 1: It was crushed, crushed like a beer can't.
Speaker 2: By the immense weight of that dense, heavy atmosphere. It
was a hydraulic force.
Speaker 1: That information must have been absolutely devastating to the engineering
team to have come so close to prove you could
survive the initial descent, only to have your hardware fail
because of the fundamental misunderstanding of the destination.
Speaker 2: You have to step back for a moment and consider
the timeline. This happened in late nineteen sixty seven. By
early nineteen sixty nine, the Americans were finalizing preparations for
the Apollo Moon landing.
Speaker 1: So the Soviets knew they had lost the Moon race.
Speaker 2: They knew the political imperatives shifted if they couldn't land
a man on the Moon. They needed a game changing
planetary first to maintain their global.
Speaker 1: Prestige, so they launched Veniera five and six in January
nineteen sixty nine, even though they knew, they absolutely knew,
the design was fundamentally flawed. Against the pressures that Veniera
four had.
Speaker 2: Confirmed, they did. I mean, there must have been immense
frustration within the engineering teams, but the political masters dictated
the timetable.
Speaker 1: So These missions were launched just to stay competitive.
Speaker 2: And to capture whatever data they could before they were
entirely eclipsed by the moon landing. They slightly adjusted the
parachute size, hoping for a faster descent to reach the
crushing pressure point later.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't a structural fix, not at all.
Speaker 2: Both priends recorded less than an hour day each before
meeting the exact same crushing fate as their predecessor. It
was a pure testament to that dominant political imperative overriding
sound engineering judgment.
Speaker 1: It's just remarkable that the Soviet Union wasn't discouraged by this.
I mean they were simply motivated to bill stronger. They
realized the only way to beat Venus was to engineer
a machine that could withstand hell.
Speaker 2: Itself absolutely, and this led to a complete design overhaul
for Venera seven and eight. These were what we could
call the extreme environment survival units.
Speaker 1: This is where the engineering truly advanced, right. They were
addressing the dual horror of extreme pressure and extreme heat.
Speaker 2: Yes, they recognized they couldn't just make the old capsules
a little bit thicker. They needed a radical solution based
in material science.
Speaker 1: So what were the key modifications that defined these new
Ironman probes.
Speaker 2: They attacked the problem with layers. First, the overall descent
module was constructed with a much thicker outer shell of
high grade steel to physically resis the known atmospheric.
Speaker 1: Pressure okay, brute force on.
Speaker 2: The outside, but the real ingenuity was inside the sensitive instruments.
The electronics, the batteries, the transmitters were housed within a
perfectly spherical internal pressure vessel made of titanium.
Speaker 1: Why titanium, specifically.
Speaker 2: Titanium is its lightweight, it's incredibly strong, and it maintains
its structural integrity at very high temperatures. It was the
ideal material for this environment.
Speaker 1: So this inner titanium sphere was designed to keep the
internal pressure at one atmosphere, basically creating a little earthlike
bubble for the instruments.
Speaker 2: Exactly protecting them from the external ninety two bar environment.
And that titanium sphere was then wrapped in thermal insulation
multi layer blankets designed to protect the instruments from the
four hundred and seventy five degrees celsius exterior heat for
as long as possible.
Speaker 1: And they made another smart pragmatic design choice. They added
extra padding around the sphere to soften the blood right.
Speaker 2: They were recognizing that maybe a perfect, gentle soft landing
wasn't feasible given the pairs shut limitations. A high velocity
impact was probably likely, and.
Speaker 1: That pragmatic choice paid off, but only due to well
pure accident.
Speaker 2: A very happy accident. Venerus seven launched in nineteen seventy.
When the probe entered the atmosphere, the parachute deployed, but
it didn't last.
Speaker 1: It failed.
Speaker 2: It failed. The material either ripped under the g forces
of deployment, or, more likely, it just suffered rapid chemical
degradation from the sulfuric acid and the heat.
Speaker 1: So the lander just dropped like a rock.
Speaker 2: It did, accelerating to a terminal velocity of sixty one
kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1: That's fast enough to destroy a typical lander. So back
on Earth, ground control must have just assumed Venera seven
was another failure.
Speaker 2: They did. The signal was lost for twenty three minutes,
but then for thirty five minutes they received a faint,
intermittent trickle of data. Wow, and that trickle was monumental
because the lander had dropped so fast that titanium sphere
survived the rapid impact. It essentially bounced off the Venusian.
Speaker 1: Surface, so the sphere was probably dented. The antenna was busted,
but survived.
Speaker 2: It survived, and the data it sent back confirmed all
the worse spheres and cemented the true nature of Venus.
Speaker 1: And that scientific confirmation was terrifying.
Speaker 2: Oh it was. The data indicated a surface temperature of
four hundred and seventy five degrees celsius. That's roughly nine
hundred degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: That's the temperature inside a wood fired pizza oven, or
to use a more industrial analogy, hot enough to instantly
melt aluminum.
Speaker 2: It proved that machine operation on the surface was only
going to be possible for a fleeting moment.
Speaker 1: And by this time the US had claimed the Moon.
The Soviets, they shifted their focus entirely toward interplanetary exploration,
right to robotically demonstrating mastery over the Solar System's inner frontier.
Speaker 2: They did. They even managed a brief but important soft
touchdown on Mars in nineteen seventy one, though that probe
only lasted for about twenty seconds. They were masters of
getting there, but survival remained the challenge.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to Venera eight in nineteen seventy two.
This mission was a resounding success for the new design.
Speaker 2: A huge success. The descent module parachuted down softly and
recorded data for nearly an entire hour before the heat
finally became too much and the electronics failed. This mission
synthesized the final, terrible, complete truth about the Venusian environment.
Speaker 1: So Venera eight confirmed the dual horror in stark detail. First,
the atmospheric.
Speaker 2: Pressure measured at the surface to be equivalent to ninety
two times Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Ninety two times.
Speaker 2: That is the same pressure you would experience if you
were submerged one kilometer deep in the ocean. This changes
the dynamics of the atmosphere entirely and makes it behave
less like a gas and more like a supercritical fluid.
Speaker 1: And the second critical finding elevated the understanding beyond just
pressure and heat. Venera eight confirmed the composition of the
lower atmosphere.
Speaker 2: It confirmed that the entire lower atmosphere is filled with corrosive, noxious,
highly reactive sulfuric acid HASO.
Speaker 1: And that's far more specific than just saying it's like
the stuff inside a car battery.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a much more complex system. The sulfuric acid
clouds on venus are formed high up at about fifty
to seventy kilometers altitude through complex photochemical reactions.
Speaker 1: So it's driven by sunlight, yes.
Speaker 2: Involving sulfur dioxide and water vapor, and this creates a
thermal inversion layer, a zone where the temperature actually rises
with altitude, leading to massive instability and rapid corrosive chemical
erosion of any material introduced into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: So you have extreme heat, crushing pressure, and extreme corrosiveness,
a literal trifecta designed to melt, crush, and dissolve you
all at once, precisely So, knowing this, I have to
ask again, after confirming an environment that seems scientifically pointless
to explore, given the cost and the tiny survival window,
why continue? What kept the engineers going?
Speaker 2: It was a combination of momentum and one last tantalizing
fact returned by Venera eight, which was even with the
dense sulfuric acid cloud cover, the probe's instruments measured that
enough sunlight reached the surface to make photography possible. Ah
it would be heavily filtered turning everything a sickly orange
color due to atmospheric scattering. But it was there, and
the next objective became clear.
Speaker 1: The world needed to see what the surface of Hell
looked like.
Speaker 2: That was the new compelling and achievable goal.
Speaker 1: So this quest for a photograph spurred the third and
final fundamental design change for the Venera program, starting with
Venera nine.
Speaker 2: That's right, the engineers realized their previous design failed because
they still spent too long in the atmosphere waiting for
the parachute to gently lower them down.
Speaker 1: The new philosophy was simple and brutal, minimal exposure.
Speaker 2: Exactly, they intentionally decided to rapidly drop the capsule.
Speaker 1: To pull that off, they would have needed a beast
of a machine, and.
Speaker 2: They built one. The new probe design was massive, tipping
the scales at nearly five metric tons, the approximate weight
of a fully grown African elephant, and.
Speaker 1: That sheer mass helped push the capsule through the less
dense upper atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Quickly it did, But the standout technical marvels of this
design were all centered on embracing the Venusian environment rather
than fighting it. If you're going to intentionally drop the probe,
you need robust, simple landing gear and a braking system.
Speaker 1: So they got rid of complex folding.
Speaker 2: Legs completely in favor of an enormous flat metal circle
at the bottom the impact ring. This ring, attached by
shock absorber legs, served as rudimentary landing gear designed to
distribute the enormous impact force regardless of the terrain.
Speaker 1: But the truly ingenious part which really demonstrates how well
the Soviets came to understand this alien environment, was the aerobrak.
Speaker 2: The aerobrake is brilliant. It's that feature that looks like
a large conical hat strapped to the top of the capsule,
and it was the primary mechanism for slowing the probe
down without a parachute. Had it work, it worked by
exploiting the incredible density of the Venusian atmosphere. To reiterate,
the air on the surface of Venus is about sixty
five times denser than Earth's air at sea.
Speaker 1: Level, it behaves more like water than air.
Speaker 2: It really does so. By creating a massive surface area
with that wide blunt cone, the probe generated enormous aerodynamic drag.
Instead of relying on fragile heat and acid vulnerable parachutes
for the main descent, they used the thick, heavy atmosphere
itself as the primary braking mechanism.
Speaker 1: That is a brilliant counterintuitive solution, using the problem to
create the solution.
Speaker 2: It's one of my favorite feats of engineering in the
entire space race, and the risk.
Speaker 1: Paid off immediately. Vanara nine, launched in nineteen seventy five,
returned the first black and white photograph ever taken on
the surface of another planet.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't a scenic postcard, but its scientific significance
was monumental. The photo showed a field of broken, jagged,
sharp edged rocks surrounded by sand like material.
Speaker 1: The sharpness of the rocks was a key finding right.
It suggested that the weathering processes, though corrosive, weren't sufficient
to rapidly erode or smooth the terrain, or that.
Speaker 2: The surface was geologically young and active, which is a
huge discovery.
Speaker 1: And just a few days later, an Era ten, an
identical lander, sent back a completely different view.
Speaker 2: Totally different a flatter ground with large, smooth, pancake shaped rocks.
It was likely the top of an ancient lava flow.
This demonstrated the diverse active geological features of Venus right
from the.
Speaker 1: Start, but the subsequent missions Venera eleven and twelve were frustrating.
Speaker 2: Setbacks, very frustrating. They failed to return any photographs because
of lens cap failures.
Speaker 1: It sounds like such a simple problem, but when you
think about the complex engineering hurdle, it's incredible. The camera
lens had to be protected by a cap on the
way down.
Speaker 2: Shielded from the melting heat and the corrosive acid, and then.
Speaker 1: An automated high precision, high temperature system had to jettison
that cap at the precise moment of landing before the
lander's electronics failed entirely.
Speaker 2: The synchronization was incredibly difficult, and for those two missions
the caps just didn't come off.
Speaker 1: It just highlights the knife edge of survival they were
operating on. They were performing cutting edge interplanetary science with
automated systems that had mere minutes to function in an
environment that was actively trying to destroy them.
Speaker 2: But then we get to the pinnacle of the program,
Venera thirteen in nineteen eighty one, a truly remarkable success.
This probe returned the first successful color photo of the
Venusian surface, and that.
Speaker 1: Color photo is incredible. It showed flat sandy rock, but
because the lander touched down right near the edge of
a cliff or a large boulder, you could finally get
a sense of scale and depth.
Speaker 2: It made the alien landscape feel tangible and real for
the first time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can even clearly see the metal base of
the lander in the foreground, and it demonstrates that color
shift caused by the filtering atmosphere, a hazy orange glow
across everything.
Speaker 2: Venera thirteen also featured another set of subtle but critical
design improvements. It had these metal fins added to the
outside of the impact ring. They were dubbed aerodynamic teeth.
Speaker 1: What were those four?
Speaker 2: They were crucial for ensuring the probe did not spin
or shade excessively as it fell through the dense atmosphere.
It ensured a smoother trajectory and more reliable instrument readings
upon impact.
Speaker 1: But Venera thirteen was far more than just a camera.
It was equipped with a sophisticated miniature drill and a surface.
Speaker 2: Sampler, the first ever on site chemical analysis of Venusian soil.
Speaker 1: What did they find?
Speaker 2: The analysis showed the material was very similar to a
terrestrial rock called tough which is essentially solidified volcanic ash.
Speaker 1: So this confirmed that Venus wasn't just hot and crushed,
It was extremely geologically active with significant past volcanism.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And one final incredible detail about Venera thirteen. It
carried a microphone.
Speaker 1: So we have the sound of Venus. What did it
actually sound like? Captured through a ninety two bar atmosphere.
Speaker 2: The recordings were limited. They primarily captured wind noise and
the mechanical sound of the probe operating, but it was
noted as sounding strange and alien, a deep, thick acoustic
environment consistent with moving air molecules under enormous pressure.
Speaker 1: The sound of a super dense a atmosphere in motion. Yes.
Speaker 2: And the final chapter was Venera fourteen, which was nearly
identical to thirteen, and it lanted successfully in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 1: It found another flat plane of smooth rocks, and its
soil analysis confirmed the geological findings it did.
Speaker 2: It identified the material as being very similar to selatic bus.
Speaker 1: Salts, which is a critical piece of data.
Speaker 2: Hugely critical. Phialatic refault is the most common volcanic rock
on Earth. It makes up most of our ocean floor,
so the finding strongly connected Venus's subsurface material to Earth's
mantle composition.
Speaker 1: So despite the catastrophic divergence in their atmospheric evolution, their
basic geological building blocks are similar.
Speaker 2: They're twins in a way.
Speaker 1: And that was it. Venera fourteen delivered the last photograph
ever taken of that hellish landscape. Over two decades of relentless,
often failing effort culminated in a handful of photos and
a couple of hours of irreplaceable surface data.
Speaker 2: So we have to ask the inevitable question. After all
that monumental effort, the design breakthroughs, the survival against impossible odds,
the expenditure of billions of rubles, why did the vendor
program stop? And why hasn't humanity gone back to the
surface since nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 1: The reasons are multiple, and looking at it purely from
a return on investment perspective, very sensible. The first factor
was just the devastatingly high cost versus the low data payoff.
Speaker 2: Right, You're talking about designing bespoke, single use titanium armored
probes for an immense expense only to get a few
minutes or at best a couple of hours of data.
Speaker 1: The longest of an arrow lander ever survived was just
under two hours.
Speaker 2: Now compare that to the robotic missions we send to
Mars today. They're also expensive, but they can last for years,
even decades, collecting continuous long term data sets.
Speaker 1: When you're presenting a budget to politicians, advocating for a
probe that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and will
melt in one hundred and twenty minutes is a very
tough sell against missions that provide stable, long term.
Speaker 2: Data a very tough sell. And we cannot, in this
historical analysis ignore the immense political transformation that.
Speaker 1: Was happening the fall of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: The Venera program essentially came to a hard stop right
as the Soviet Union itself was dissolving in the late
nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties. Space exploration, particularly costly
deep space planetary emissions, was the first thing to be
cut when priorities shifted.
Speaker 1: The entire institutional structure that supported this ambitious program just vanished.
Speaker 2: It did, And meanwhile, NASA maintained its sensible reluctance designing
probes that must withstand nine hundred degrees fahrenheit and ninety
two atmospheres of pressure is an engineering problem of the
highest order.
Speaker 1: The difficulty in justifying that immense cost when the data
return is so short lived has been the persistent barrier.
Speaker 2: So they focused their planetary science budgets on orbital missions
for Venus like Magellan, which gave us incredible radar maps.
Speaker 1: And surface missions from Mars where longevity was guaranteed.
Speaker 2: The net result is that the Venera program, despite the
heroic efforts of the Soviet engineers to pierce the veil,
ended up confirming the sheer violence of the environment. It
force us to rethink how planetary atmospheres evolved.
Speaker 1: It established Venus as the ultimate warning the stark consequence
of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Speaker 2: But the legacy is far greater than just a warning
about planetary doom. The Soviets provided foundational data that is
still critical today. They identified the rock types, the tough
and the salt, which established that Venus's basic material composition
is strikingly similar to Earth's, which.
Speaker 1: Raises profound questions about planetary divergence. Why did these two
planetary twins, formed under similar conditions end up following such
dramatically different evolutionary paths and.
Speaker 2: That is where the story truly shifts from history to
the future. The Venera data drives modern proposals. We now
know that the hostile environment isn't a reason to quit.
It's a challenge that must be overcome to fully understand
planetary dynamics exactly.
Speaker 1: The Venera findings are the bedrock for the modern missions
NASA's planning, like Da Vinci Plus and Veritas.
Speaker 2: And those missions won't attempt long term surface survival, but
they use the a Narra data to model the atmospheric
layers and map the surface in high detail from orbit.
They were chasing the secrets of Venus's atmospheric chemistry, which
the Venera probes only sampled fleetingly.
Speaker 1: We still want to know is Venus still volcanically active today?
What drives the incredible super rotation of its atmosphere, which
circles the planet faster than the planet itself rotates.
Speaker 2: The answers to those questions require going back.
Speaker 1: What stands out to be the most looking at the
entire arc of this program is the relentless engineering adaptation
from those early primitive rockets that just failed.
Speaker 2: Completely to the decision to use titanium pressure.
Speaker 1: Spheres, and that brilliant move to rely on the atmosphere
itself as an aerobrake. It is a masterclass in iterating
against physics. They continually redesigned against increasingly overwhelming.
Speaker 2: Odds just to capture two hours of data and a
handful of indelible photographs.
Speaker 1: It's a truly profound story of human dedication.
Speaker 2: It is they solved every engineering problem Venus through at them,
short of achieving infinite power or creating some kind of
superconducting material that could operate indefinitely at nine hundred degrees,
they proved that a probe can land and.
Speaker 1: Function, and that leads us to the pondering question. The
Soviets confirmed the horrific environment, yet they establish that the
materials are similar to Earth's and that sunlight reaches the surface.
So if humanity can now build machines that last for
years on Mars, knowing everything the van Or program taught
us the extreme survival requirements, the necessity of the aerobrake.
Does the potential scientific payoff finally justified the enormous engineering
effort and financial cost of another longer lived soft landing.
Speaker 2: Well, the scientific potential is immense. Studying why Venus went
so catastrophically wrong compared to Earth is essential for understanding
exoplanets in our own climate. But we have to solve
the longevity problem. So what's the technologically active cooling systems,
exotic materials designed to laugh at sulfuric acid and five
hundred degree temperatures, or maybe fundamentally new robotic architectures that
rely on heat resistant pneumatic systems rather than delicate electron
What would it take to make a multi year surface
mission on Venus finally possible?
Speaker 1: I want to know what you, the listener, think the
necessary technological leap is what would it take to build
a robot that could survive not just two hours, but
two years on the surface of Venus. That is a
fascinating challenge to ponder. Thank you for joining us on
this deep dive into the scorching legacy of the Soviet
space program here on Throwing Threads. We'll see you next time.