Hi Scott, thanks for the video about the Molniya satellites. I built a receiver & tracking system using an 8 ft dish (1987 to 1991). They also broadcast Radio Moscow on a subcarrier. One day in 1991 I tuned in and heard Rod Stewart and realized that things really were changing in Russia. My article about how to track Molniya satellites was in the August 1989 issue of Circuit Cellar Ink magazine.
In the late '70s I went to a broadcast satellite (TVRO) convention in San Jose, CA, mainly for those wanting to get into home satellite systems. This was when everything on satellite was broadcast in the clear (no encryption). I had brought my Tektronix 465 to work on a project with a friend. We got into a conversation with a group that had a dish on site that they decided to try to pick up Molniya. They succeeded, and I was told that the audio was in the horizontal sync area, rather than a subcarrier, so I got my scope, and found the audio, and we slapped together a simple circuit to demodulate the audio, and listened to Molniya auido until the satellite went below the horrizon. Definitely a fun weekend.
All those hundreds of Molniya launches are why one of the most common "satellites" you can see flying overhead anywhere on Earth are spent Russian rocket bodies in polar orbits. You will know these by the fact that they're always traveling directly north/South and they tend to slowly fluctuate in brightness as they tumble. You're pretty much guaranteed to see them on any summer evening after twilight.
I spotted one back in the spring which turned out to be a 1974 rocket body. When I saw it it was brighter than any star for a few seconds. It was travelling almost due south to due north.
I've seen many Russian spent rocket bodies pass over Perth Australia on NS polar orbits just after twilight, I keep track of orbiting objects on a phone app and try see them if I see something is going to pass over at the right time (just after the sun has dipped below the horizon and is still shining on any orbiting objects above where I am)
That poor technician with the tape. All the hard worked and money wasted because you did a quick fix with some tape. That must have been a rough week at the office.
Yeah, it must of been the start of the "Have you tried switching it off and on again?" helpline protocol. Bill Gates was watching and learning from the Soviet Union, who'd a thunkit?
@@DamirAsanov And yet you have no problem with "thunkit"? Language changes: it is ours to do with as we wish. Like music. Slang. Rap. Patois. Punchuation.
At Stanford in the 1980’s a student figured out how to receive signals from the satellite over Siberia and it was piped into the campus wide cable TV system. At our research group it became the habit to all go buy a snack at “The Store” in the student union then race back to the office to watch “good night kids” on Russian TV at midnight local time. As the politics changed we had a front row seat. We watched “spotlight on Perestroika”. The funniest thing was when they had the first ever live call-in program. There was some government person they could ask live questions of. But every caller’s question was “this can’t really be live, I don’t believe it”. The host eventually got angry and held his watch up to the camera. It is LIVE, this is the ACTUAL TIME, does anyone have a REAL QUESTION?!
Sting, the singer, was shown a Molnia receiving station on an American university by a friend and watched some Russian cartoons (it was Saturday evening in the US and Sunday morning in Russia). This was the inspiration for his song "Russians with the refrain "Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too".
Our amateur radio station in college (northern California) had a satellite dish antenna which tracked the succession of Molniya satellites and patched at least some channels into the campus cable TV system. I don't remember how the cable TV system dealt with SECAM vs NTSC video formats. We had multi-format TVs to watch it directly if we wanted. I only vaguely remember seeing morning exercise shows. We also had a dish antenna we could manually aim at geostationary satellites, and a smaller microwave antenna we could aim at mountain tops, both of which we of course used to watch bootleg movies from any unscrambled systems we found.
@@mattbartley2843”Rhythmic gymnastics by the sea”, that woman they had doing the exercises on the show was insanely flexible. Taught me to count to 4 in Russian. :-)
One thing that has interested me is that Soviet launch vehicles in the R-7 family often took on the name of one of the early payloads that used that variant.
@@scottmanley Oh, didn't know that connection. "Blixt" is Swedish for lightning, "Mjölner", which is the hammer, is pretty close to "mjölnare" meaning miller. "Mjöl" is Swedish for flour.
Another interesting property of those satellites was that they actually had a sealed capsule with an atmosphere inside them, where the electronics were located. So some of the problems of having electronics in a vacuum (like no convection cooling possible and problems with outgassing of some components) were avoided, of course at the expense of a huge mass increase.
due to the lack of relative acceleration, the cooling against the internal atmosphere wouldn't really be convective since that relies on hot air rising (which it only does because cold air displaces it due to buyouancy which is a thing cuz gravity), it'd be only conductive.
Although simply binding the electronics to an aluminum plate could transport the heat to a radiative panel. Although it is true that our modern consumer electronics are designed to be air cooled, that isn't entirely true, there are plenty of electronics that are water cooled, oil cooled, alcohol cooled and or cooled by an aluminum plate. Simply bathing the electronics in something like mineral oil which would be a liquid would be more effective than a pressurized air environment as liquids are considered incompressible and hence less vulnerable to pressure changes and would carry a lot more heat than air could. Though it would be possible to have the electronics in a pressurized air container, that is hardly necessary nor would it be the most effective solution especially as we even have water and oil cooled electronics in our consumer market.
GREAT explanation of the Molniya orbits. Wikipedia is not nearly so cogent and easy to understand. Plus you always make talk about the Russian achievements so interesting. I am constantly amazed at how brilliantly people used mathematics to achieve exact solutions to problems before computer power got so strong as to make simply modeling the behavior and observing the solution a possibility. That period after Newton and Leibnitz where they exploited Calculus to solve so many problems is such an amazing period. Clearly, the Soviets had very smart mathematicians to make up for their primitive computers. I guess we also had a lot of advantages with our better miniaturization and those hydroLOX upper stages.
Thanks for a great video series on communication satellites, and particularly appreciate your explanation of the unique Molniya orbit! I did internships for Ford Aerospace (later renamed SSL) while in college in the 1979 and 1980 and worked on the first 3 Intelsat V satellites, so com sats are near and dear to me (lots of memorable stories from that time, not the least of which was when I had inadvertently changed the software constants for the flight-ready F-2 spacecraft while it was undergoing final testing in their large vacuum chamber, causing the senior managers to get woken up at 3 am due to telemetry readings being way off... all was well once they figured out what had caused the problem, but it's a miracle that as a lowly intern I wasn't fired on the spot 😲)
I was in SATCOM in the US Army in the mid-1980s. We used the TWT amplifiers to transmit. They were cooled by pure water and laboratory pure (99.6%) Ethylene Glycol (antifreeze). Even with a continuous flow of liquid around the pass tube it still glowed cherry red on the outside so I can imagine what all that heat was doing to that equipment...
I've worked with many satellite communication HPAs up to around 7.5kW and they have all been air cooled. It would have to be a huge power output to require liquid cooling.
Well this was 1983-85 The amplifier that we used was the standard HPA used by all branches of the service then on their large, fixed station antennas. I cannot remember the exact numbers but it was capable of 15KW transmit power singular or 25KW combined if memory serves. We had two units for redundancy but could run them in combined mode if the enemy was trying to jam us. Remember, back then this system was intended to be used in a combat environment so it was quite powerful. One thing I never could figure out though... if they were jamming us and we were running full power, what would happen if the enemy were to just drop their jamming? I would think it would blow the LNAs in the satellite pretty quickly. No one could ever give me a good answer. One time I remember we held an 8 ft florescent lamp up in front of the antenna and it actually glowed... We were only running about 15 watts then too... Have to be pretty nasty running full power. @@cambridgemart2075
In the mid-'80s, an uncle of mine had a very large terrestrial safellite TV dish at his farmhouse in Pennsylvania. We were both curious radio hams, and had just read an article on how to pick up polar satellites, so we gave it a go. We must've futzed around for hours, switching between one of us outside moving the dish and another inside looking at the TV, both of us with handheld tranceivers. When we eventually picked up the Molinaya eliptical orbit signal, which had an animated program (that showed up in black-and-white as it was the SECAM broadcast standard, a bit different than NTSC), we were *so* excited. I still remember every minute!
The Soviets were never short on ideas, or even expertise to pull those ideas off. The Soviet government just didn't have the money to spend. Or would not spend it. For as much as NASA has it's hands tied by politicians, the US managed to get a lot of stuff done. And most (if not all) of it was stuff the Soviets could have pulled off, had they had the money. Much respect to the engineers and scientists behind the iron curtain who did what they could with what they had. Very capable people.
There were no money in USSR like in capitalism. Every state enterprise and bureau had something called a credit budget. This budget was not money because money has to circulate whereas this credit was an artificial limitation on what these enterprises could buy in terms of what they needed. Instead, the Soviet Union may have been vast but its resources were not infinite and the Soviet Union had an industry twice the size of the entire West, its not easy to distribute resources in such a large industry. The military and the space industry had priority on everything, the space industry however was secondary to the military. The USSR lost 27 million people during WW2, this fear had built into their psych and thats why they were on such a large military build up. Because they feared another war.
Eh…they expanded their “empire” quite a bit by/at the end of the war. So they weren’t completely crushed economically or at a loss of resources. But also they were way more hamstrung by their economic woes in the 80s and towards the fall.
@@SMGJohnthey feared US/Western agression and bugeted heavily towards defence. Its wild to think were we could have been if the US hadent been such a huge dick lol
A lot of amateur radio satellites used the Molniya orbit. It worked very well, since amateurs could have a satellite that would stay up in the sky over a certain position for hours at a time and then go back to another position over a different part of the sky for hours at a time allowing amateurs all over the world to share the satellites to make contact.
I had a QSO with a ham in Florida. He was a satellite guy from way back. He said in the 60,a you could talk a long time on the sats. Now it’s minutes. With the help of your post and this video I understand what he was talking about. Many thanks!
Great video, Scott. Well presented, with suspense about whether they’d ever get a successful deployment. You not only have vast technical knowledge, you also tell a story well.
@@Keenath I'm not sure, but it probably is. As far as I remember, it's distantly connected to the word for hammer, молоток / molotok i.e. mallet. So, hammer of Thor connection makes a lot of sense.
Incidentally, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Molotov (he of cocktail fame) chose this nom de guerre as it has a nice industrial communist association. Hammers again.
Now, I haven't looked it up myself, but Scott Manley replied in another comment*, saying: "same etymology root". Thanks for the extra insight/interesting tidbit about molotok and Molotov, btw! __ * If I'm to be overly specific (for no reason): said reply can be found within the comment thread that reads: "What is Scott's today's video about? -The Molniya -Is it a launch system, a spacecraft or an orbit? -Yes" ... kinda wish we could link comments on this platform
@@Lowkeh You can. Just right-click on the comments "posted" time and copy the link address. There's a pretty good chance though that if you try including the link in a comment then the comment will immediately be deleted as being "spam". (It's not just including links, just today I had a comment get deleted just for parenthetically recommending someone's channel.)
1:50 - "Strategic Rocket Forces" is the most awesome name for a military branch ever. (It also makes much more sense than lumping in satellites and ballistic missiles with the Air Force like the U.S. did for the longest time.)
Hi Scott, Hello from Russia and thank you for the video! I read Chertock memories about 20 years ago too. A great insight to Russian space program heydays. Such a open and sincerely book without mouth-playing. Recommend to everyone tech gigs.
We started with a masters program in aerospace engineering one week ago and one of the first things that were mentioned in orbital dynamics was Molniya. So it was really exciting to see you post a video about it just a few days after the lecture. I saw the youtube notification a few hours ago and watched it with great interest as soon as I got home. Thanks! 💙
They never really were concerned about wasting resources, it seems. More than 1900 Soyuz rockets were launched with different, mostly military, payloads.
Man, if some journalists coukd do this kind of research and then write an article. That's exactly why online content created by enthusiasts is replacing magazines and TV stations. Great one Scott!
Scott, while visiting the Smithsonian, I looked into the window of one of the Soviet manned spacecraft... it's control panels had like about 40 simple toggle switches where as the American manned spacecraft had like 4000 switches of very high quality. The thing that really got me was that the Soviet space craft were the same switches I bought from Radio Shack for like $2.00 apiece... very high tech...!! Thanks as always Scott,...Sir !!
Soviet and Russian manned spacecraft until 2000 (when the Soyuz TMA was first launched) used the GLOBUS navigation system, which was in essence a mechanical computer not much different than the Norden bombsight used by USAAF bomber crews during WW2. Only the Mercury capsule used a mechanical sequencer operated by a clock (thus the astronaut's calling out, "The clock is operating," as that was the main clock; a backup clock was also added for redundancy along with a watch strapped on the astronaut's wrist); all subsequent spacecraft starting with Gemini used an onboard computer with the Apollo Guidance System being the most well-known of these electronic computers.
Yes, and as I understand it the Soyuz got a huge up to its controls in 2015. With this 'huge' up grade to it flight control system... when they Finally got a Digital computer... in 2015... What I saw of the Soyuz when I visited the Smithsonian in 1983... I wouldn't let them roll me 10 feet across the floor... how did Cosmonauts achieve orbit with 1940s tech ?? Not Mr Sir...!! Thanks Scott and all !!
As an aside, the first three satellites launched for the space based Sirius radio network used this orbit. It was thought this would give better reception versus the typical geostationary orbits. XM solved the issue by building hundreds of ground repeaters fed by the satellite. This made building their recievers with a built in method to deal with the delay necessary. It's way too complicated to explain here but it's pretty brilliant in its own right. The signal for both joined service is sent thru the XM satellites today.
Big ole fat bureaucracy had to go get itself in the way during the latter nasa years… 😂 Obviously in the past decade it’s picked back up quite a bit - especially in the US and Chyna.
This whole story is a perfect example of the Soviet space program development methodology. Ground testing actually seems to have hurt them on this project! I have no doubt that, if allowed to continue, the N1 program would have succeeded, probably with the next launch (which was on the pad undergoing fueling tests when Glusko cancelled it). The USAF launched a similar system to Molniya in the late '70s. It was called "Bent Pipe" and was used for communications between their tracking station in Thule, Greenland, code named "POGO", and the Satellite Test Center (which was, despite the name, actually the command center) in California. It had two vehicles in 24 hour orbits so that at least one of them was visible to both stations at all times.
I very much doubt N1 would have been successful at any point and definitely not on the next launch, it never lasted even through the complete first stage burn
@@olasek7972 - That underscores my point. The fourth flight, N1-L7, got within 15 seconds of successful staging. The first stage was the only really experimental piece of the stack. The stages above were much more "normal" in terms of engine count and arrangement. The 4th stage, the "Block D", not only worked, but has been used for nearly 60 years as a "space tug" at the top of the Proton booster and other vehicles. The main problem with the first stage was the engines. In the first four flights these were the development NK-15 engines, with lots of teething problems. In the N1-8L (the one sitting on the pad I mentioned above) these had been replaced with the production version NK-33, a design that is still being used today as the Aerojet AJ-26 used on the Atlas V.
@@hagerty1952 one understanding I have is that they had no way to ship completed stages, the USA could ship completed Saturn V stages and had stands to test them. The important factor is basically the US was capable of testing things like a full stage with all its engines and then send it to KSC as a completed unit(first stages for Saturn of course went by barge).
@@filanfyretracker- You are basically correct. They had both highways and railroads from central Russia, where the pieces were made, to the launch site in Kazakhstan. These were limited, though, in how large the components could be for transport. The largest building at Launch Complex 110 was the assembly building where the entire N1 stacks were built horizontally. This, as you mentioned, meant that full-up ground testing could not be performed, so they did their best and tested full vehicles from the start. This has always been their way, and the R7 (the ICBM that is still used today as the Soyuz launch vehicle) took nearly 20 development flights before they got a fully successful flight. The N1 had 12 test vehicles scheduled in its development program, but it was cancelled after 4.
Speaking of communication satellites, one of the professors at my engineering school told us a story of when he was a junior on the Telstar satellite though this might also just have been an urban legend instead of a personal account. The project was compartmentalized so few knew the whole design and each team was to build a module to certain specifications that would survive the acceleration of launch and the harsh environment of outer space. There was one module that they were having a lot of problems with that was to design a filter with a linear phase response and no one could design one that would survive the acceleration of launch. They finally contracted a reknown engineer who only agreed if they would not open the module to see how it worked. He came back with a module that met all the specifications and survived both launch and the expected harsh environments of space. As juniors, they were very interested in how it all worked so they secretly opened the module and it was aluminum foil crumpled till it had the right magnitude and phase response of the desired filter.
@@cambridgemart2075 Except I did a paper in engineering on physical signal processors that even used physical acoustic properties to achieve a linear phase response in a filter. Crumpling aluminum foil is a valid way to achieve magnitude and phase responses that can't easily be achieved with electronics alone. As to precision, it's bestoke, you crumple till you get the right response so it's really more precise and accurate than you are assuming, it's just not readily mass reproduced without again more custom crumpling. The difficulty in mass production is also why we design filters with capacitors whenever possible and not inductors as inductors have high variability, we use inductors in the lab because we can measure hundreds till we find the right one but we can't measure hundreds for each production unit. To a certain extent, crumpling aluminum foil is adjusting it's inductive values manually. The analog world is a lot more varied than you imagined. Just because it looks cheesy to you doesn't mean it isn't precise, it's still just what it is and if that happens to be precisely what's needed then it's precise. You could say that crumpling aluminum foil is fine tuning.
@@cambridgemart2075 Sigh, and you don't even realize that crumpling aluminum is fine tuning. The acoustic piezo electric signal processor was a paper I wrote in engineering and shows that some magnitude phase responses are difficult to achieve through electronics alone and yet can be obtained by material properties and morphology. What do you think makes crumpled aluminum do anything at all as a filter but material properties and morphology. You are specifically tuning the crumpled aluminum morphology by tuning it. Crumpled aluminum is the epitomy of a manually tuned filter so your whole argument that it's just urban legend just because filters need to be precisely tuned us false. Also as I say we engineers intentionally try to design filters with capacitors as capacitors can be precisely manufactured while inductors have high variability in mass production shows we try to design filters that do not need manual tuning. Everything about your premise is simply false and shows you have no education in analog signal filters.
I admire all space tech but why does all the Soviet stuff look so cool??? Those ground relay stations look like something from Thunderbirds and their rockets just look amazing!!
It’s amazing what need and country-to-country competition can do to foster creativity. Let the military find use for a new innovation and sky’s the limit. A wonderfully detailed presentation, Scott. Learned a lot here. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’…
I worked for GE during the period when we supplied bits for the space program, semiconductors and relays. If I remember correctly, GE was at least partially responsible for developing the methods for “testing “ components in such a way that they achieved VERY high reliability. What these methods were are too complicated to describe in a comment, but would make for an interesting video. Every time you test something, you “wear it out” a little bit, so how do you test without wearing it out? Not a simple question.
Bro, you are glorious. Not only knowldgeable but also a good character. I can feel how you control your accent, I am grateful for that, as a non-native english speaker.
The Soviets should be an example of the innovation thats possible when you rely on socialism. I say this as a capitalist. We should let our government do the war spending and the innovation. Let the corporations trickle them down to the consumer.
I believe the first three Sirius Radiosat satellites used a similar scheme to extend their time over the US. They had 24 hour orbits that had an apogee that was about twice their perigee. They were launched from Russia in 2000. Later, after Sirius merged with XM, I believe they shifted to geosynchronous satellite locations.
Scott- I was in the USAF Security Service in the late Sixties stationed on the north coast of Turkey at Samsun. Interesting memories you've evoked. Congrats on that PPL you got. I just gave up on renewing my medical certificate any more times, though I still fly by taking a PIC along. I'm 76. -Harv
I have a few artifacts from the Relay 1 spacecraft including a Mission Control test/backup panel. Ran into it from some tweakers as well as other component test panels on the same satellite.
Small correction, Re: PAL. It's a European Standard developed in West Germany, while yes the UK saying it the way you did is a bit like implying Canada invented NTSC.
The USSR actually adopted SECAM to prevent people in their border states from watching european TV. France was far enough from the border that they didn't care. Just as a side note.
I have a hard time believe they would be the only ones. But the reason would be fairly simple: circular polarization can be picked up by linear receivers at any angle at the expense of some signal strength loss. If they were operating a linear transmitter then the receiver would have to not only be pointed at the satellite but also aligned to it. It could have anything from 100% signal strength (disregarding distance and other losses) to 0% strength. It is just less math and engineering to go with circular polarization.
Because it's hard to make linear polarisation work on satellites without a mechanical means to keep adjusting the orientation of your receiving antenna. It's out of the question for anything but a geosynchronous, as the orientation of the polarisation will move as the satellite tracks across the sky. Circular is just easier. Linear polarisation is used on satellites, it just needs more expensive motorised antennas. (Unless you're doing it in HAM, in which case your mechanical antenna alignment is replaced by someone watching the dials and shouting 'left a bit!' to the man waving the antenna around.)
Imagine being that engineer who wrapped up the scuffed wires with PVC tape, thinking you were being helpful, only to find out you completely screwed the satellite once it got into orbit. I'm sure he had a long and productive career breaking rocks for the glory of the Motherland after that.
Doing the calculations of Molniya orbit stability is pretty satisfying when you study orbital mechanics. Taking into account he oblateness of earth and doing first order series calculations of the orbital elements, you get to prove that wdot (evolution of the argument of perigee) is proportional to 4-5sin^2(i) where i is the orbital incline. i =63.4 degrees is a solution. So the argument of perigee is constant. The orbit semi axis and eccentricity is made so the time spent at apogee is long enough for convenience and to have the orbital period = a sideral day. That way, the ascending node position -omega- stays a the same place relative to the ground. But given the Earth's oblateness again, omega dot (evolution of omega) is not 0 with this inclination and eccentricity, so the period of the orbit has to be changed from time to time to maintain omega (i.e. the apogee position relative to the ground). So Molniya have to regularly expand fuel for that purpose.
I remember learning about Molniya orbits back in high school in my aerospace engineering class. I always thought it was a really cool concept, some real out of the box thinking. I think the Cold War (and Space Race) was a boon for technological innovation. Think about just how many discoveries we would have missed out on if not for Cold War paranoia!
Scott, I don't believe you addressed why the USSR needed to launch satellites so much larger than the US's. And the relationship of both nation's satellites to their boosters.
The Soviet Union was generally behind in electronics and computer technology. If I remember correctly they also didn't develop computers that worked in a vacuum but rather put them in a pressurised container which adds mass
He did address it. They didn't need to get to geostationary orbit as it wasn't particularly useful at covering the Soviet Union, nor did they have the vehicle for it. Their easier, more useful orbit for their conditions simply allowed more mass so they used it.
When I was a child, I lived in the Eastern Finland. They launched these satellites, including others, from Plesetsk cosmodrome. Sometimes these launches caused extraordinary shows in the dark sky. Military uses of this launch location are limited, with inclusion of Finland into NATO.
I am guessing it might have to do with the ease to customizing the likeness of the satellites and launch system. I wasn't fond of maintaining KSP mods but I do love what plain J:NO allows in terms of customizations.
Have you added a Vizzy program to automate your launch trajectory yet? First thing I did was add that in, then adjust it to launch into the correct trajectory as well :)
I truly would love some sort of sci-fi setting that explored a future where the Soviet Technocratic utopia was successful. Sure, it wouldn’t sell in the US, but it would be really interesting as a cool and dynamic future :-)
Just try to read some books from Stanislaw Lem. Not his philosophical books, but storys about Pilot Pirx, Ion Tichy etc. There can you find among eatch other, generations of inteligent robots - from steam driven to "modern" with vacuum tube build brains ... , atom reactor driven starships, etc. Read it just as they are, without political background. Hi is Polish , one of the most known scifi writers worldwide. "Solaris" is the commercialy most known book. I think here will you find some kind of what you are looking for, a kind of raw industrial sci fi. VERY fascinating. Cheers.
Have a look at “Atomic Heart” by Mundfish. It’s not about future itself, but it is retrofuturistic game in soviet style. Strongly recommend to check it out. My parents, born in early 60s in USSR, confirmed, that it has truly “that” vibe. Especially in the beginning. P.S.: Also, looks like the canonical ending is a shorter one. You’ll get it after passing the game.
@@marcwolf60biased crap with space KGB eager to execute each and every one. Nothing to share with the Soviet union. Check out Ivan Efremov or Stanislaw Lem, maybe even Alexei Tolstoy if you're into retro 30s' aesthetics
That was a great video, I really enjoyed it. I know it's unpopular opinion right now, but I think the Soviets managed to do some incredibly cool stuff in space tech, too bad that Russia didn't inherit them properly and right now that's just wasted. But wow, imagine the persistence and the state support the developers were getting to be able to iterate over so many failures. Nowadays, that's much harder to achieve.
I'm not sure whether it's popular or not. The real and valid criticism comes from things like the first Russian toilet paper factory being built in 1969 and the number of people who still lived in barracks. They were good at big prestige type projects, but then neglected the fact people lived in their country. I'd be curious how many people in the entire USSR had a TV in 1965.
13:02 The story behind USSR using SECAM was simple - using anything but PAL means people in East Germany cannot see West German "propaganda". Same analogy for other counties in Solviet block.
You could watch it bw alright. So no, the Soviets didn't care about what the East Germans could watch. Stasi did that for them much more efficiently regardless of the TV broadcast system.
@@dvv18 It depends on the actual transmission standard used. The SECAM system in France used positive video modulation, instead of the negative modulation normally used with PAL. So a PAL or a B/W TV from that time would display a badly synchronized negative picture.
@@Rob2 As a kid who grew up in a Soviet city listening to heavily jammed Western broadcasts in Russian, I can confidently tell you that the barely intelligible TV picture was the least problem for the East Germans who lived in Berlin and along the border with BRD. If you wanted to get the message, you'd get it.
This is SO uncanny. I was reading about orbits and satellites literally a few weeks ago and stumbled upon the article on Wikipedia about Molniya orbits. I thought it was really cool. It seemed like a really niche topic, It’s somewhat crazy to me that I stumble upon this video in my recommendations a week or two later. Molniya in Russian means lightning.
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Hi Scott, thanks for the video about the Molniya satellites. I built a receiver & tracking system using an 8 ft dish (1987 to 1991). They also broadcast Radio Moscow on a subcarrier. One day in 1991 I tuned in and heard Rod Stewart and realized that things really were changing in Russia. My article about how to track Molniya satellites was in the August 1989 issue of Circuit Cellar Ink magazine.
Cool.... way cool. !!
Very cool mate!
Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Primary source evidence
Wow! Very cool! Thanks for sharing!
In the late '70s I went to a broadcast satellite (TVRO) convention in San Jose, CA, mainly for those wanting to get into home satellite systems. This was when everything on satellite was broadcast in the clear (no encryption). I had brought my Tektronix 465 to work on a project with a friend. We got into a conversation with a group that had a dish on site that they decided to try to pick up Molniya. They succeeded, and I was told that the audio was in the horizontal sync area, rather than a subcarrier, so I got my scope, and found the audio, and we slapped together a simple circuit to demodulate the audio, and listened to Molniya auido until the satellite went below the horrizon. Definitely a fun weekend.
All those hundreds of Molniya launches are why one of the most common "satellites" you can see flying overhead anywhere on Earth are spent Russian rocket bodies in polar orbits. You will know these by the fact that they're always traveling directly north/South and they tend to slowly fluctuate in brightness as they tumble. You're pretty much guaranteed to see them on any summer evening after twilight.
Thanks for the tip, just threw away my compass. Obsolete now.
I spotted one back in the spring which turned out to be a 1974 rocket body. When I saw it it was brighter than any star for a few seconds. It was travelling almost due south to due north.
You haven't spotted the thousands of cube sats that have been launched recently? I'd say they're a much more common sighting for me.
I've seen many Russian spent rocket bodies pass over Perth Australia on NS polar orbits just after twilight, I keep track of orbiting objects on a phone app and try see them if I see something is going to pass over at the right time (just after the sun has dipped below the horizon and is still shining on any orbiting objects above where I am)
@@ats-3693 That's awesome, whats the app you're using called?
That poor technician with the tape. All the hard worked and money wasted because you did a quick fix with some tape. That must have been a rough week at the office.
He probably fell out of a window shortly afterwards in a tragic accident.
@@nathanaelvetters2684and landed on 36 bullets
@@nathanaelvetters2684That's a modern thing. The old KGB just disappeared you.
@@nathanaelvetters2684
Putin was not in power then
That's what your management of change processes are for unfortunately.
I love that they had to start the first satellite like a 59' chevy with a bad starter solenoid
Yeah, it must of been the start of the "Have you tried switching it off and on again?" helpline protocol. Bill Gates was watching and learning from the Soviet Union, who'd a thunkit?
@@DavidOfWhitehills ...it must HAVE been...
Yea exsept they didn't have a hammer and a 2x4 to hit it with
@@DamirAsanov And yet you have no problem with "thunkit"?
Language changes: it is ours to do with as we wish. Like music. Slang. Rap. Patois. Punchuation.
@@DamirAsanovgo back to your basement
At Stanford in the 1980’s a student figured out how to receive signals from the satellite over Siberia and it was piped into the campus wide cable TV system. At our research group it became the habit to all go buy a snack at “The Store” in the student union then race back to the office to watch “good night kids” on Russian TV at midnight local time.
As the politics changed we had a front row seat. We watched “spotlight on Perestroika”. The funniest thing was when they had the first ever live call-in program. There was some government person they could ask live questions of. But every caller’s question was “this can’t really be live, I don’t believe it”. The host eventually got angry and held his watch up to the camera. It is LIVE, this is the ACTUAL TIME, does anyone have a REAL QUESTION?!
I didn't expect Stanford to be watching "Goodnight Kids." Have you watched Soviet cartoons?
@@DIOS-M Just that one!
Sting, the singer, was shown a Molnia receiving station on an American university by a friend and watched some Russian cartoons (it was Saturday evening in the US and Sunday morning in Russia). This was the inspiration for his song "Russians with the refrain "Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too".
It always amazes me how braindead brainwashed the westerners were about the SU to even consider that Russians DON'T love their children.
Our amateur radio station in college (northern California) had a satellite dish antenna which tracked the succession of Molniya satellites and patched at least some channels into the campus cable TV system. I don't remember how the cable TV system dealt with SECAM vs NTSC video formats. We had multi-format TVs to watch it directly if we wanted. I only vaguely remember seeing morning exercise shows.
We also had a dish antenna we could manually aim at geostationary satellites, and a smaller microwave antenna we could aim at mountain tops, both of which we of course used to watch bootleg movies from any unscrambled systems we found.
@@mattbartley2843”Rhythmic gymnastics by the sea”, that woman they had doing the exercises on the show was insanely flexible.
Taught me to count to 4 in Russian. :-)
Sorry Sting, it seems the Russians do not... 😢
@@MostlyPennyCat You seem to read a lot of nonsense at night.
-What is Scott´s today´s video about?
-The Molniya
-Is it a launch system, a spacecraft or an orbit?
-Yes
I thought it was Thor`s hammer!
@@mc_cpu same etymology root
yeah, both mean lightning.
One thing that has interested me is that Soviet launch vehicles in the R-7 family often took on the name of one of the early payloads that used that variant.
@@scottmanley Oh, didn't know that connection. "Blixt" is Swedish for lightning, "Mjölner", which is the hammer, is pretty close to "mjölnare" meaning miller. "Mjöl" is Swedish for flour.
Another interesting property of those satellites was that they actually had a sealed capsule with an atmosphere inside them, where the electronics were located.
So some of the problems of having electronics in a vacuum (like no convection cooling possible and problems with outgassing of some components) were avoided, of course at the expense of a huge mass increase.
due to the lack of relative acceleration, the cooling against the internal atmosphere wouldn't really be convective since that relies on hot air rising (which it only does because cold air displaces it due to buyouancy which is a thing cuz gravity), it'd be only conductive.
@@KarolOfGutovo yea but if there was a fan in there it would still be convection
@@mshepard2264 The fan makes it not convection. The fan makes it circulation.
Although simply binding the electronics to an aluminum plate could transport the heat to a radiative panel. Although it is true that our modern consumer electronics are designed to be air cooled, that isn't entirely true, there are plenty of electronics that are water cooled, oil cooled, alcohol cooled and or cooled by an aluminum plate. Simply bathing the electronics in something like mineral oil which would be a liquid would be more effective than a pressurized air environment as liquids are considered incompressible and hence less vulnerable to pressure changes and would carry a lot more heat than air could. Though it would be possible to have the electronics in a pressurized air container, that is hardly necessary nor would it be the most effective solution especially as we even have water and oil cooled electronics in our consumer market.
@@johnwang9914 Wouldn't oil have the same convection issue as air? Also weight is a thing, I assume they did the maths.
GREAT explanation of the Molniya orbits. Wikipedia is not nearly so cogent and easy to understand. Plus you always make talk about the Russian achievements so interesting. I am constantly amazed at how brilliantly people used mathematics to achieve exact solutions to problems before computer power got so strong as to make simply modeling the behavior and observing the solution a possibility. That period after Newton and Leibnitz where they exploited Calculus to solve so many problems is such an amazing period.
Clearly, the Soviets had very smart mathematicians to make up for their primitive computers.
I guess we also had a lot of advantages with our better miniaturization and those hydroLOX upper stages.
Thanks for a great video series on communication satellites, and particularly appreciate your explanation of the unique Molniya orbit! I did internships for Ford Aerospace (later renamed SSL) while in college in the 1979 and 1980 and worked on the first 3 Intelsat V satellites, so com sats are near and dear to me (lots of memorable stories from that time, not the least of which was when I had inadvertently changed the software constants for the flight-ready F-2 spacecraft while it was undergoing final testing in their large vacuum chamber, causing the senior managers to get woken up at 3 am due to telemetry readings being way off... all was well once they figured out what had caused the problem, but it's a miracle that as a lowly intern I wasn't fired on the spot 😲)
Great story, thanks for sharing!
I was in SATCOM in the US Army in the mid-1980s. We used the TWT amplifiers to transmit. They were cooled by pure water and laboratory pure (99.6%) Ethylene Glycol (antifreeze). Even with a continuous flow of liquid around the pass tube it still glowed cherry red on the outside so I can imagine what all that heat was doing to that equipment...
So mount these outside! Surely tubes have no problem with vacuum.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldtvacuum is not thermally conductive, therefore only mode of thermal transfer in vacuum is radiation.
@@nickfirst7249 they glow cherry read. Nothing stops you from cooling the base (socket) using water.
I've worked with many satellite communication HPAs up to around 7.5kW and they have all been air cooled. It would have to be a huge power output to require liquid cooling.
Well this was 1983-85 The amplifier that we used was the standard HPA used by all branches of the service then on their large, fixed station antennas. I cannot remember the exact numbers but it was capable of 15KW transmit power singular or 25KW combined if memory serves. We had two units for redundancy but could run them in combined mode if the enemy was trying to jam us. Remember, back then this system was intended to be used in a combat environment so it was quite powerful. One thing I never could figure out though... if they were jamming us and we were running full power, what would happen if the enemy were to just drop their jamming? I would think it would blow the LNAs in the satellite pretty quickly. No one could ever give me a good answer. One time I remember we held an 8 ft florescent lamp up in front of the antenna and it actually glowed... We were only running about 15 watts then too... Have to be pretty nasty running full power. @@cambridgemart2075
In the mid-'80s, an uncle of mine had a very large terrestrial safellite TV dish at his farmhouse in Pennsylvania. We were both curious radio hams, and had just read an article on how to pick up polar satellites, so we gave it a go. We must've futzed around for hours, switching between one of us outside moving the dish and another inside looking at the TV, both of us with handheld tranceivers. When we eventually picked up the Molinaya eliptical orbit signal, which had an animated program (that showed up in black-and-white as it was the SECAM broadcast standard, a bit different than NTSC), we were *so* excited. I still remember every minute!
I tweaked SECAM video boards while working at Ampex.
The Soviets were never short on ideas, or even expertise to pull those ideas off. The Soviet government just didn't have the money to spend. Or would not spend it.
For as much as NASA has it's hands tied by politicians, the US managed to get a lot of stuff done. And most (if not all) of it was stuff the Soviets could have pulled off, had they had the money.
Much respect to the engineers and scientists behind the iron curtain who did what they could with what they had. Very capable people.
The difference between a super power that had to rebuild after the war, and a super power that profited from the war.
There were no money in USSR like in capitalism.
Every state enterprise and bureau had something called a credit budget.
This budget was not money because money has to circulate whereas this credit was an artificial limitation on what these enterprises could buy in terms of what they needed.
Instead, the Soviet Union may have been vast but its resources were not infinite and the Soviet Union had an industry twice the size of the entire West, its not easy to distribute resources in such a large industry. The military and the space industry had priority on everything, the space industry however was secondary to the military.
The USSR lost 27 million people during WW2, this fear had built into their psych and thats why they were on such a large military build up. Because they feared another war.
Bureaucrats personal luxury and military budget was more important than anything else.
Eh…they expanded their “empire” quite a bit by/at the end of the war. So they weren’t completely crushed economically or at a loss of resources. But also they were way more hamstrung by their economic woes in the 80s and towards the fall.
@@SMGJohnthey feared US/Western agression and bugeted heavily towards defence. Its wild to think were we could have been if the US hadent been such a huge dick lol
A lot of amateur radio satellites used the Molniya orbit. It worked very well, since amateurs could have a satellite that would stay up in the sky over a certain position for hours at a time and then go back to another position over a different part of the sky for hours at a time allowing amateurs all over the world to share the satellites to make contact.
Amateur radio enthusiasts financed and launched a constellation of Molniya-orbit satellits? Tell me more
I wouldn't describe any satellite as "amateur"
I had a QSO with a ham in Florida. He was a satellite guy from way back. He said in the 60,a you could talk a long time on the sats. Now it’s minutes. With the help of your post and this video I understand what he was talking about.
Many thanks!
its only like 50 bucks to send one up to geostationary and like 20 to low earth orbit. what are you talking about?@@x-ray-oh3134
the soviet space hardware always looked cool and characteristically soviet. I think it must be the symmetrical pressure vessels.
Great video, Scott. Well presented, with suspense about whether they’d ever get a successful deployment. You not only have vast technical knowledge, you also tell a story well.
Молния / Molniya = "Lightning" if anyone wanted to know.
Hang on, is Molniya cognate with Mjolnir?
@@Keenath I'm not sure, but it probably is. As far as I remember, it's distantly connected to the word for hammer, молоток / molotok i.e. mallet. So, hammer of Thor connection makes a lot of sense.
Incidentally, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Molotov (he of cocktail fame) chose this nom de guerre as it has a nice industrial communist association. Hammers again.
Now, I haven't looked it up myself, but Scott Manley replied in another comment*, saying: "same etymology root".
Thanks for the extra insight/interesting tidbit about molotok and Molotov, btw!
__
* If I'm to be overly specific (for no reason): said reply can be found within the comment thread that reads:
"What is Scott's today's video about?
-The Molniya
-Is it a launch system, a spacecraft or an orbit?
-Yes"
... kinda wish we could link comments on this platform
@@Lowkeh You can. Just right-click on the comments "posted" time and copy the link address. There's a pretty good chance though that if you try including the link in a comment then the comment will immediately be deleted as being "spam". (It's not just including links, just today I had a comment get deleted just for parenthetically recommending someone's channel.)
1:50 - "Strategic Rocket Forces" is the most awesome name for a military branch ever.
(It also makes much more sense than lumping in satellites and ballistic missiles with the Air Force like the U.S. did for the longest time.)
Space Force sounds rather pedestrian.
Their motto also slaps.
"After us, silence."
@@juhasznagyjozsef *clap *clap
Love learning about all these older satellites! Great video!
Hi Scott,
Hello from Russia and thank you for the video!
I read Chertock memories about 20 years ago too. A great insight to Russian space program heydays. Such a open and sincerely book without mouth-playing. Recommend to everyone tech gigs.
Do u use VPN ?
We started with a masters program in aerospace engineering one week ago and one of the first things that were mentioned in orbital dynamics was Molniya. So it was really exciting to see you post a video about it just a few days after the lecture. I saw the youtube notification a few hours ago and watched it with great interest as soon as I got home. Thanks! 💙
Thanks Scott for explaining the developement and deployment of early Soviet communications satelites.
They launched 164 of those monsters, Van Allen belts really do wreck havoc huh
They never really were concerned about wasting resources, it seems. More than 1900 Soyuz rockets were launched with different, mostly military, payloads.
Hello from Russia, Scott, and thank you for this video!
Man, if some journalists coukd do this kind of research and then write an article. That's exactly why online content created by enthusiasts is replacing magazines and TV stations. Great one Scott!
Fascinating video! Little question, what KSP like game was used for the launch recreation?
Scott, while visiting the Smithsonian, I looked into the window of one of the Soviet manned spacecraft... it's control panels had like about 40 simple toggle switches where as the American manned spacecraft had like 4000 switches of very high quality. The thing that really got me was that the Soviet space craft were the same switches I bought from Radio Shack for like $2.00 apiece... very high tech...!! Thanks as always Scott,...Sir !!
What I'm saying... yet not very well is that the Soviet sourced their switches From Radio Shack during the 1970-1980s... fyi... lol
Soviet and Russian manned spacecraft until 2000 (when the Soyuz TMA was first launched) used the GLOBUS navigation system, which was in essence a mechanical computer not much different than the Norden bombsight used by USAAF bomber crews during WW2. Only the Mercury capsule used a mechanical sequencer operated by a clock (thus the astronaut's calling out, "The clock is operating," as that was the main clock; a backup clock was also added for redundancy along with a watch strapped on the astronaut's wrist); all subsequent spacecraft starting with Gemini used an onboard computer with the Apollo Guidance System being the most well-known of these electronic computers.
Yes, and as I understand it the Soyuz got a huge up to its controls in 2015. With this 'huge' up grade to it flight control system... when they Finally got a Digital computer... in 2015...
What I saw of the Soyuz when I visited the Smithsonian in 1983... I wouldn't let them roll me 10 feet across the floor... how did Cosmonauts achieve orbit with 1940s tech ?? Not Mr Sir...!!
Thanks Scott and all !!
@@georgejenkins8063 oh if we only had radio shack now
The Mercury capsule "switches" looked rather basic too, back in their day. The Pate Museum of Transportation used to have on on display here in Texas.
Another awesome history lesson. Thanks Scott!
As an aside, the first three satellites launched for the space based Sirius radio network used this orbit. It was thought this would give better reception versus the typical geostationary orbits. XM solved the issue by building hundreds of ground repeaters fed by the satellite. This made building their recievers with a built in method to deal with the delay necessary. It's way too complicated to explain here but it's pretty brilliant in its own right. The signal for both joined service is sent thru the XM satellites today.
Sirius/XM used a related orbit called a Tundra orbit, not a Molniya orbit.
Today it still sounds thin and low bandwidth.
@@steveschu if you knew how beaten and abused those bits were you would be amazed it sounds as good as it does.
It's amazing how quickly the space program moved back then.
Big ole fat bureaucracy had to go get itself in the way during the latter nasa years… 😂
Obviously in the past decade it’s picked back up quite a bit - especially in the US and Chyna.
They were replacing those satellites at the pace of smartphone life cycles.
This whole story is a perfect example of the Soviet space program development methodology. Ground testing actually seems to have hurt them on this project! I have no doubt that, if allowed to continue, the N1 program would have succeeded, probably with the next launch (which was on the pad undergoing fueling tests when Glusko cancelled it).
The USAF launched a similar system to Molniya in the late '70s. It was called "Bent Pipe" and was used for communications between their tracking station in Thule, Greenland, code named "POGO", and the Satellite Test Center (which was, despite the name, actually the command center) in California. It had two vehicles in 24 hour orbits so that at least one of them was visible to both stations at all times.
I very much doubt N1 would have been successful at any point and definitely not on the next launch, it never lasted even through the complete first stage burn
@@olasek7972 - That underscores my point. The fourth flight, N1-L7, got within 15 seconds of successful staging. The first stage was the only really experimental piece of the stack. The stages above were much more "normal" in terms of engine count and arrangement. The 4th stage, the "Block D", not only worked, but has been used for nearly 60 years as a "space tug" at the top of the Proton booster and other vehicles.
The main problem with the first stage was the engines. In the first four flights these were the development NK-15 engines, with lots of teething problems. In the N1-8L (the one sitting on the pad I mentioned above) these had been replaced with the production version NK-33, a design that is still being used today as the Aerojet AJ-26 used on the Atlas V.
@@hagerty1952 one understanding I have is that they had no way to ship completed stages, the USA could ship completed Saturn V stages and had stands to test them. The important factor is basically the US was capable of testing things like a full stage with all its engines and then send it to KSC as a completed unit(first stages for Saturn of course went by barge).
@@filanfyretracker- You are basically correct. They had both highways and railroads from central Russia, where the pieces were made, to the launch site in Kazakhstan. These were limited, though, in how large the components could be for transport. The largest building at Launch Complex 110 was the assembly building where the entire N1 stacks were built horizontally.
This, as you mentioned, meant that full-up ground testing could not be performed, so they did their best and tested full vehicles from the start. This has always been their way, and the R7 (the ICBM that is still used today as the Soyuz launch vehicle) took nearly 20 development flights before they got a fully successful flight. The N1 had 12 test vehicles scheduled in its development program, but it was cancelled after 4.
As a suggestion, I think a video explaining the Van Allen radiation belts themselves would be helpful. Not everyone knows.
I have one already
th-cam.com/video/h9YN50xXFJY/w-d-xo.html
This one I think th-cam.com/video/h9YN50xXFJY/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/h9YN50xXFJY/w-d-xo.html
His video on the belts -> th-cam.com/video/h9YN50xXFJY/w-d-xo.htmlsi=oyTAGGXH-8Ey_9Jp
Scott, great video as ever! Thanks for sharing, educating and entertaining!
So this is how 3-CP-1 took over SCTV! The guest from the Minsk Bus and Truck Works was informative.
13:57 Crazy that Brezhnev was a pallbearer!
Speaking of communication satellites, one of the professors at my engineering school told us a story of when he was a junior on the Telstar satellite though this might also just have been an urban legend instead of a personal account. The project was compartmentalized so few knew the whole design and each team was to build a module to certain specifications that would survive the acceleration of launch and the harsh environment of outer space. There was one module that they were having a lot of problems with that was to design a filter with a linear phase response and no one could design one that would survive the acceleration of launch. They finally contracted a reknown engineer who only agreed if they would not open the module to see how it worked. He came back with a module that met all the specifications and survived both launch and the expected harsh environments of space. As juniors, they were very interested in how it all worked so they secretly opened the module and it was aluminum foil crumpled till it had the right magnitude and phase response of the desired filter.
That’s a great story! Clever with the crumpled foil.
Sounds like an urban myth to me, RF filters are precision devices requiring a lot of fine tuning.
@@cambridgemart2075 Except I did a paper in engineering on physical signal processors that even used physical acoustic properties to achieve a linear phase response in a filter. Crumpling aluminum foil is a valid way to achieve magnitude and phase responses that can't easily be achieved with electronics alone. As to precision, it's bestoke, you crumple till you get the right response so it's really more precise and accurate than you are assuming, it's just not readily mass reproduced without again more custom crumpling. The difficulty in mass production is also why we design filters with capacitors whenever possible and not inductors as inductors have high variability, we use inductors in the lab because we can measure hundreds till we find the right one but we can't measure hundreds for each production unit. To a certain extent, crumpling aluminum foil is adjusting it's inductive values manually. The analog world is a lot more varied than you imagined. Just because it looks cheesy to you doesn't mean it isn't precise, it's still just what it is and if that happens to be precisely what's needed then it's precise.
You could say that crumpling aluminum foil is fine tuning.
@@johnwang9914 You are conflating acoustic filters with RF filters, they are completely unrelated devices.
@@cambridgemart2075 Sigh, and you don't even realize that crumpling aluminum is fine tuning. The acoustic piezo electric signal processor was a paper I wrote in engineering and shows that some magnitude phase responses are difficult to achieve through electronics alone and yet can be obtained by material properties and morphology. What do you think makes crumpled aluminum do anything at all as a filter but material properties and morphology. You are specifically tuning the crumpled aluminum morphology by tuning it. Crumpled aluminum is the epitomy of a manually tuned filter so your whole argument that it's just urban legend just because filters need to be precisely tuned us false. Also as I say we engineers intentionally try to design filters with capacitors as capacitors can be precisely manufactured while inductors have high variability in mass production shows we try to design filters that do not need manual tuning. Everything about your premise is simply false and shows you have no education in analog signal filters.
I admire all space tech but why does all the Soviet stuff look so cool??? Those ground relay stations look like something from Thunderbirds and their rockets just look amazing!!
It’s amazing what need and country-to-country competition can do to foster creativity. Let the military find use for a new innovation and sky’s the limit. A wonderfully detailed presentation, Scott. Learned a lot here. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’…
The Algebraist is one of my favorite books. The Dwellers are so cool. Really a unique book.
How did they calculate this ideal orbit? Was there enough information about the oblateness of the earth available at the time?
It turns out that the ideal inclination is independent of oblateness.
Another great video scott! Love this series!
Good video, Scott! Well researched and presented.
1:04 Also, the vast majority of the population lived in a small portion of the USSR's territory.
I worked for GE during the period when we supplied bits for the space program, semiconductors and relays. If I remember correctly, GE was at least partially responsible for developing the methods for “testing “ components in such a way that they achieved VERY high reliability. What these methods were are too complicated to describe in a comment, but would make for an interesting video. Every time you test something, you “wear it out” a little bit, so how do you test without wearing it out? Not a simple question.
Through the magic of buying two of them?
@@deus_ex_machina_then whichever one you test was used, is the point. Don't know the answer though.
MTBF
I am loving this series giving me a view of a history I had not really heard of before!
As a side topic: how did later satellites survive the Van Allen belts longer?
Better component shielding.
@@GeomancerHT Given that it was the solar panels that failed first, it's clearly a more complicated topic. You can't line a solar panel with lead.
Radiation hardened components as well. Of course now, it's tending more towards fault tolerant components instead.
Mostly satellites avoid the VA belts.
This series where you talk about old communication satellites, was really interesting and cool.
An episode about the European Projects Astra vs TV-SAT would be interesting. How the TV standard D2-MAC failed but gave birth to the SCART connector
Thank you for all your hard work scott
What a great piece of reporting on the Soviet TV satellite network.
Bro, you are glorious. Not only knowldgeable but also a good character. I can feel how you control your accent, I am grateful for that, as a non-native english speaker.
The Soviets should be an example of the innovation thats possible when you rely on socialism. I say this as a capitalist.
We should let our government do the war spending and the innovation. Let the corporations trickle them down to the consumer.
Great stuff! I didn't know about the use of highly eccentric orbits. Thank you.
I believe the first three Sirius Radiosat satellites used a similar scheme to extend their time over the US. They had 24 hour orbits that had an apogee that was about twice their perigee. They were launched from Russia in 2000. Later, after Sirius merged with XM, I believe they shifted to geosynchronous satellite locations.
Scott- I was in the USAF Security Service in the late Sixties stationed on the north coast of Turkey at Samsun. Interesting memories you've evoked. Congrats on that PPL you got. I just gave up on renewing my medical certificate any more times, though I still fly by taking a PIC along. I'm 76. -Harv
Have you tried Basic Med? You just get a regular doctor do do a physical and you can fly small planes with that plus a driver’s license
You’re doing a great job with this series.
I have a few artifacts from the Relay 1 spacecraft including a Mission Control test/backup panel. Ran into it from some tweakers as well as other component test panels on the same satellite.
Extremely cool. "
This is a great series, thank you!
That was very interesting, Scott. Cheers.
Small correction, Re: PAL. It's a European Standard developed in West Germany, while yes the UK saying it the way you did is a bit like implying Canada invented NTSC.
But more nations around the world would adopt PAL as the Brits had it
He said Britain had PAL, he didn't say they invented it.
The USSR actually adopted SECAM to prevent people in their border states from watching european TV. France was far enough from the border that they didn't care. Just as a side note.
The human creativity is indeed fascinating!
Thanks, Scott! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Russian TV satellites use circular polarization instead of linear. I wonder if there is a technical reason for this.
I have a hard time believe they would be the only ones. But the reason would be fairly simple: circular polarization can be picked up by linear receivers at any angle at the expense of some signal strength loss. If they were operating a linear transmitter then the receiver would have to not only be pointed at the satellite but also aligned to it. It could have anything from 100% signal strength (disregarding distance and other losses) to 0% strength. It is just less math and engineering to go with circular polarization.
Because it's hard to make linear polarisation work on satellites without a mechanical means to keep adjusting the orientation of your receiving antenna. It's out of the question for anything but a geosynchronous, as the orientation of the polarisation will move as the satellite tracks across the sky. Circular is just easier. Linear polarisation is used on satellites, it just needs more expensive motorised antennas.
(Unless you're doing it in HAM, in which case your mechanical antenna alignment is replaced by someone watching the dials and shouting 'left a bit!' to the man waving the antenna around.)
In the 1950 film DESTINATION MOON a flight to the Moon almost fails because a guy puts grease on an antenna not realizing it will freeze in space.
Imagine being that engineer who wrapped up the scuffed wires with PVC tape, thinking you were being helpful, only to find out you completely screwed the satellite once it got into orbit. I'm sure he had a long and productive career breaking rocks for the glory of the Motherland after that.
Doing the calculations of Molniya orbit stability is pretty satisfying when you study orbital mechanics.
Taking into account he oblateness of earth and doing first order series calculations of the orbital elements, you get to prove that wdot (evolution of the argument of perigee) is proportional to 4-5sin^2(i) where i is the orbital incline. i =63.4 degrees is a solution. So the argument of perigee is constant. The orbit semi axis and eccentricity is made so the time spent at apogee is long enough for convenience and to have the orbital period = a sideral day. That way, the ascending node position -omega- stays a the same place relative to the ground. But given the Earth's oblateness again, omega dot (evolution of omega) is not 0 with this inclination and eccentricity, so the period of the orbit has to be changed from time to time to maintain omega (i.e. the apogee position relative to the ground). So Molniya have to regularly expand fuel for that purpose.
Great as always
Space Cowboys movie taught me that the USSR didn't have TV satellites, they had orbital launch platforms.
as the non scientist in this room, I thank you for your work and learning opportunities. thank you Scott.
I remember learning about Molniya orbits back in high school in my aerospace engineering class. I always thought it was a really cool concept, some real out of the box thinking. I think the Cold War (and Space Race) was a boon for technological innovation. Think about just how many discoveries we would have missed out on if not for Cold War paranoia!
Scott, I don't believe you addressed why the USSR needed to launch satellites so much larger than the US's. And the relationship of both nation's satellites to their boosters.
Also why were the Russian ones so ugly.
The Soviet Union was generally behind in electronics and computer technology. If I remember correctly they also didn't develop computers that worked in a vacuum but rather put them in a pressurised container which adds mass
@@dlueck1296would have made sense to note that in the video. Seems like important context.
He did address it. They didn't need to get to geostationary orbit as it wasn't particularly useful at covering the Soviet Union, nor did they have the vehicle for it. Their easier, more useful orbit for their conditions simply allowed more mass so they used it.
To function at apogee, these satellites had to have big antennae and hefty power systems.
fascinating information, excellent video, Thank You
11:41- "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" - Russian tech support
When I was a child, I lived in the Eastern Finland. They launched these satellites, including others, from Plesetsk cosmodrome. Sometimes these launches caused extraordinary shows in the dark sky.
Military uses of this launch location are limited, with inclusion of Finland into NATO.
Any particular reason that you used Juno for the background video instead of KSP 1? Just curious...
I am guessing it might have to do with the ease to customizing the likeness of the satellites and launch system. I wasn't fond of maintaining KSP mods but I do love what plain J:NO allows in terms of customizations.
@13:50 That's actually quite beautiful. Wow.
November is the anniversary of the "October" revolution according to the russian calendar 12:55
I've been watching your channel for a long time, thank you for all of the stuff you do. I have to ask though... what's with the magnet on your shirt?
Holds the microphone in place
Thank you, very interesting 🙏👍🏻
Have you added a Vizzy program to automate your launch trajectory yet?
First thing I did was add that in, then adjust it to launch into the correct trajectory as well :)
I stopped using vizzy after I learned there was no way to upload new code in flight.
Man, I love that Saturn V and launch tower. Great backdrop.
This is an awesome topic!!! Thx!
Molniya was my favorite Sattelite when i was 5 because of it's fan shapped outlook and I forgot its name till now and now i have a reason to like it.
I remembered it from the cool shape too. I must have been about the same age.
That was an interesting insight into the Soviet era usage of space . Thanks and Best Regards
I truly would love some sort of sci-fi setting that explored a future where the Soviet Technocratic utopia was successful.
Sure, it wouldn’t sell in the US, but it would be really interesting as a cool and dynamic future :-)
Just try to read some books from Stanislaw Lem. Not his philosophical books, but storys about Pilot Pirx, Ion Tichy etc. There can you find among eatch other, generations of inteligent robots - from steam driven to "modern" with vacuum tube build brains ... , atom reactor driven starships, etc. Read it just as they are, without political background. Hi is Polish , one of the most known scifi writers worldwide. "Solaris" is the commercialy most known book. I think here will you find some kind of what you are looking for, a kind of raw industrial sci fi. VERY fascinating. Cheers.
Have a look at “Atomic Heart” by Mundfish. It’s not about future itself, but it is retrofuturistic game in soviet style. Strongly recommend to check it out. My parents, born in early 60s in USSR, confirmed, that it has truly “that” vibe. Especially in the beginning.
P.S.: Also, looks like the canonical ending is a shorter one. You’ll get it after passing the game.
For All Mankind series. Russia got to the moon first and the space race continued through the ages.
@@marcwolf60biased crap with space KGB eager to execute each and every one. Nothing to share with the Soviet union. Check out Ivan Efremov or Stanislaw Lem, maybe even Alexei Tolstoy if you're into retro 30s' aesthetics
For the third one engineers were like - "Have you tried turning it on and on again?"
Our man is using Simplerockets 2, thank you for playing the game :)
Scott,
Thank you and keep looking up! 😉👍
Hi Scott, I'm since people are talking about video subtitles
I'm willing to volunteer for this work and I can get the rocket lingos correct.
I understood the idea of communications satellites was first presented by Arthur C. Clark. Thanks for the video!
As presented it required 3 equatorial geostationary satellite relays. So the Soviets came up with an idea that was better for their situation.
That was a great video, I really enjoyed it. I know it's unpopular opinion right now, but I think the Soviets managed to do some incredibly cool stuff in space tech, too bad that Russia didn't inherit them properly and right now that's just wasted. But wow, imagine the persistence and the state support the developers were getting to be able to iterate over so many failures. Nowadays, that's much harder to achieve.
funding has always been and still is the problem
I'm not sure whether it's popular or not. The real and valid criticism comes from things like the first Russian toilet paper factory being built in 1969 and the number of people who still lived in barracks. They were good at big prestige type projects, but then neglected the fact people lived in their country. I'd be curious how many people in the entire USSR had a TV in 1965.
@@johnl5350 I'm not sure how toilet paper is related to rockets, but whatever.
@@johnl5350 Зато сколько чугунины выплавляли!!
13:02 The story behind USSR using SECAM was simple - using anything but PAL means people in East Germany cannot see West German "propaganda". Same analogy for other counties in Solviet block.
You could watch it bw alright. So no, the Soviets didn't care about what the East Germans could watch. Stasi did that for them much more efficiently regardless of the TV broadcast system.
@@dvv18 It depends on the actual transmission standard used. The SECAM system in France used positive video modulation, instead of the negative modulation normally used with PAL. So a PAL or a B/W TV from that time would display a badly synchronized negative picture.
@@Rob2 As a kid who grew up in a Soviet city listening to heavily jammed Western broadcasts in Russian, I can confidently tell you that the barely intelligible TV picture was the least problem for the East Germans who lived in Berlin and along the border with BRD. If you wanted to get the message, you'd get it.
They watched West TV in Eastern Germany though.
Ah, one of those so numerous stupid scary fairy tales about USSR.
What program did you use to simulate those orbits?
As always Thanks Scott
…that one burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the seventh castle… errr, satellite stood and it’s the strongest satellite in the land
A much more strategically important orbit than the orbits overview video implied.
What is the software package you are using at 3:22 to illustrate the Molniya orbit?
It's called Universe Sandbox. It's on Steam.
what are you using to simulate? it is not quite KSP, or is it?
This is SO uncanny.
I was reading about orbits and satellites literally a few weeks ago and stumbled upon the article on Wikipedia about Molniya orbits. I thought it was really cool. It seemed like a really niche topic,
It’s somewhat crazy to me that I stumble upon this video in my recommendations a week or two later.
Molniya in Russian means lightning.
Scott, loved how you used JNO (juno new origins aka SR2 aka simplerockets 2)