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Poster for Cosmodrome

Cosmodrome

2008 · Film · documentary · 49 min

Directed by Dan Clifton

Documentary

Cosmodrome is the story of Russia's "Crown Jewels"--The finest rocket engines in the world, built under conditions of absolute secrecy to land a man on the moon. It tells how, at the height of Cold War rivalry, the engineers of the Soviet Union's elite Design Bureaux developed what today have become the most admired rocket engines money can buy--and how in the new climate, driven by commerce not conflict, those engines have found their way into American rockets.

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2 comments on Hacker News

  1. PositivecartoonworldJun 20, 2021

    Its interesting to me that while in the US, we were spearheading the computer revolution with our cutting edge semiconductor industry, Soviet rocket designs remain pretty much unsurpassed to this day.[0]

    There's a cool documentary called "The Engines That Came In From The Cold" (available on youtube[1]) and if you have a Netflix subscription, I recommend the documentary "Cosmodrome" (2008)[2] which is about the history of the Soviet space program and these engines.

    I'm sure you're aware that the US Space program has been reliant on ex-Soviet heavy lift vehicles for decades more or less. Especially, since the Space Shuttle program was canned, if it weren't for SpaceX, the Russian lift would be the only bus on the route, aside from NRO launches and other um..stuff

    Indeed, the Soviets had a completely parallel semiconductor and electronics industry as well. I don't know for certain but it was undoubtedly lagging western developments by a large margin. Nonetheless, the Soviets had some very interesting developments of their own, such as the Kola superdeep borehole. It is all terribly fascinating.

    [0] https://sputniknews.com/russia/201704081052440303-russia-rockets-engines/

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbl_ofF3AM

    [2] https://letterboxd.com/film/cosmodrome/

  2. MixedmcguireOct 1, 2016

    There's an interesting, if a bit overdone documentary on Netflix called "Cosmodrome" concerning those Russian engines.