Originally published at: India successfully landed a rover on an unexplored section of the moon | Boing Boing
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India is the fourth Terran country to land on the moon, after
RussiaUSSR, USA, and China.
Well done, ISRO! 
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I feel bad for this being my first reaction because it is a nice accomplishment for India, but suck on that, Russia
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More of this! Less of what’s happening in Ukraine.
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As mentioned in another thread and hinted by @euansmith above Russia has never landed anything on the moon without enlisting the help of Ukrainian scientists and engineers.
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Yeah, like everything else Russia attempts to do, it’s shoddy and corrupt.
I feel like even the old USSR was more capable than Russia of today. Still to this day Russia / USSR is the only country to have successfully landed probes on Venus and they did that over 50 years ago. In fact the USSR was the first country not just in space, but the first to land a probe on another planet, which was Venus.
Anyway, go India!
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Which either says a lot about the science community in the USSR; or the suitability of Venus as a holiday destination. 
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Sunny but a terrible atmosphere.
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and really, you want to have a good time, but there’s just so much pressure.
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“The ten seconds before I dissolved in shrieking agony were the best!”
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The two countries have almost equally ultra nationalist governments, so you don’t have to feel too bad
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The US Pioneer Venus Multiprobe’s ‘Day Probe’ also returned data from the surface for more than an hour. Having said that, the Soviet Venera missions were a triumph.
BTW. From the original article, India has already had a successful mission to Mars. Mangalyaan orbited the planet for eight years from 2014 until contact was lost last year. Maybe the interviewee was talking about a Mars Lander? If they can do it, and get useful data from the surface, they would be only the third country to do so after the US and China - the Soviet Union never got anything out of their Mars landers.
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I’m amazed they actually got the probe to the moon before it all went belly up.
Not only did they land on the moon, but they did it with more style than anyone in history.
Check out the colours of that lander!
None of yer boring grey metal colours for these guys, oh no…
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I don’t think they could have achieved that if the USSR didn’t have strict emigration policies intentionally fashioned to kill off the brain drain, or allowed its scientists and engineers to attend international conferences and such sans KGB “chaperones”.
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NASA entirely outsourcing launching astronauts to a commercial carrier, and Russia crash landing on the moon as its first foray back into a 21st Century space race, days before India succeeds in landing a very colorful-looking lander on the moon in the year 2023 is the most science-fictionesque world that might be found on a paperback in 1983. Except there’d be real cosmonauts involved, and this is 20 years after emerging from the ashes of World War III.
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Does the rover have a sign on the back saying “Horn Ok Please”?
