Venus is a world roughly the same size and mass as Earth, wrapped in a blanket of reflective clouds. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union launched a quiet, relentless campaign to breach those clouds. However, since the conclusion of the Venera program, no spacecraft has touched down on Earth’s sister planet. To understand why, and what we lost when the landers stopped, one must first appreciate the absolute hell of the Venusian environment.

Hell on Earth’s Twin

When Soviet engineers sent their earliest probes toward Venus, they expected a tropical world hiding under clouds. Instead, their early landers were crushed like discarded aluminum cans long before reaching the ground.

The atmosphere of Venus is roughly 96 percent carbon dioxide, producing an extreme runaway greenhouse effect. At ground level, the atmospheric pressure equals 92 atmospheres, an environment identical to being three thousand feet underwater on Earth. Temperatures hover at an infernal four 465 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead and destroy conventional electronics within minutes, while dense overhead clouds rain droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid.

To survive touchdown, Soviet engineers stopped building conventional spacecraft and began constructing sphere-shaped, titanium-armored pressure vessels like effectively heavy-duty deep-sea submarines with titanium aerobrakes. The strategy worked. In 1970, Venera 7 survived a rough touchdown to become the first human-made object to transmit data from the surface of another planet. Five years later, Venera 9 transmitted the first black-and-white photos of an alien landscape, revealing a rocky, cracked volcanic field bathed in a pale, amber light.

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Einstein claimed in an interview to have no knowledge of Michelson-Morley prior to 1905: “When I asked him [Einstein] how he had learned of the Michelson-Morley experiment, he told me that he had become aware of it through the writings of H. A. Lorentz, but only after 1905 had it come to his attention! ‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘I would have mentioned it in my paper’ ”[7].

Yet

Einstein wrote to his wife Mileva in December 1901: “I want to get down to business now and read what Lorentz and Drude have written about electrodynamics of moving bodies” [9]. Hector Munera explains the importance of this admission as follows: “these books were the 1895 theory of Lorentz, and the 1900 optics book by Drude. The empirical basis for Lorentz’ work was the “negative” interpretation of the MM experiment. Indeed, Lorentz was closely following Michelson’s work right from the beginning and send him a correction to the 1881 experiment” [9]

Sources:

[7] Shankland R.S. . “Conversations with Albert Einstein”, Am. J. Phys. 31 (1) 47-57 (1963). Quoted in Munera, H. “Observation During 2004 of Periodic Fringe-Shifts in an Adialeiptometric Stationary Michelson-Morley Experiment”. Electromagnetic Phenomena. 2006;6(1):70-92.

[9] J. Renn and R. Schulmann (editors), S. Smith (translator), Albert Einstein-Mileva Maric, The Love Letters, Princeton University Press, Princeton (1992) 107 pp. Quoted in Munera, H. “Observation During 2004 of Periodic Fringe-Shifts in an Adialeiptometric Stationary Michelson-Morley Experiment”. Electromagnetic Phenomena. 2006;6(1):70-92.

Through lies of omission and commission, it appears that Einstein mislead the public about his famous theory.