I'm John Batchel with my good colleagues, David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show,

and Anatoly Zach of the Russian Space Web.

And we're following the inventors of Veneira 72A and 72B.

It's, I believe, Venera A that makes it through all of the challenges of Soviet

rocketry at the time, third stage launch, orbit of Earth. Venera B stays with us and just came

to Earth in the Indian Ocean. I've asked Anatoly about the parachutes. There's much more to say

about their skill set. But David, you have a question for Anatoly.

Anatoly, why after 50-some years does 72B fall out of orbit?

What happened?

So essentially, like I said, it was a launch failure, right?

So this orbit, nobody really choose this particular orbit.

It's ended up in this kind of X-shaped orbit or elliptical orbit, as they call it, in rocket science, by chance, right?

Because of the failure, because that's when the engine kind of stalled and stopped working.

And instead of the interplanetary trajectory,

it's end up in this ellipse, right, in that X-shaped orbit.

So imagine when you start launching from your parking orbit

and you ended up in this ellipse,

the highest point in so-called apogee,

the capsule comes very, very high, but then every orbit,

it comes back to this, to this starting point, right?

And that's where there is very small, dense amount of air, not dense, but very small amount

of air.

...