cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/37764597

It appears that nearly all content related to the Soviet Venera Venus program has been scrubbed from nasa.gov. Pages that were clearly there—based on existing links and references—are now dead or redirect to generic pages. For a program that achieved the first landing on another planet, the first photos from a planetary surface, and the only audio ever recorded on Venus, this sudden erasure is… suspicious.

Given our president’s weird nostalgia for the Cold War and general fondness for Russia, I genuinely can’t figure out the angle here—maybe it’s just about downplaying non-American accomplishments in space? No idea. But it’s strange.

When I asked ChatGPT to generate a post about this, it danced around the fact for several tries, repeating vague lines about the importance of remembering historical missions but refusing to directly say the content had been scrubbed from nasa.gov. Which, honestly, isn’t surprising—but it’s still dismaying. I wasn’t expecting this particular bit of weirdness, and I don’t love what it suggests.

Discovered when I tried the links from this one page that came up in a lengthy search: apod.nasa.gov/apod/