A Russian spacecraft built in 1972 to land on Venus finally made its landing 53 years later, on 10 May 2025 — except it came down on Earth, carried through a fiery reentry intact by the same titanium shell its engineers had built to survive the hottest planet in the solar system.

A Russian spacecraft built in 1972 to land on Venus finally made its landing 53 years later, on 10 May 2025 — except it came down on Earth, carried through a fiery reentry intact by the same titanium shell its engineers had built to survive the hottest planet in the solar system.

At around one in the morning on April 3, 1972, four red-hot titanium spheres fell out of the sky onto farmland near Ashburton on New Zealand's South Island. Each weighed about 30 pounds and measured roughly 38 centimeters across, and they scorched holes through crops and punched dents into the soil across a sixteen-kilometer radius. They were pressure vessels from a Soviet rocket that had failed four days earlier trying to send a probe to Venus.…