A Soviet spacecraft is expected to make a crash landing on Earth this week. But nobody knows where — yet.

By the time the Kosmos 482 spacecraft launched in 1972, the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States had been in full swing for about 15 years.

It began in 1957 when the Soviet Union sent Sputnik 1, the first satellite, into Earth’s orbit. About four years later, astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth.

In the early ’60s, the Soviet Union seemed to be winning the space race — until NASA’s Apollo 11 became the first crewed mission to land on the moon in 1969.

The next frontier in the early 1970s for the US-Soviet competition was exploring planets using unmanned spacecraft. In 1972, the Soviet Union’s Kosmos 482 probe was intended to reach Venus, however, it never got to its destination. Instead, it’s been circling Earth since 1972, and gradually descending.

Now, Kosmos 482 is expected to come hurtling back to Earth this week after being stuck in orbit for more than 50 years.

Anatoly Zak, a journalist, and the author of a book, “Russia in Space,”  said that predicting the timing and the location of the spacecraft’s crash landing won’t be possible until just hours before it comes pummeling down.

“When you’re flying with this tremendous speed, even a few seconds difference can have a huge geographical change because it affects your trajectory by hundreds of kilometers,” Zak said. “So, it’s notoriously hard to predict. Of course, oceans are covering a big part of this area, so the probability is very high that it’s going to end up in the ocean.”

Russian space expert and journalist Vitaly Yegorov, said that the spacecraft successfully launched into Earth’s orbit, but because of a technical problem with one of the rockets, it couldn’t blast off toward Venus.

That’s why it’s been stuck in orbit for all these years.

Yegorov said that whenever a Russian spacecraft wouldn’t reach its destination, it would essentially be renamed. So, what was supposed to be known as Venera 9 was called Kosmos 482 because it never made it to Venus.

Yegorov said that the Soviet Union didn’t want to publicize its failures, so it would simply rebrand, and say that it successfully launched a satellite into orbit.

Author Zak explained how the Kosmos 482 fit into the US-Soviet space race.

“Both the United States and Soviet Union at that time were very actively exploring the planets, using the robotic probes. For example, the Americans were the first who delivered very clear images of the Martian surface. So, the Soviet Union focused on Venus as a sort of counterweight to the exploration of Mars.”

Zak said that there was a lot of prestige in space exploration but also political pressure and that led to many Soviet achievements big and small.

“They were the first who were able to penetrate the very dense atmosphere of Venus, very hostile environment of Venus, to reach the surface, and actually transmit useful data, from the surface of Venus, all the way back to Earth.” 

Since the early 1970s, a lot has changed in the relationship between the US, Soviet, and now, Russian space programs.

Zak said that in the ’70s, after years of competition, space became an area of cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

“Right now, we almost came full circle, because, of course, it’s exactly the time now where we are marking almost three decades of a cooperative space program, which is now unraveling, and turning back into the competition.”

And that competition isn’t limited to Russia and the United States.

Other countries, like China, have also entered the competition along with many private companies that are leading the way in the new space race of the 21st century.