Soviet

Jalopnik has some wonderful pictures of relics from the Soviet Lunar Lander program, abandoned after the success of Apollo 11.
Rhizome has a cache of incredible 1980s-era Soviet animations of American science fiction stories. Quite fittingly for Earth Day, here is Ray Bradbury's "Here There Be Tygers" as imagined by Russian animators. The hyper-synth music is especially awesome. неимовеÑно! More wonderful animations of stories by the likes of Stephen King and Robert Silverberg can be found at Rhizome.
In our increasingly worldaround world, it is a rare, if not obsolete, occurrence for two wildly disparate and equally sophisticated cultures to meet for the first time. That's probably for the best, of course, because when it did happen in spades, during the centuries on Earth before instantaneous global communication, all bets were off, and what went down was almost always marked with catastrophe (as with the indigenous people of North America) or powderkeg-and-a-match mutual distrust (as with the first United States naval expeditions to Japan in the 1850s, a cultural collision that is…