This Soviet stamp commemorates the Venera 8 mission to Venus. The USSR went all-out with its ... More commemorative spaceflight memorabilia: postage stamps, lapel pens, and even fountain pens shaped like rockets.

A long-dead Soviet spaceship is coming back to haunt us. Kosmos 482 was supposed to land on Venus 53 years ago, but a rocket malfunction left it trapped in a slowly decaying orbit around Earth instead. After all that time, Kosmos 482 finally gets to land — albeit on the wrong planet.

The spacecraft is expected to fall to Earth sometime between May 7 and May 13, as Forbes’s Jamie Carter reports. Here’s the weird story behind this week’s blast from the past (from outer space).

The spacecraft now called Kosmos 482 should have been Venera 8 or Venera 9: part of a series of Soviet missions to Earth’s backwards-rotating evil twin sister planet, Venus. Between 1961 and 1984, the USSR sent 13 Venera missions to Venus. Venera 8 had launched on March 27, 1972, and its sister ship should have followed close behind. But, as engineers like to say, “space is hard,” and something went wrong.

After blasting off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 31, 1972, the craft should have briefly settled into what’s called a “parking orbit” around Earth (a parking orbit is sort of a rest stop for interplanetary space missions). Firing the Molniya rocket’s upper stage engine for a few minutes should have pushed the spacecraft out of parking orbit and onto a path toward Venus.

“Typically Soviet planetary missions were initially put into an Earth parking orbit as a launch platform with a rocket engine and attached probe,” explained NASA on its website for the spacecraft. “The probes were........

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