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Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today
dj writes in with a reminder that forty years ago, on January 16, 1969, the two Russian spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 carried out the first docking between two manned spacecraft and transfer of crew between the craft. Wired's piece gives a gripping account of "one of the roughest re-entries in the history of space flight": "Soyuz 5's service module failed to detach at retrofire, causing the vehicle to assume an aerodynamic position that left the heat shield pointed the wrong way as it re-entered the atmosphere. The only thing standing between Volynov and a fiery death was the command module's thin hatch cover. The interior of Volynov's capsule filled with noxious fumes as the gaskets sealing the hatch started to burn, and it got very hot in there (which, a short time later was something he probably missed). ... But wait. There's more."
What a retarded headline. Would it have killed someone to write it as "Soyuz 4 and 5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"?
nothing worked right
I'd say that the vast majority of systems MUST have worked right for the ships to have entered space in the first place, let alone docked and re-entered. Wuthell!
That's right..as opposed to oh so superior American Engineering that results in lots of good TV coverage of shuttles blowing up and burning up every few years.
If I were going into space I'd pick the Soyuz every time, at least you get up there and back without being spread over most of Texas.
Well, comparing to a real third world country with nukes (Pakistan), the soviet industry was way more advanced back then - 40 years ago - than pakistani industry is now.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Soyuz; It's the AK-47 of spacecraft
People like to think that NASA is borderline retarded and would be better off simply using their funding dollars and fuel. Most of the time they are right. However, when it comes to safety, NASA is the top, through frequently to their own detriment.
For the case you pointed out:
> I've read that the clever Russian solution to updating the computers in Soyuz. Rather than
> a start from scratch rewrite of the controls and instruments, they choose to emulate all
> their old computers in modern circuitry, and to display the same gauges and instruments
> on modern LCDs.
The Russians here are totally in the wrong. First of all, one of the major issues concerning software in space is the ability of the hardware to work in the wild temperatures and radiation of space. NASA uses old hardware because they know it works. The Russians have swapped out their known-working hardware, and added fun potential issues like and LCD panel. On top of this, instead of just porting the code to a newer system and proving it still works, they now have to prove an emulator emulates the old hardware exactly: a much harder problem.
In short, this is like the old "Russians using a pencil / NASA spending $** million on the space pen story". It sounds clever until you realize that a pencil makes loose graphite dust in a closed environment.
eh, so when the "old hardware" was first used, how did NASA know it would work in space? did they look at the test data from the ancient Mayan space flights?
the whole "we use old hardware because we know it works" excuse is a ton of baloney. every space technology has to be tested and tried for the first time initially. sticking to the tried and true is not a blanket excuse to oppose change or to stubbornly hold onto archaic & outdated technology; otherwise, we'd never make any kind of technological progress.
we know enough about space that vital equipment can be tested on earth by simulating space environments before they're employed on an actual space mission. it's the same principle as building equipment for use in the arctic or the deep ocean. if you don't try new things you won't be able to improve on existing systems.
part of what NASA has been doing over the past 4 decades is learning more and more about environmental conditions in space and how this affects human-beings and equipment. that lets us theorize/predict how new equipment will behave in space, and allows us to design better space technology. space isn't this unknowable mystery or some supernatural realm that magically breaks new equipment for no reason. the best way to know if LCD screens will work in space is to send one up for non-mission-critical use. and if it does break unexpectedly from an unknown interaction, then that's something that we need to investigate as it could shed light on aspects of space that we are not currently privy to.
if something doesn't work in space, we should learn why it doesn't work. likewise, if something does work in space, we should learn why it works. by taking a rational scientific approach to space exploration, we can improve on existing systems and employ new technologies in space without rolling dice. sticking to outmoded technologies due to a fear of change is a very reactionary attitude that does not belong in space exploration.
The Soyuz was (and is) a very simple, basic rocket. As the Russians and Americans had scooped up V2 rocket scientists, my guess is that the Soyuz is basically what the V3 would have been had the war continued. Given that the V2 was designed to be mass-produced as an effective weapon, it would logically follow that Soyuz must be cheap enough that it could have been produced in the tens or hundreds of thousands by a Europe-wide industry in war footing.
One should not assume that Soyuz is perfect, merely because it's simple. Although any engineer will tell you that a more complex system is a less reliable system, Soyuz had problems. At least one capsule malfunction killed all the crew during descent. Control malfunctions causing descent problems are common. Nonetheless, for a program that lost the only engineer who really understood rockets very early on from a brain tumour, it has had astonishing success.
The American and European space programs are not wrong, I believe, to use more modern technology, but they are wrong to use that as an excuse to not perform the additional quality control you need. It makes sense to assume that the number of possible interactions increases exponentially as you increase the number of components, which means you need to spend exponentially more resources on both the design AND the QA for a linear increase in manufacturing complexity.
It should be perfectly possible to design a highly reliable modern rocket system, but it won't be cheap and it won't be easy. Since NASA and the ESA operate on shoestring budgets that would barely pay for enough string for the engineer's shoes, it is clearly impossible for them to be designing such systems correctly. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what it takes a rocket scientist.
For commercial rocketry, though, you probably don't want the sophistication that is possible. A souped-up V2, as per Arthur C Clarke's suggestion in Wireless World and as adopted by the space giants early on, is really all you need, although I don't see the harm in borrowing more modern material science techniques to cut costs and reduce weight.
I imagine you could put a Sputnik-like payload into space for a few hundred thousand dollars and put astronauts in space for a tenth of what Russia has to charge space tourists. Not mainstream, but less the province only of the billionaires of the world.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Don't get me wrong, but I think if the MIR was a western design, it would not have outlived its expected lifetime by many years. Yes, it would have worked flawlessly 'til its end, but in the end it would have come down because some special part was not available and without you couldn't keep it afloat.
Spirit and Opportunity would like to have a word with you.
You've got a point with low cargo capacity but they certainly launch more often than the shuttle - the launches usually don't even make the news.
The durability of Soviet (now Russian) space technology is the result of a very different design philosophy.
The U.S. program tends to use extreme engineering to make the failure of critical componants extremely unlikely. The Soviet philosophy is to make system failures less critical. That's why Mir was basically OK with it's main power failed after the docking accident.
Another aspect of Soviet design is to brute force the problem using existing materials rather than develop new exotic materials to finesse the problem. That's why a Soyuz capsule can survive reentering at the wrong attitude.
The resulting designs do have their merits. I suspect there's a happy medium between the two approaches that would work even better.
The shuttle HAS NO right end to enter the atmosphere. It is not stable without active controls. Soyuz can enter in brick mode and still survive the reentry.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
According to wikipedia, the Shuttle has launched a total of 830 crew, of whom 14 have died. That's 1.69%, vs. 4 fatalities out of ~250 crew launched on human Soyuz (1.6%).
Note that this 830 crew is less than 830 astronauts, because some have flown multiple times...
2 fatal accidents out of 123 flights (Shuttle) is simply not distinguishable from 2 fatal accidents out of ~100 human Soyuz flights.
"Sometimes" because simple and robust are relative terms. A rock is simple and robust, you could even use it to hammer a nail in a pinch. A hammer is a little more complex and vastly more efficient. A nailgun is much more complex than a hammer, but you can't put 50 nails a minute into a roof with a hammer. When you then start trying to ask questions like "Is a nailgun better than a hammer" or "Is the Soyuz better than the Space Shuttle" without any qualifications the questions are meaningless.
Only 4 cosmonauts have died, that we KNOW of. The Russian government isn't the greatest at telling the truth, and is really good at PR bending.
Very selective use of facts. Four people have died in flight in Soyuz spacecraft, while fourteen have died in flight on US shuttles.
14>4
Utter nonsense. You somehow equate a larger seating capacity to "more failures".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.