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."

Comments

Moral of the story

[ShooterNeo]

The Soyuz space capsule was an incredible engineering accomplishment. Sometimes, a simpler, robust design is vastly superior to a complex, brilliant piece of engineering. It isn't always about min-maxing performance characteristics : engineering is about solving a problem with the least amount of resources used.

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.

For various reasons, somehow NASA has never done this. Their solutions to problems have tended to be stupendously expensive, complex boondoggles. Any average joe can see that building a space station when your launch costs are $10,000 a kilogram is a horrifically bad decision : the money spent should go into working out a cheaper way to launch things into orbit, first.

Part of this is politics, of course. The only reason Mission Control was in Houston rather than in the same facility where the rockets are worked on is due to a certain powerful Texas politician, LBJ...

Re:Moral of the story

[LWATCDR]

I guess but Remember that the Apollo 9 mission flew one month before this one. That mission was the first manned mission to orbit the moon. I would take the Apollo over Soyuz at that time. The Shuttle... Was an underfunded mess. It looks nothing like what NASA wanted to build. It was also oversold. It should have been an X-Plane like system and not sold as a Space 747. We where not even up the the space DC-3 level yet and politicians wanted to jump to airline service!
We should have kept flying Apollo/Saturn and updating it while getting the shuttle in service and testing it.

Re:Moral of the story

[QuantumG]

Ahh. another idealist who is completely unaware why the ISS project was approved. MIR had fell out the sky and the Russians were about to let go a whole bunch of their space engineers. What do you think those engineers would go on to do if something else was not found to occupy their time? The US feared it would be making weapons.. most likely for countries like Iran. So the Space Station Freedom plans were dusted off and modified for "international cooperation" and, there ya go, the Russian space program is re-invigorated. No need for a nasty war. Now compare the cost of the ISS to that and you get some idea why it is considered a bargin.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[Tablizer]

Amen! The Russians improved on an existing design to make it increasingly more reliable. We instead keep jumping from the alleged latest and greatest to the next alleged latest and greatest.

Programming languages and tools are like this also: outside of the US, older languages are still happily used in many parts. This is one reason why Microsoft kept upgrading FoxPro until recently--it's sales numbers were fairly high outside the US. (There's still some features about FoxPro that I like far more than MS-Access.)
     

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[dbIII]

It started off that way of becoming a super V2, however the Russians had a surviving decent rocket scientists of their own. What they lacked was technicians. What they did is repeated cleverly in a several Indian software companies today, they had the captured germans working on basicly irrelevant projects and would bring in soviet technicians and engineers to work alongside of them. After a while the soviet workers would leave and new ones would come in - the enhanced V2 project they were working on had become a training program. In the USA the captured rocket scientists were also not trusted for a few years and were mostly kept idle. The soviet orbitial rockets couldn't really be a mass produced delivery system of anything but it appears to have started off as a cleverly subverted promise to deliver a few enormous nukes to anywhere that quickly turned into a space program - Deborah Cadbury's "Space Race" describes it quite well.

Pronouncing Russian space names

[Opyros]

FWIW, most of us English speakers are badly mispronouncing the word "Soyuz". James Oberg has an article on how to pronounce it and several other names associated with the Soviet/Russian space program.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[damburger]

This is wrong. The early American rockets were far more based on German designs than Russian rockets were, because Americans got a lot more German rocket scientists.

The clustering and boosters of the R-7 design are radically different from anything von Braun envisioned. Korolev was a genius in his own right and I think its disrespectful to consider him merely a copier of German designs.

The reason Sputnik was such a shocker (along with other Soviet space firsts, all largely enabled by the immense power - for the time - of the R-7 derivatives) is because it was so far off the curve of rocket development at the time. With more and better German expertise, the US was baffled at how the Soviets had ended up with such a clear lead in the rocket race.

Yes, the US followed Soviet space firsts in short spaces of time - but in each case the satellite or capsule was a lot lighter. It was only a combination of superior computer technology in the west, and the inability of the Soviets to get the N-1 working, that kept them from claiming the moon. Both of these factors were simply policy mistakes by the Soviets; the leadership unlike their engineers lacked the insight to put good money into them early on.