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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."
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...
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.)
Table-ized A.I.