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

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[sr180]

Foxpro had one great feature.. It functioned as a database aware scripting language which made complex tasks simpler than any other database packages around. You could work in a proceedural way, accessing record by record, you could work with sets, cursers and sql, it even had a limited object like support. I still see complex database tasks now that I wish I had foxpro or an equivalent around for. For processing or rearranging databases, nothing beat foxpro.

However, It was horribly buggy - graphics and gui features would just never work the way you expected them to - the database features were all solid however. MS would even issue major changes in the SQL syntax with minor point releases of the ADO objects. (A lesson to ALWAYS use a test server.)

Foxpro is what access should have been. Something like Foxpro is exactly what Open Office needs for manipulating data..