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

Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[modmans2ndcoming]

nothing worked right, but that was no big deal since the machines were so tough, they could just brute force their way to the end.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[Stormx2]

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!

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[dunkelfalke]

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.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[sakdoctor]

Soyuz; It's the AK-47 of spacecraft

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

[lysergic.acid]

does that mean any 12-year-old can fly one?

joking aside, that's probably an apt comparison. i wonder how much it cost to develop/build/operate the Soyuz compared the Shuttle.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[jd]

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.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[lysergic.acid]

yea, that was 1960. and the Nedelin disaster was an ICBM test; it was not space-related.

so far NASA astronauts have a mortality rate of 4.1% (17 deaths), whereas only 4 Russian cosmonauts have died, which is 0.9% of all the cosmonauts launched.

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.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[sjames]

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.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[jd]

Quite likely. If you look at "traditional" engineering techniques, you start with a specification which you then implement. A fault-tolerant specification implemented such that those faults are themselves unlikely would logically be superior to one that is fault-tolerant but liable to suffer faults or a system in which faults are unlikely but catastrophic.

Alternatively, go in the opposite direction. Design something in such a way that components have few opportunities to fail, but then implement them to be fault-tolerant should that happen.

On a more trivial level, look at materials. Iron is ok as a building material but it's heavy and has a much lower critical temperature at which it will fail than, say, some of NASA's high-temperature ceramics. Logically, a Soyuz capsule that replaced some of the ablative heat-shield with the Shuttle's thermal skin would be lighter (making it less costly to launch) and more heat-resistant (making it safer in the event of too steep a re-entry).

I suspect that the fuel used by the Russian rockets is also less stable than some of the liquid and hybrid fuels used in the US. The US has the means to develop fuels that behave in a highly predictable and controlled manner, whereas the Russians are likely using fuels that might do anything short of tap-dance. It's entirely possible that a Russian launcher converted to use US fuels would be more reliable than either country has produced independently.

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.

Re:Nothing like Soviet Engineering

[Ceiynt]

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.

"Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"

[Jurily]

What a retarded headline. Would it have killed someone to write it as "Soyuz 4 and 5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"?

Re:"Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"

[Yvan256]

Indeed. I lost about 5 minutes searching for "Soyuz 0.8" on Wikipedia.

Re:"Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"

[Anders]

What a retarded headline. Would it have killed someone to write it as "Soyuz 4 and 5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"?

"Soyuz 4 and 5 Made History 40 Years Ago Yesterday"

Re:"Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"

[Colitis]

That version was an internal-only release.

Re:"Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"

[Tablizer]

Would it have killed someone to write it as "Soyuz 4 and 5 [instead of a slash]

Dude, this *is* slashdot. Plus, the capsule got stuck to the docking station, making the it re-enter the wrong way, so they showed it closer together than "and" would have provided. See, it's all logical.
             

Re:"Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"

[orzetto]

That would be soyuzy .

Re:"Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today"

[pnevin]

Given that about 4/5 of the mission worked, it's reasonably accurate.

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

[Em Ellel]

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...

Wow, LBJ had enough clout to move his state to be one of the southern most locations in US... amazing.... I wonder if he pushed the frozen donkey wheel alone or had some help... (Also, does that mean he could never find his way back to Texas and had to live out his life in outside world?)

-Em

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:Moral of the story

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that the Apollo 9 mission flew one month before this one. That mission was the first manned mission to orbit the moon.

That was Apollo 8-- Apollo 9 tested the LEM out in earth orbit, which was a pretty exciting mission itself even though it didn't happen at the moon.

Re:Moral of the story

[lysergic.acid]

actually, Florida extends further south than Texas.

-Houston, Texas is located at 294546N
-Merritt Island, Florida is located at 282128N

also, the Saturn V rockets were designed & built at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, which is a heck of a lot closer to Florida than to Texas. and it should also be noted that just because Johnson Space Center is the Mission Control of all manned space flights in the U.S. does not mean all manned space missions take off from Houston. the Apollo 11 mission was actually launched from Kennedy Space Center.

Re:Moral of the story

[lysergic.acid]

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.

Re:Moral of the story

[QuantumG]

Sigh. The Russians were planning MIR-2.. it was canceled, what with the fall of the Soviet Union and all. Bush (Sr)'s justification for the "Agreement between the United States of America and the Russian Federation Concerning Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes" was well documented at the time. With his departure and the arrival of Gore and Clinton, the reasoning was spelled out again.

I'm repeating the fact that water is wet, you're saying I'm "making attacks on people's ignorance".

Re:Moral of the story

[QuantumG]

patriot? What the fuck dude? For one, I'm Australian. For two, parts of MIR had fallen out of the sky by the time the ISS started construction in 1998. Here's another idea, how about you just fuck right off? Nit picking tool.

Re:Moral of the story

[bitrex]

"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.

Re:Moral of the story

[Dun Malg]

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".

Bonus Parts?

[Tablizer]

Let me see if I got this strait: the return capsule accidentally got stuck to part of the ship it was docked to, and took the part with it on the way down, but this extra part cause the capsule to face the wrong way, using the wrong side as the "heat shield", which meant the astronaut was about to be cooked to death.

But the vibration and heat of a rough re-entry jiggled or melted the extra part away, setting the capsule free and allowing it to face the proper direction. (Although the rough ride caused other landing problems as a result.)
       

Re:Bonus Parts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good enough. Soyuz, Gemini and Mercury capsules were designed so that they are stable in aerodynamic flight when the heat shield is pointing in the direction of travel. So even if you can't see what orientation you are in, once the capsule 'feels' the atmosphere, it will turn around on its own to face the correct direction.

The same thing happened recently on the TMA-11 return, where the SM got hung up and didn't detach for some time.

http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/4170

Re:Bonus Parts?

[John Hasler]

> Let me see if I got this strait...

You don't. You don't have it straight, either.

Re:Bonus Parts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me see if I got this strait:

Not quite, but you're on the right Bering.

Re:Bonus Parts?

[smoker2]

Let me see if I got this strait:

Not quite, but you're on the right Bering.

Oh, that was just dire.

Re:Bonus Parts?

[Brett Buck]

Note that this is hardly the only time this happened, in fact it happened on Soyuz TMA-11 last year, and to a fair number of the Vostok/Voskhod flights before it. It's a source of concern for the ISS return spacecraft.

          Brett

Re:The suspense!

[stonedcat]

It can't be helped. The actual article uses this statement three times...

Re:In Soviet Russia ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... spacecraft REENTERS you

He came from outer space

[Raenex]

Best part of the story for me was this:

Given that the entire re-entry-and-landing process was pretty well botched, it's perhaps unsurprising that Volynov came down well short of the intended landing area. In fact, he landed in the Ural Mountains, where he was greeted by a local temperature measuring a brisk minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit With rescue several hours away at best, our intrepid cosmonaut decided to hoof it for safety. He plodded a few kilometers before finding a cheery fire and a brimming samovar in the cottage of a welcoming peasant.

That must have been one surprised peasant.

Re:He came from outer space

[Detritus]

That's much better than Voskhod 2, which also landed off-course in the Urals in similar circumstances, and was surrounded by hungry wolves.

http://www.astronautix.com/flights/voskhod2.htm

Re:He came from outer space

[quenda]

no kidding. given what had just happened to him, i half expected for the peasant to have shot Volynov for trespassing.

Not in Russia. But this is why US astronauts landed at sea, rather than risk landing in Texas.

Re:He came from outer space

[dunkelfalke]

actually very far - ussr was the largest country in the world. you could get a flight over 8 time zones (and this without any passport or hassle at the check in).

internal ids are pretty common in europe (the system is not much different) and european police asks for them way more often than soviet militia did it back then.

you have to get some perspective. while the ussr looked quite totalitarian some decades ago, comparing it to modern europe and usa creates a very different picture. in some ways soviet people were more free than western people are now.

Re:In Soviet Russia ...

[Opportunist]

No wonder that cosmonauts had a reputation of being really hard-assed.

True meaning of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world countries

[mhalagan]

Today's meaning of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world countries is vastly different from the original meaning. Originally 1st world countries were those which were democratic. 2nd world countries were communist, and everyone else fell into the 3rd world category.

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:Also, imagine what would happen if...

[XNormal]

...the Shuttle entered the armosphere wrong end in

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.