> Actually, your statistics rely on "public data."
Where have you been for the last 10 years? (sorry, couldn't resist).
> There were at least two capsules that never made it up
Soyuz 18-1 and Soyuz T-10-1.
A lot of rockets never made it up. See this list. Only a few of them were manned: Soyuz 18-1, Soyuz T-10-1, STS-51-L. It so happened that 7 astronauts died, but 4 cosmonauts survived.
> a fair number that died on the ground (one of which, if I recall correctly, actually took out some high level brass observing nearby.)
I would say comparable number of people for both space programs (can anybody count the flights at Encyclopedia Astronautica?) And, of course, Russians spent a lot more man-days in space.
Russia (USSR) has lost 4 cosmonauts in two in-flight accidents, all of them on landing:
Vladimir Komarov (Soyuz 1, Apr 23 1967) - parachute system failure, the capsule crashed into a field;
Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, Vladislav Volkov (Soyuz 11, Jun 6 1971, first ever space station flight) - valve failure on separation of orbital module and landing capsule. No spacesuits and no air.
There was one Russian accident similar to Apollo 1: Valentin Bondarenko was killed on March 23, 1961 in oxygen camera. After a routine blood test he dropped alcohol soaked cotton ball on a hot electric stove, starting the oxygen fire. Valentin died in the hospital the same day.
There were no more Cosmonaut deaths. However, there were numerous rocket and military missile accidents killing the ground crew.
"Tens of millions of pepper-flake sized radioactive particles, comprising a fifth to a quarter of the core, remained scattered
over a 124,000 square kilometer 'footprint', stretching southward from Great Slave Lake into northern Saskatchewan and Alberta..."
I think the Cosmos worries were justifiable -- the satillite had a small radioactive power source. I think that they just have some warm radioactive material that heats a thermocouple to make electricity -- it makes the satillite smaller and harder to see, nice for a spy satillite (which cosmos 954 was) or a space probe going far away from the sun (like Cassini, if I remember correctly). Cosmos apparently spread a lot of small radioactive dust particles over the Northern Territories. If NASA had had a disaster with Cassini, they could have done the same thing.
Russian naval radarsats had an actual nuclear reactor aboard. The radioactive stuff landed in the Northern Territories in Canada were the remains of the reactor core.
* Elbrus, under development: a family of different CPUs; some of them were called SVS, basically advanced BESM (see below); some were "high-level" processors bridging the lexical gap (a la iAPX432). Original Soviet design. One interesting use was on-board flight control and automatic landing of the Soviet shuttle (Buran) in 1988.
* VAX clones, under development.
* ES series: IBM/360 clones. The government-mandated mainframe. Some ESes had vector co-processors.
* SM series: PDP-11 clones. The government-mandated mini.
* BESM6: 60's era monsters, built with transistors(!), real core memory and magnetic drums. 1 megaflop peak per processor. 6-byte words. 64K words memory space. Integers are denormalized floats. Drums were eventually replaced with ES disks, core memory with 64K chips (hanging in the middle of the vast space vacated by the cores), but huge transistor CPU stayed. Nice toy, but kinda big. Used mostly by the Academy of Sciences.
* Various military microprocessors.
* Whatever it was called: PC sized PDP-11 clones.
* Oversized calculators slowly evolving in microcomputers. Were coded in Basic. Bizzare - all numbers in BCD.
* Bunch of home-brew processors from universities.
One of those which got government funding was designed for Modula-2 and as such didn't have a GOTO (JUMP) instruction. Fortran compiler designers had to push address on stack and return.
Soviet VAX clones were developed on real VAXes.
There were enough companies willing to break COCOM restriction and deliver latest PCs, UNIX boxes,
HPs, VAXes and many more.
Slashdot Mirror
> The Russians lie.
Whoops. I am Russian. Can't trust me. Duh.
> Actually, your statistics rely on "public data."
Where have you been for the last 10 years? (sorry, couldn't resist).
> There were at least two capsules that never made it up
Soyuz 18-1 and Soyuz T-10-1.
A lot of rockets never made it up. See this list. Only a few of them were manned: Soyuz 18-1, Soyuz T-10-1, STS-51-L. It so happened that 7 astronauts died, but 4 cosmonauts survived.
> a fair number that died on the ground (one of which, if I recall correctly, actually took out some high level brass observing nearby.)
This one: The Nedelin Catastrophe.
> Not to mention at least one that we heard of where the astronauts died in the capsule, because of leaks
Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, Vladislav Volkov (Soyuz 11, Jun 6 1971) - on descent. Public record as of 1971.
> Of course, these events never made it into the "public record."
But they made it into state records, which eventually became public.
> Until now, the only useful thing I've really seen come out of that research was the Optical Intellimouse.
Optical Intellimouse uses technology from HP.
CDMA 1900 and GSM don't work well inside the buildings (or windowless cubicle-filled caves like the one I'm in now).
We don't want airships dead.
/. banner ad)
(Link taken from today's
Automatic watches are far from dead. Can I have one for Christmas?
And Russians have better record on launch abort casualties:
April 05 1975, crew of 2 - stages 2 and 3 failed to separate - 20G reentry, both survived.
September 26 1983, crew of 2 - explosion on the pad, saved by the launch abort system.
Compare to STS-51-L.
Russia (USSR) has lost 4 cosmonauts in two in-flight accidents, all of them on landing:
Vladimir Komarov (Soyuz 1, Apr 23 1967) - parachute system failure, the capsule crashed into a field;
Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, Vladislav Volkov (Soyuz 11, Jun 6 1971, first ever space station flight) - valve failure on separation of orbital module and landing capsule. No spacesuits and no air.
There was one Russian accident similar to Apollo 1: Valentin Bondarenko was killed on March 23, 1961 in oxygen camera. After a routine blood test he dropped alcohol soaked cotton ball on a hot electric stove, starting the oxygen fire. Valentin died in the hospital the same day.
There were no more Cosmonaut deaths. However, there were numerous rocket and military missile accidents killing the ground crew.
> What are you talking about, the whole site is in Russian.
And Ukrainians didn't take over Moscow...
The point is, KIAE (Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy) is in Moscow, Russia. And the web site is physically located in Moscow.
AFAIK the crew that was running reactor went straight to the hospital, and perished well before their trial could start.
> I don't read Russian either, but it's probably in Ukrainian.
It is in Ukranian. It was converted when Ukrainians took over Moscow and the web site.
Gore vs Bush
Gore
By the way, wrong spelling in the article. It's "Funktsional'no-gruzovoy blok" ("Ôóíêöèîíàëüíî-ãðóçîâîé áëîê" - set your browsers to Windows-1251).
"Tens of millions of pepper-flake sized radioactive particles, comprising a fifth to a quarter of the core, remained scattered
over a 124,000 square kilometer 'footprint', stretching southward from Great Slave Lake into northern Saskatchewan and Alberta..."
Sounds ugly.
Russian naval radarsats had an actual nuclear reactor aboard. The radioactive stuff landed in the Northern Territories in Canada were the remains of the reactor core.
I think the reactor was called Topaz.
US-A radarsats were not small - 3800 kg.
Too bad it breaks on this insider story. The story is mostly about Russian business - it talks about the OS only in the very beginning.
State of the art in the mid-80's:
* Elbrus, under development: a family of different CPUs; some of them were called SVS, basically advanced BESM (see below); some were "high-level" processors bridging the lexical gap (a la iAPX432). Original Soviet design. One interesting use was on-board flight control and automatic landing of the Soviet shuttle (Buran) in 1988.
* VAX clones, under development.
* ES series: IBM/360 clones. The government-mandated mainframe. Some ESes had vector co-processors.
* SM series: PDP-11 clones. The government-mandated mini.
* BESM6: 60's era monsters, built with transistors(!), real core memory and magnetic drums. 1 megaflop peak per processor. 6-byte words. 64K words memory space. Integers are denormalized floats. Drums were eventually replaced with ES disks, core memory with 64K chips (hanging in the middle of the vast space vacated by the cores), but huge transistor CPU stayed. Nice toy, but kinda big. Used mostly by the Academy of Sciences.
* Various military microprocessors.
* Whatever it was called: PC sized PDP-11 clones.
* Oversized calculators slowly evolving in microcomputers. Were coded in Basic. Bizzare - all numbers in BCD.
* Bunch of home-brew processors from universities.
One of those which got government funding was designed for Modula-2 and as such didn't have a GOTO (JUMP) instruction. Fortran compiler designers had to push address on stack and return.
Soviet VAX clones were developed on real VAXes.
There were enough companies willing to break COCOM restriction and deliver latest PCs, UNIX boxes,
HPs, VAXes and many more.