Charles Homans: How Soyuz Outlasted the Space Shuttle
[Charles Homans is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.]
When Michael Barratt, a NASA flight surgeon, arrived at the Russian cosmonaut training facility at Star City in 1993, the space program that once lofted Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin into orbit was at its lowest ebb since the U.S. moon landing. The storefronts in the enclave nestled in the boreal forest 20 miles outside Moscow were mostly closed, their shelves empty of food. The soldiers guarding the compound, Barratt recalls, were for a time receiving their paychecks in the form of surplus canned salmon. "A lot of our Russian co-workers hadn't been paid in months," he recalls.
It seemed an ignominious end for what had once been the most advanced space agency in the world. But if Russia lost the space race during the Cold War, today the country is about to take the lead, however temporarily, in the space marathon. When the last U.S. space shuttle touches down in Florida this year, it will leave behind in orbit the International Space Station, an 11-year, almost-completed construction project that the United States -- which has paid $48.5 billion of the expected $100 billion tab so far -- and other countries hope to keep using for at least another decade. But how to get there? U.S. President Barack Obama wants to pour $6 billion over the next five years into commercial transportation to and from orbit, bankrolling companies he claims will be "competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable." But whether they can pull it off remains an open question, and in any case their rockets are years away from being astronaut-ready. The Chinese have launched a few manned test flights, and India hopes to do so by 2016, but for now both are strictly minor league....
The austerity of the early post-Soviet years forced Russian engineers to embrace a MacGyver sensibility, using duct tape and chewing gum to hold together venerable spacecraft designs that the Americans would have retired decades earlier. The centerpiece of their efforts remained the Soyuz, a sort of aeronautical Kalashnikov: a famously reliable, no-frills machine that Russian factories had been stamping out in one form or another -- it has gone through eight variations -- since before the moon landing. No one would mistake the three-seat capsule, the shape of a gumball machine and not much bigger, for the glamorous space shuttle. On its return from orbit, the shuttle glides to a landing near a resort town in southern Florida; the Soyuz cannonballs out of the sky -- at a face-peeling eight times the force of gravity, if things go badly -- and thuds to rest on the Kazakh steppe. Its onboard survival kit has included a custom-designed three-barrel handgun ever since an early crew, emerging from the craft in the Ural Mountains, was reportedly menaced by wolves....
But for the routine space-station trips that constitute almost all manned spaceflight today, the Soyuz is not only $19 million cheaper per astronaut to launch than the shuttle, but it's also by most measures safer -- it hasn't had a fatal accident in 29 years. "In the West, we build Cadillacs," says Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut and space station commander who has flown on both the shuttle and the Soyuz. The latter, he says, "is more like an old pickup truck: It doesn't have air-conditioning, only has AM radio, but it gets you where you're going." The European Space Agency plans to begin launching its own Soyuzes late this year, and even the U.S. military's Atlas V rocket uses Russian-built engines. Nearly every company that has tried to break into the commercial satellite launch business has done it using Soviet-designed rockets bought cheap in Russia or Ukraine. U.S. aerospace contractors, fattened on years of noncompetitive government work, don't stand a chance....
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When Michael Barratt, a NASA flight surgeon, arrived at the Russian cosmonaut training facility at Star City in 1993, the space program that once lofted Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin into orbit was at its lowest ebb since the U.S. moon landing. The storefronts in the enclave nestled in the boreal forest 20 miles outside Moscow were mostly closed, their shelves empty of food. The soldiers guarding the compound, Barratt recalls, were for a time receiving their paychecks in the form of surplus canned salmon. "A lot of our Russian co-workers hadn't been paid in months," he recalls.
It seemed an ignominious end for what had once been the most advanced space agency in the world. But if Russia lost the space race during the Cold War, today the country is about to take the lead, however temporarily, in the space marathon. When the last U.S. space shuttle touches down in Florida this year, it will leave behind in orbit the International Space Station, an 11-year, almost-completed construction project that the United States -- which has paid $48.5 billion of the expected $100 billion tab so far -- and other countries hope to keep using for at least another decade. But how to get there? U.S. President Barack Obama wants to pour $6 billion over the next five years into commercial transportation to and from orbit, bankrolling companies he claims will be "competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable." But whether they can pull it off remains an open question, and in any case their rockets are years away from being astronaut-ready. The Chinese have launched a few manned test flights, and India hopes to do so by 2016, but for now both are strictly minor league....
The austerity of the early post-Soviet years forced Russian engineers to embrace a MacGyver sensibility, using duct tape and chewing gum to hold together venerable spacecraft designs that the Americans would have retired decades earlier. The centerpiece of their efforts remained the Soyuz, a sort of aeronautical Kalashnikov: a famously reliable, no-frills machine that Russian factories had been stamping out in one form or another -- it has gone through eight variations -- since before the moon landing. No one would mistake the three-seat capsule, the shape of a gumball machine and not much bigger, for the glamorous space shuttle. On its return from orbit, the shuttle glides to a landing near a resort town in southern Florida; the Soyuz cannonballs out of the sky -- at a face-peeling eight times the force of gravity, if things go badly -- and thuds to rest on the Kazakh steppe. Its onboard survival kit has included a custom-designed three-barrel handgun ever since an early crew, emerging from the craft in the Ural Mountains, was reportedly menaced by wolves....
But for the routine space-station trips that constitute almost all manned spaceflight today, the Soyuz is not only $19 million cheaper per astronaut to launch than the shuttle, but it's also by most measures safer -- it hasn't had a fatal accident in 29 years. "In the West, we build Cadillacs," says Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut and space station commander who has flown on both the shuttle and the Soyuz. The latter, he says, "is more like an old pickup truck: It doesn't have air-conditioning, only has AM radio, but it gets you where you're going." The European Space Agency plans to begin launching its own Soyuzes late this year, and even the U.S. military's Atlas V rocket uses Russian-built engines. Nearly every company that has tried to break into the commercial satellite launch business has done it using Soviet-designed rockets bought cheap in Russia or Ukraine. U.S. aerospace contractors, fattened on years of noncompetitive government work, don't stand a chance....