For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Politics Covid U. News World Opinion Business. Share this —. Follow NBC News. By Matthew Bodner. At the heart of the Apollo spacecraft , for instance, was an advanced MIT-designed guidance computer — a truly pioneering microelectronic device to enable the astronauts to accurately position themselves in space.
The Soviet solution to the same navigation problem was an elaborate electro-mechanical box of rods, wheels and cogs surrounding a miniature painted globe of the Earth. Rather than electronic view screens, Soyuz employed dials and a periscope that cosmonauts looked through for docking. The mechanical navigation system was phased out in the s but the periscope remains today.
When I visited the Soyuz simulators in the cosmonaut training centre at Star City a few years ago, I asked about this. Our guide pointed out that when you are approaching a space station at seven kilometres per second, a tube and a couple of mirrors are much more reliable than an electronic display.
Even the control room in Moscow — tacked onto the side of the impressive ISS control room — looks more like a call centre than a hi-tech space hub. Soyuz is the space equivalent of a white van or pick-up truck. There are parallels to Soyuz in aviation, with iconic aircraft of the Cold War including the B52 bomber, U2 spy plane and the Soviet-era MiG fighter still flying, not to mention the s-designed Boeing This video is no longer available.
This is a charge that has been levelled at the Space Shuttle — a space programme that has come and gone during the Soyuz era. This month on 4 December Nasa will launch — unmanned — the first of its new Orion space capsules. Developments and upgrades continued throughout the decade, but a rocket with a history as long as the Soyuz cannot be without its hitches.
Commander Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov came within seconds of tragedy on 26 September , as they sat in the capsule atop a Soyuz-U rocket preparing for a mission to service the Salyut 7 space station.
Spilled fuel was to blame for the spacecraft erupting in flames, burning the control cables to its automatic ejector escape system. Unshaken, the Soviets continued to send the Soyuz-U rocket into space and it would eventually deliver Expedition 1, the first resident crew to the International Space Station, on 2 November Another major milestone in spaceflight history occurred in July , when the American Space Shuttle fleet was retired. Since its inception, the Soyuz rocket has been at the heart of space exploration; its durability a testament to Korolev and his team.
Yet the Soyuz rocket has become not just a symbol of ambitious Soviet engineering or of Cold War technology, but of a united humanity, exploring the stars as one. What sort of a man was Sergei Korolev? He was the chief designer, a very good and able engineer, and that involved being able to manage many large organisations. He knew exactly what was required and had the energy, the imagination and the foresight to see it through. He had to marshal a large number of different design bureaux — engine designers like Valentin Glushko and Vasily Mishin — overseeing support systems, navigation, guidance, structures, and how to launch it.
Resources, relatively speaking, were in far shorter supply in the Soviet Union than in the West, so they had to make do with what they had. The problem was that it took long to fuel up — about seven minutes — so by the time you went to all that trouble, your enemy would have taken out your silo or launch site.
Korolev remained anonymous until after his passing in , when he was given a state funeral, but there were reasons for this. He fell in love with the night sky when he caught his first glimpse of Orion, aged Home Missions The history of the Soyuz rocket.
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