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Old 16th Dec 2015, 14:41
  #52 (permalink)  
wiggy
 
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: The Winchester
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Pasta

Go find out yourself. Not my figures.
There's more to Shuttle/Soyuz than those numbers and I'd have to agree with pasta on this...

The early Soyuz programme in the mid-60s was very politically driven - the project was going head to head with Apollo. The designers and cosmonauts knew that original machine in the shape of Soyuz 1 wasn't man ready but for the sake of the Motherland..and funding - the decision was made to fly and Komarov lost his life.... Move down the road and handful of years to the second fatal flight, Soyuz 11 in '71. Depressurisation during the re-entry burn exposes a second design weakness. Rectified, plus a decision made to the return to wearing pressure suits for launch/entry. Since 71 there have been zero Soyuz in-flight fatalities (and at least 1 save from the Launch Escape system, a system the Shuttle lacked after the first handful of flights).

OTOH whilst the Shuttle sure looked good, was certainly a triumph of engineering, and was no doubt a pilot's spacecraft, it was loaded right from the start with compromises which were difficult, if not down right impossible to engineer out (such as the ice damage/LE tile strength problem that did for Columbia). It was not really capable of evolving into the reliable workhorse NASA promised it was going to be.
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