[ExI] commie spacecraft landing

[Dan]

Your comment about high-tech and high-priced makes me think of the joke about 
the pen that writes in space. I don't know if it's merely an urban legend, but 
it goes like this: NASA spent millions to develop a pen that writes in space 
while the Soviet space agency opted to use pencils. (Of course, ignorant people 
might chalk this up to the command economy working better than free markets. 
They are ignorant because NASA is not the free market in action. It's definitely 
command economy -- just command economy with a much bigger budget -- hence more 
waste and more Kafkaesque developments.)

Regards,

Dan


From: spike <spike66 at att.net>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Wed, December 1, 2010 4:29:04 PM
Subject: [ExI] commie spacecraft landing


Check this.  Cool slides showing how the commies do their space engineering.  
Their system works and its immensely more cost effective than the way we do it.  
Of course the system we have (used to have) had a lot more flexibility, and was 
waaay more high tech.   Unfortunately, we can’t afford it anymore.
 
These photos are those of which you will never see in the US newspapers or 
probably anywhere else in the USA.  A Soyuz capsule carrying Russians Alexander 
Skvortsov and Mikhail Korniyenko, and NASA's Tracy Caldwell Dyson came back to 
Earth September 25, 2010 from the International Space Station and landed safely 
in Kazakhstan, a day after an initial attempt to return was aborted after 
latches holding the Soyuz TMA-18 craft to the orbital station failed to open.

http://cryptome.org/info/soyuz-tma18/soyuz-tma18.htm 

spike 


      
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