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From Russia With Problems
by Paul McGoldrick
My first hands-on experience with Soviet-era engineering was in 1978. The company I was working for had a large contract for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, connecting all the sites with video from all the other sites (23, if I remember correctly), so a commentator at one site could watch all the events taking place. As I have observed before, we got paid before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan when the Games, under American pressure (and the then love of Osama Bin Laden), ended up being a rather heavily Eastern Block affair.
The Soviets had already been to our plant in West London for acceptance tests – three engineers plus a communist minder – and we had gotten very friendly with one another. We had shocked them with the contents of Western supermarkets; taken them to spectacular box seats to watch a Tchaikovsky ballet; wined and dined them on luxurious, ethnic food from the rest of Europe; left them speechless when I didn’t take the windshield wipers off my company car after parking it; and filled them with joy as we bought them the only item they each (including the minder) wanted to take home with them: a Monopoly game set!
Arriving in Moscow for the first time, in the depth of winter, is a shock to the system. You knew you were being watched (we were briefed by some gentlemen from an unnamed government department before we left the UK) and on each floor of the Hotel Rossia (now gone – but what reader would like to guess the purpose of the lowest antenna on the pole on the roof?) there was a babushka (grandmother, rather than the literal meaning of headscarf) who would sit at a little desk and monitor the comings and goings of everyone on her floor. Few of the items on the menu in the hotel restaurant were actually available, but you could trade shopping bags from Harrods for nearly anything you wanted.
We were totally responsible for the hardware while the Soviets were responsible for all the cabling (ever seen a pneumatic drill having to be used to make a cable trough in the ground?) At the first installation I was having terrible trouble getting their BNC connectors on to our bulkhead females. It was only by observing one of their connectors under a magnifying glass that it became obvious that the bayonet slots had been hand cut!
Few, very few, were 180º spaced…
It became common practice after that for us to just cut off one of the BNC pins on all our sockets before dropping any equipment into place. And it made us all wonder what and how the equipment they were routinely sending into space at that time was also built.
Well, I now wonder all over again. For the second time in a row a Soyuz capsule went off course, and apparently out of control, while attempting a landing in Kazakhstan – a location used almost since the start of their manned program. The three occupants, a Russian cosmonaut and two astronauts (US and South Korea), were subjected to 9 or 10g acceleration forces during the four-and-a-half hour descent from the International Space Station, double the normal rate, while in a constant spin. (Imagine that, if you can, after six months in a weightless environment.) There was total radio silence from the craft and it was only after the cosmonaut managed to get out of his upside-down seat and out of the Soyuz to use a satellite phone, thirty minutes after the prang, that anybody had any idea of either whether they had landed, or not, where they were, or even if they were alive.
On landing about 200 miles West of its target, it was reported that the craft caused a brush fire that ignited the collapsed parachute and smoke entered the Soyuz. The same thing was reported from the last such landing in October 2007. Smoke entered how?
The apparent total failure of the craft’s systems, including radios, signals a major quality issue about the Russian ability to continue safe contributions to the International Space Station. Why did the on-board squawk beacons not indicate to the ground where the Soyuz was heading? Did they fail too? As well as ground-based radar?
The Russians have literally doubled their production of Soyuz in the last three years with the prospect that the population of the International Space Station will be doubling just as NASA’s twenty-seven year old orbiters are ending their extended service life. Even the most gentle of let-downs of a Soyuz apparently makes them non-reusable.
You have to wonder where Russia is finding the workers, how they are being trained, how pushed they are to get production out – at whatever cost – and how the craft are being QC’d before getting to a launch.
Maybe someone is still having to cut pins off a connector, or two… Or can we sort out the Russian space program with a few Harrods shopping bags?
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