Sole Survivor

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The world was astounded when the first Soviet space shuttle blasted off into orbit.

Everyone knew that the Russians had been working on a shuttle of their own. But no one expected it to get off the ground. The Russians had finally licked the problem of cryogenic propulsion, but they couldn't come up with a reusable rocket motor. They tried to steal the secret from the French Ariane space program, but failed.

And so they resorted to the tactic that had enabled them to get Sputnik into orbit. They didn't build a better propulsion system, they built a bigger one. They mounted their main rocket engines onto the fat external fuel tank, strapped the shuttle to it, and augmented the system with four slender solid rocket boosters. The U.S. shuttle had used only two.

Once again, the Russians had solved a problem through brute force when patience and skill would have been more efficient.

In the Sputnik days, so long ago, they blew up rockets every third day until the law of averages ran in their favor and their tiny satellite achieved orbit. In the days of manned space flight, Russian cosmonauts lost their lives on the launching pad or in space, one for every five successful American man-in-space projects.

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