Little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station

arstechnica.com

9 pointsvpribish3 comments

A detail thrown in at the end of the article is that this station was one end of humanity's only journey from one space station to another. They flew some equipment over to Mir from Salyut 7.

Bit of a reality check for 'muricah that we don't have any idea when we'll do that. Sure there was the moon, but that was a stunt. This mundane chore to fetch some stuff is far more meaningful as a measure of progress.

I don’t know that I’d call docking and transferring cargo a Soviet space win. The first successful Soviet manned spacecraft rendezvous and docking was in 1969, the same year that the Americans landed on the moon. Americans had been docking for years by then.

That's precisely my point, though: it wasn't "a win" at all. It was just getting shit done that in hindsight, was a pretty remarkable event not to be repeated for decades. So much of the narrative of the space race is childish bragging for doing X first or biggest or farthest. Ultimately those trophies are worthless.

"be right back, getting the stuff from the old space station" is the sort of thing that should have become commonplace by now. Making that progress would have been much more important than having landed on the moon 50 years ago.

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