Good thing those guys are armed!
http://lbo-talk.org/lbo/Week-of-Mon-20080407/006481.html
.......
Any week which includes a near drunken argument over aerospace technology is a good one.
And, by that criteria, this was a good week indeed.
One of my colleagues, a grizzled Russian programmer, an expat with a lot stories to tell -- stories about the Soviet anti-personnel missile systems deployed in Afghanistan, the proper use of ultra low frequency waves and other tales for the Pynchon age -- told a group of us a ripping yarn about the time a mid 1960s Soyuz crew landed off-target.
After touching down somewhere on the steppes of Kazakhstan (or was it Ukraine?), the crew found itself trapped inside their vehicle, surrounded by a hunting party of wolves - or perhaps it was bears.
This, he informed us, was the incident which led to the arming of cosmonauts.
Oh, he also said that American spacecraft were made of cardboard, overdone tech and the dreams of aerospace contractor avarice. "Can you imagine the shuttle surviving such a rude course correction? 8 g's worth of error and yet the crew still lived to talk about it?"
This led to a discussion of comparative spacecraft architectures and the joys of titanium, the alloy used for the Soyuz's frame.
Chinese and Indian colleagues joined in, explaining why their home countries were building space platforms on the reliable Russian model instead of the more expensive (and techno-fussy) American.
.d.