r/space • u/ye_olde_astronaut • 1d ago

Soyuz 18A: The First Crewed Inflight Launch Abort - 50 years ago

https://www.drewexmachina.com/2019/04/05/soyuz-18a-the-first-crewed-inflight-launch-abort/
89 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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16

u/jericho 1d ago

Wild ride. 400 seconds in free fall, 21 G reentry, land on a mountain top in deep snow. Would make a good short film. 

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u/sledge98 11h ago

The whole "rolling to a stop just before falling off a cliff" sounds like it's right out of a movie.

3

u/Elthore 1d ago

The early russian space program is fascinating, much more interesting than the american imo. Kamanin diaries on astronautix is an amazing read, its like the right stuff but from the russian perspective. Very kerbal.

http://www.astronautix.com/k/kamanindiaries.html

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u/Youutternincompoop 19h ago

always funny to remember that the Soviets got a reputation for poor reliability even though Nasa killed more astronauts.

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u/Xenomorph555 16h ago

Soviet launch vehicles and probes were far less reliable then American ones during the 50's-early 70's. Just for an example, if you look at the Soviet moon or interplanetary programs; the large majority of rockets failed to either get to orbit or insert the probe into it's trajectory. Afterwards many probes failed due to hardware errors.

Reasons for this include far worse metallurgy than the west, a lack of high end alloys, a computer industry that was far behind resulting in older systems being used that were prone to breaking, and general poor manufacturing quality at factories.

Ironically it wasn't until Glushko took over as head of the program that quality control went way up, despite his reputation.

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u/wierdness201 17h ago

I wish they released more information on their early failures.