
Little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station - vpribish
https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/
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vpribish
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.

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danielvf
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.

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vpribish
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.

