#salyut

March 22, 1981 — Jügderdemidiin Gürragchaa becomes the first Mongolian citizen in space onboard Soyuz 39

Gürragchaa and commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov were the eighth Interkosmos crew to visit the Salyut space station and carried out a number of experiments for Mongolia. Gürragchaa was the second Asian cosmonaut in space after Vietnamese cosmonaut Pham Tuân and is the only Mongolian citizen to have flown in space.

For many years the height of engineering and technical excellence was held by the Germans, the Swiss and the Japanese. What may have been commonly overlooked was the rugged reliability of the Russians. Russians have made spacecraft, aircraft, guns, satellites, radio sets and some of the worlds best optical technologies (lookup Zeiss – it’s not all German).

Although the Russians aren’t held in high regard as upholding precision or quality in manufacturing techniques. They do however, carry the worlds reputation in quantity, ruggedness and reliability of their products. When did a Russian product break? When did a Russian device fail to function. OK, So they don’t look pretty, but Damn, they’re cheap and dependable.

The question is why?

Engineers have studied precision machining and manufacturing techniques for several hundred years, to build some of the finest watches, tools and cars money can buy and yet, we still can’t make it last as long as the Russians can.

Looking at the mechanical properties of their engineering techniques we witness a mechanical marvel. Loose tolerances are a bane of our culture, loose parts mean shoddy workmanship and poor fitting. To the Russians it means low cost,  fast turnaround and reliability. The loose fittings allow for inaccuracy's in manufacture to become usable. The lower the tolerance, the lower the rejection rate as the components won’t bind. If some parts expand at different rates due to differences in thermal mass this isn’t a problem. The parts now have room to move. There is enough clearance for ingress to not only get in, but also to be flushed out easily. Because of the clearance there are less points of contact reducing wear and allowing lubricants to flow freely. If the parts wear and become loose, it doesn’t matter as they were originally designed with that in mind. I’m not saying as precision engineers we should embrace this ‘loosey goosey’ culture they have, but maybe we should forward think our product design to incorporate wear as a factor so it becomes less of a problem. Maybe make swapping out parts easier, or allowing the consumer to purchase the replacements (rant for another day).

So hats off to those crazy Russian belt and braces engineers who kept the products cheap and reliable and working for generations.

Nostrovia to Russia,

“u know u like it ;)” - @cosmo-naute