Why a 1960s Soviet Spaceship Outlived the Space Shuttle

How did Soyuz, a Soviet spaceship that first flew in 1966, keep carrying crews long after the Space Shuttle made its final landing in 2011? The story runs through two fatal Soyuz flights and the fixes that followed. Then a launch pad fire in 1983 and a booster failure in 2018 put the escape system to the test. Last comes the money, from the shuttle's cost per launch to the price of a Soyuz seat. You come away knowing how one ship was built to be fixed and the other was asked to do everything. ARCHIVE FOOTAGE Archive footage: AP Archive, NASA, Internet Archive, British Pathé, Roscosmos TV. MUSIC Music licensed from Epidemic Sound. PHOTOS Alexander Gerst — CC BY-SA 2.0 — https://www.flickr.com/photos/7248258... Vladimir Akimov / Владимир Акимов — CC BY-SA 3.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... CHAPTERS 0:00 The Last Shuttle Landing 1:18 Two Deaths, One Fix 2:52 A Ship Fixed Step by Step 4:18 Where the Crew Sat 5:41 The 1983 Pad Escape 6:44 Soyuz MS-10 Abort 8:54 What Each Machine Was Asked 10:55 The Sceptic's Case 11:59 Why the Old Ship Lasted SOURCES Columbia Accident Investigation Board — Report, Volume 1 (2003) — https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/ht... Rogers Commission — Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (1986) — https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/ge... Pielke, Roger Jr. and Byerly, Radford Jr. — Shuttle programme lifetime cost, Nature 472, 38 (2011) — https://doi.org/10.1038/472038d Wikipedia — Soyuz 11 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11 Wikipedia — Soyuz 1 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1 Wikipedia — Soyuz T-10-1 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_T... Wikipedia — Soyuz MS-10 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_M... NASA — Space Shuttle program history — https://www.nasa.gov/space-shuttle/ KEYWORDS soyuz, soyuz spacecraft, space shuttle, soyuz vs space shuttle, soyuz outlived the space shuttle, soyuz ms-10, soyuz t-10 launch abort, soyuz 11, soyuz 1 komarov, space shuttle retirement, atlantis final landing, soyuz launch escape system, space shuttle cost, columbia accident investigation board, challenger disaster, soviet space program, spacecraft engineering history, baikonur cosmodrome, once upon an engine, failed machines, machines that failed, engineering disasters