Amazed by the Soyuz

I never thought that one of the things that would impress me the most when visiting New York City, would be seeing a Russian Soyuz. It was at the Intrepid Museum. There was a Soyuz and a space shuttle, the Enterprise (wink wink to Star Trek fans).

The Enterprise is huge. Half the size of a Boing or Airbus. First class in spacecrafts. The workhorse of the NASA. I imagine myself working on that and I drool. The dream of every engineer. They built 5 of them, only 3 survive nowadays. But they are discontinued. Too complex, too expensive to keep them on duty.

Next to the Enterprise there was a tiny metal shell. Something that reminded me of a piece of a submarine that got loose and dropped. A Soyuz. It hardly fits 3 people in it. It can carry a tiny portion of what Enterprise could. But they work. And they are still in service.

That recalled me my work. Sometimes we engineers are so excited about technology that we get lost in the process and miss the final purpose: solve the problem. It’s cool to solve it with the last shinny piece of tech.

But what if simpler, rude solutions are the solution? What if those are the solutions that really last?