In Lighter News: Russian Rocket Uncontrollable, Might Crash With Full Load of Toxic Chemicals

Russian engineering always inspires:

The Russian Phobos-Grunt (Phobos Ground) mission, designed to send an unmanned robotic probe to the Martian moon Phobos and return to earth with soil samples, is in serious trouble after a seemingly successful launch on Tuesday.Russian engineers are struggling to communicate with the spacecraft, which has no bearings and is now stuck in low-Earth orbit, having failed to fire its engines on two occasions...Worse still, if Russian engineers fail to gain control of the probe and cannot launch into a higher orbit, the drag that it endures at its lowest orbital point will eventually cause it to crash back to Earth in an uncontrolled descent, carrying a nearly-full supply of toxic fuels.

That reminds me of my favorite story of inept Russian engineering. During the Second World War, several American B-29 bombers, the most technologically advanced in the world, made emergency landings in the Soviet Union after being damaged during bombing raids over Japan. The Soviets captured the planes and the crew, letting the personnel go after a year or two, though they kept the planes. The Soviets then decided to copy the B-29's down to the rivets and make their own versions, since that would be far quicker than designing a large bomber from scratch. Now, it's important to note that the key feature of the B-29 was that its cabin was pressurized, allowing it to fly higher and therefore further than other aircraft. That meant that the metal skin of the plane was critical, since it had to be thick enough to withstand the pressure.

In reverse engineering the plane, the Soviets ran into a problem: the metal skin was of a gauge measured in inches, while all Soviet steel came in metric increments. So there were no sheets of steel in the Soviet Union that exactly matched the American plane's skin. The two closest would have been just a little thinner, and just a little thicker. Fearing that a thinner skin would be too weak, they built their carbon-copies with the thicker skin. That meant that their version weighed several thousand pounds heavier. The Tu-4, what they dubbed their B-29, had the same dimensions, the same engines, the same fuel and bomb capacity (they even copied improvised repairs made to the American planes) - but weighed so much more that it had half the range as the original. They never realized that their planes needed a larger wing and more powerful engines. The Russians at their finest.