"If it works, why change it?"

Russian space culture thinks in centuries. Baikonur, the original home of the Soviet space program, now belongs to Kazakhstan, but Russia rents it from Kazakhstan on a hundred-year lease, as Britain in the old days rented Hong Kong from China. The lease still has eighty years to run, and Baikonur feels like a Russian town. Historical relics of Russian space activities are carefully preserved and displayed in museums. The three patron saints are the schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who worked out the mathematics of interplanetary rocketry in the nineteenth century; the engineer Sergei Korolev, who built the first orbiting spacecraft; and the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who first orbited Earth. Korolev and Gagarin lived side by side in Baikonur in simple homes, which are open to the public. In a public square is a full-scale model of the Soyuz launcher that Korolev designed. It is a simple, rugged design and has changed very little since he designed it. It has the best safety record of all existing launchers for human passengers. The Russian space culture says, "If it works, why change it?"

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