Y'know, I've been thinking about that, too...

A lot of us might point and laugh at Soyuz for looking like it was hammered together by a bunch of fat little old babushka-wearing women at the Heroic Peoples' Spacekraft Works, but, seriously... the Soyuz has been sort of like the Volkswagen Beetle of space... carefully, incrementally updated and improved; it may look clunky and ugly, but it's proven, and it works... even if the outer thermal blanket looks like the lining of an old Army sleeping bag. They've been flying the thing for over forty years now, and they've pretty much got it down pat.

Honestly, it makes me jealous as hell; iirc, we quit building Apollo spacecraft roundabout 1970ish, with just enough left in stock to fly the remaining lunar expeditions and three or four SkyLab missions. I can remember, as a young teenager, reading about the upcoming Shuttle program and thinking it was going to be cool as hell -- a spacegoing DC3 that can carry large cargo, satellites or space-station components to orbit, and glide back in and land on a runway like a regular airplane.

Thirty years of retrospect, though, makes me think it was the biggest mistake NASA ever made -- a spacegoing white elephant. Apollo could've been our Soyuz -- easily adaptable and dependable. By the time the SkyLab missions were flying, it had finally matured into a really sweet machine, and it would've been a relative piece of cake to replace the LM with a mission module -- like the one Soyuz uses -- that could be easily custom-outfitted depending on the mission, such as long-duration science flights, or ferrying cargo to a space station. Heat-shielding wasn't as big an issue, either -- an abalative coating on the bottom that burned away and carried the heat with it. Granted, the heat shield could only fly once, but it wasn't as big a pain in the ass as trying to heat-shield a winged boost-glide vehicle like the Shuttle. They don't call that goddamn' thing the Flying Brickyard for nothing.

I know a lot of folks like to bust on NASA for going back to a ballistic capsule design for their next-gen manned craft, and give them shit for building a craft whose command module outwardly resembles Apollo, but I think it's the best decision they could've made. I think if, after the lunar expeditions were finished, they'd stuck with the tried'n'true Apollo design, incrementally modifying and adapting it as the Russians did with Soyuz, we wouldn't be having the pissfight over the next-gen manned craft that we're having here now.

pasty Christmas dinner

Actually, they've come a long way since those old-skool paste/dehydrated food packets and tubes they used in Mercury and Gemini. Aboard Apollo, they had hot dogs, sliced bread, deviled ham (remember the video of Buzz Aldrin making a deviled ham sandwich aboard Apollo 11?), and a special beef stew made with an extra-thick broth to keep it from floating out of the cup. Much of the food aboard the Shuttle and ISS these days is actual Earth food -- some in cans, some in little plastic tubs. Things like soups and drinks still require special packaging, of course, but other than that, pretty much anything that won't float out of the can or bowl can be eaten normally, with a fork or spoon.

Hell, they even have shrimp cocktail and M&Ms out there, now, and ice cream -- although the ice cream isn't quite up to Earth standards, as I understand from friends who've actually tried the foil-packaged space ice-cream bars which one can actually buy in the gift shop at the National Air & Space Museum. They tell me it's fun to try once, just to say you've tried it, but it's not all that great. However, the shrimp cocktail is apparently quite popular with Shuttle crews, and is actually sometimes used as a trade medium ("hey, are you gonna finish that shrimp cocktail? I've got enough deviled ham left here for one more sandwich...")

Pint of lager, as they don't have beer in space yet, so I'm going to have another for the ISS skeleton crew.