21 July 1975 ended with the experimental flight of “Soyuz — Apollo” program of the joint flight of the Soviet spaceship “Soyuz-19” and American “Apollo”, which is called “handshake in space”. Its main task was not only a test of the docking Assembly and test technique, but also gain experience to coordinate the two Zubov. The American crew was Thomas Stafford, Vance brand and Donald Slayton and Soviet Valery Kubasov and Alexei Leonov (this was the second flight of the legendary astronaut).
Engineers of both countries had not only to develop a compatible docking Assembly — “connector” that space ships are connected — but to solve the problem of different atmospheres. On the American “Apollo” astronauts breathed pure oxygen at low pressure, a Soviet spacecraft was filled with air — as on Earth. In the end had to make an intermediate camera-gateway, so quickly fly from one ship to another was impossible.
Just as the docked ships stayed in orbit for 46 hours and 36 minutes.
Reconstruction of the docking of Soyuz and Apollo
21 Jul 2011 landed the latest reusable spacecraft Space Shuttle “Atlantis”. Thus ended the American program “the Comic transport system”, and all the shuttles were decommissioned. Reusable “space Shuttle” was developed at NASA to deliver astronauts and cargo between Earth and orbit. Just managed to build five ships, but got to the finish only three of them: “Challenger” exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986 and Columbia disintegrated during reentry in 2003. For 30 years the shuttles made 135 flights and made a total of 21152 orbits around the Earth. Now all the ships are preserved in museums across America.
In 2004, then US President George Bush announced a new space program. Among its objectives are new missions to the moon and, accordingly, the necessary space ships. Among the most likely causes of rejection of the “space Shuttle” — high cost (despite the reusability, the Space Shuttle was not so profitable) and the resonance catastrophe of “Colombia”. Americans now reach orbit on the Russian Soyuz, as part of the goods as the contractor gives the company SpaceX Elon musk (known for his other company that produces electric cars — Tesla).
Space Shuttle Atlantis
July 21, 2009, Kingston released the world’s first USB flash drive with capacity of 256 GB — DataTraveler 300. The write speeds on it were 10 megabytes per second and read speed of 20 MB/S. the Price at the start of sales exceeded $ 900.
The event is remarkable because just a month prior to that, Kingston has released a USB flash drive, 128 GB is also the first. In the spring of that year a rival SanDisk has released a disposable drive 256 GB to erase or overwrite the files it was not.
USB flash drive Kingston DataTraveler 300 256 GB