Yes. IIRC it was Henry Spencer who made this analogy:
If you think about the airship, it's the ship mental model transferred into the air. It stays aloft with buoyancy and needs a vast hull. In airships they had signaling devices from the wheelhouse to the engineers working on the engines, to set the engine speed. Large crews, cabins, dining space, everything.
Then came the airplane and demolished all that. It was small and lean - and it was fast and required far less infrastructure or crew. Air was a different medium than water and it required a different paradigm. There was no space for dining and the flights didn't last for days anyway.
It can be argued that the Space Shuttle suffers from airship syndrome: it tries to be like an airplane with a cockpit, wings, landing gear, payload bay, carrying big engines in the back.
The Soyuz is just a capsule. Because weight goes above all else in space launch, when your payload is about 2% of total launch mass. And the simplicity is for safety. If all guidance fails, it can go to a spinning mode that still enables a safe re-entry.
In a sense, the earlier Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft are even more extreme embodiments of the lean capsule philosophy, as their re-entry vehicles are just balls with an offset center of gravity. AFAIK they could re-enter with any attitude and always turn up right. IIRC most other capsules have at least two stable modes, and there is some care needed that the wrong one is not used.
The same tight focus and lean principle can be seen in many other vehicles. Take a look at the A-4 Skyhawk or F-16.
The Space Shuttle had some extraordinary capabilities, but it was so large and complex that it took a large amount of the budget, just for launching humans to space. There couldn't be much human launcher development while the Space Shuttle was flying. Imagine you're renting a castle - hard to buy a house when all your money goes to rent...
I don't think it was a thought problem. The goal was to put satellites in odd orbits and still be able to return to a fixed airstrip, requiring great lateral transit. There were plenty of smaller lifting bodies that could have done most of the work, but the Shuttle was built to handle pretty exotic polar orbits from a west coast launch facility.. that never happened.
If you think about the airship, it's the ship mental model transferred into the air. It stays aloft with buoyancy and needs a vast hull. In airships they had signaling devices from the wheelhouse to the engineers working on the engines, to set the engine speed. Large crews, cabins, dining space, everything.
Then came the airplane and demolished all that. It was small and lean - and it was fast and required far less infrastructure or crew. Air was a different medium than water and it required a different paradigm. There was no space for dining and the flights didn't last for days anyway.
It can be argued that the Space Shuttle suffers from airship syndrome: it tries to be like an airplane with a cockpit, wings, landing gear, payload bay, carrying big engines in the back.
The Soyuz is just a capsule. Because weight goes above all else in space launch, when your payload is about 2% of total launch mass. And the simplicity is for safety. If all guidance fails, it can go to a spinning mode that still enables a safe re-entry.
In a sense, the earlier Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft are even more extreme embodiments of the lean capsule philosophy, as their re-entry vehicles are just balls with an offset center of gravity. AFAIK they could re-enter with any attitude and always turn up right. IIRC most other capsules have at least two stable modes, and there is some care needed that the wrong one is not used.
The same tight focus and lean principle can be seen in many other vehicles. Take a look at the A-4 Skyhawk or F-16.
The Space Shuttle had some extraordinary capabilities, but it was so large and complex that it took a large amount of the budget, just for launching humans to space. There couldn't be much human launcher development while the Space Shuttle was flying. Imagine you're renting a castle - hard to buy a house when all your money goes to rent...