I just found out that Russian aerospace pioneer, Guy Severin, passed away on February 7 at age 81. Not well known in the West, but highly regarded in Russia and the former Soviet Union, Severin was President of the aerospace company Zvezda, and oversaw the development of safety and life support equipment for the military and the Russian space program. Zvezda (which means "Star" in Russian) designed and built the K-36 series of ejection seats used in most of the high-performance Russian fighter aircraft, such as the MIG-29 and Sukhoi SU-30. Zvezda also built the space suits used by Russian cosmonauts. Among his many accomplishments, Severin helped design the ejection seat system that returned Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, safely from his orbital flight. Not many people realize that Gagarin did not land on earth in his capsule after his historic flight. At the time of Gagarin's flight in 1961, the Russians had not yet reliably developed the combination parachute/retro-rocket landing system they still use to this day on their Soyuz capsules. They did have confidence in their military aircraft ejection seats at that time, so they modified a seat to fit in the Vostok capsule that took Gagarin into orbit. After the capsule made it through the high-speed, high temperature phase of reentry, a drogue chute slowed it down to the point where Gagarin ejected from the capsule around 25,000 feet altitude and landed on his feet under a regular personal parachute.

I met Severin when I spent 3 weeks in Russian in 1993 as part of a U.S. government/industry team sent there to evaluate life support and crew escape technology. He was a dynamic character who was proud of his accomplishments and those of his engineers at Zvezda, and he wasn't ashamed to boast about them. At one of our first meetings with the Russians, Severin jokingly thanked the U.S. contingent for all the technical reports we had published, because they had helped Zvezda develop some of their life support technology. After seeing some of the Russian hardware, I realized that he was only half-joking: some of the equipment on their ejection seats was direct copies of U.S. designs tested years earlier. That's not to take anything away from the Russian engineers I worked with. They were very competent and their technical knowledge was extensive.  However, it was apparent that they weren't afraid to "borrow" good ol' Western ideas if it helped them save time and money. Overall, it was a great experience working with Severin and the Russians so soon after the fall of communism.  (Plus, I have enough interesting stories from my time in Russia that I intend to write about them in future blog entries.)  Political and cultural differences aside, we were all just engineers trying to make the best equipment to save aircrew lives.