Oberg on the Soyuz near-disaster

NASA historian and gadfly James Oberg wrote up a very detailed and very interesting report on the near-disastrous re-entry of a Soyuz carrying three astronauts back from the space station. This is really an epic tale; it looks like there was a system malfunction that would normally have doomed the crew. However, a similar problem occurred decades ago, and apparently Soviet engineers redesigned the re-entry vehicle to account for it should it happen again. The redesign worked quite well, and saved the lives of the crew. I highly recommend reading this, even if you hadn't read the original reports. I'm still very unhappy about how this played our politically, but I'm very glad that sensible engineers, whoever they may have been, were in the loop all those years ago.