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[i]Probably the biggest and happiest hardware-related surprise of the space station is how the patched-together design -- a Russian segment at one end, a swiftly expanding U.S. segment at the other -- has offered unexpectedly strong robustness. It may look like a classic engineering "kluge," and the interfaces may have been lashed together with inelegant rigging. But when push came to shove, boy, did it ever hold together. In the face of failure of systems from either country, the other country's equipment could and did stand in. The design philosophy here is not to build one integrated vehicle comprising components from a dozen sources. It's to create a system from separately developed space vehicles, bundled and cross-connected but still vastly different in their engineering cultures. It has worked for the International Space Station, and it can work for future big projects.[/i]
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