The USSR should be commended on not throwing as much good money after bad as the US did w/ the Space-Shuttle Program, which was built on even worse faulty assumptions re: cost, reuse, safety, launch frequency, etc.
> When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or $60,000/kg (approximately $27,000 per pound) to LEO. This should be contrasted with the originally envisioned costs of $118 per kilogram (approximately $53 per pound) of payload in 1972 dollars ($1,400/kg, [approximately $630 per pound] adjusting for inflation to 2011)
> The launch rate was significantly lower than initially expected. While not reducing absolute operating costs, more launches per year gives a lower cost per launch. Some early hypothetical studies examined 55 launches per year (see above), but the maximum possible launch rate was limited to 24 per year based on manufacturing capacity of the Michoud facility that constructs the external tank. Early in shuttle development, the expected launch rate was about 12 per year. Launch rates reached a peak of 9 per year in 1985 but averaged fewer thereafter.
Damn straight. They built a better shuttle, then had the common sense to realize the idea was silly.
They were right about the Space Shuttle and the US military too; much of the design of the Space Shuttle was influenced (compromised) by the DoD so that the Shuttle would be able to get into polar orbits for military missions (such as launching US spy satellites, and stealing Soviet spy satellites). These design requirements forced them to design a shuttle with dimensions that were not optimized for the missions the shuttle ultimately carried out.
One of the problems with the ultimate design is that the Shuttle stack relied in part on the SSMEs to get into orbit. This meant that the fuel tank/SRBs were worthless for anything other than getting the Shuttle into orbit, while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).
> One of the problems with the ultimate design is that the Shuttle stack relied in part on the SSMEs to get into orbit.
In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.
> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).
The engines used for its boosters, however, are used in modified form in the Zenit (RD-171, like RD-170 with extra axis of movement) and Atlas V (RD-180; size-reduced version) rockets, and will be used in Angara.
>>In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.
They were reused and were extremely efficient with a much higher unit cost than the equivalent energia stack main engine. The Soviets intended to design a carrier shuttle with reusable engines just like the US Shuttle but abandoned the effort due to reliability concerns.
That is the whole point of the space shuttle design in any case. If you can't reuse very powerful main engines that can be made to be very efficient there is no point in using a shuttle-truck design in the first place.
> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).
The energia was suboptimal for launching very large items due to its requirement that payloads have to carried on the side. This increases the weight due to atmospheric shielding that cannot be jettisoned and, more importantly, means a third stage cannot be used for efficiency. Every payload also has to be able to deploy itself into the correct orbit which requires custom development for each launch payload. So while energia was powerful it was very expensive as a standalone launch platform and never would have seen much use and consequently was never seriously considered as a future development platform.
The soviets would have done better just to develop a lh2/lox successor to the failed n1 rocket in the first place; especially if they didn't think the shuttle was going to be economical. Instead, they developed a sub-optimal launch vehicle that was itself based on a flawed concept and they had every intention of running the program out to the year 2000 even with a handful of launches scheduled and development costs that were already higher than the US shuttle.
Part of the problem with reusing SSMEs was that they burned hydrogen and hydrogen embrittlement basically ensured that any sort of fast or cheap turn around with SSMEs was impossible.
Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to work with if you want a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was really only nominally reusable, the engines had to practically be rebuilt every time to make sure everything was alright (the SRBs were hardly any better, though at least they were simpler.) (Really, hydrogen is just a pain in the ass in general though. It isn't very dense and needs to be kept much cooler than LOX to boot (requiring all that foam on the external tanks), which is why the Shuttle external tank had to be so goddamn big. The massive efficiency of LOX/LH2 are somewhat mitigated by these factors.)
If SpaceX can get their F9R working well, that will likely be the first properly reusable rocket (first stage anyway). Those will burn RP-1 which won't suffer from hydrogen embrittlement.
The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they discontinued Energia). Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.
Yeah, the SSME's were never as reusable as projected but their efficiency helped to mitigate somewhat the massive cost in weight of the shuttle. If you are committed to a shuttle design you might as well choose a very efficient partially reusable engine over one with RP-1 or a less efficient lox/h20 engine with lower total costs. That isn't an argument in favor of the shuttle just a reasonable design choice.
>>The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they discontinued Energia).
I have to disagree with this. The soviets began developing LH2/LOX technologies immediately after the N1 failure for the same reason that the Saturn V used LH2/LOX as an upper stage fuel: it is hard to make the math work for massive rockets that only consume RP-1. The weight penalty on the upper stages is just too large to be cost effective. You might as well pay the cost of LH2/LOX development if you intend to launch super heavy payloads.
>>Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.
If the criteria for deciding between SLS/Buran-Energia is which one can launch the most payload then, yes, you would choose Energia. This wasn't an intended benefit of Energia and was simply due to reliability concerns about reusing rocket engines(especially with fuel sources that the Soviets didn't have experience with).
It is hard to evaluate the cost of reusing Energia technology and developing a new booster that would be more optimal going forward. If the Soviets had the money and the political foresight to cancel Buran they might have been able to do it and use Soyuz and Energia together.
I'd like to correct - Energia didn't have solid boosters; the four strap-ons were considered the first stage and burned LOX/kerosene in RD-170. RD-170 has 2 axis of thrust vectoring for each chamber, and RD-171 - the variant used in Zenit rockets - has 1 axis of thrust vectoring (the tangential one).
> then had the common sense to realize the idea was silly
No, that's not what happened. Post-Perestroika economy collapse and massive inflation happened. The R&D funding crashed to absolute zero across all domains and Buran was just one of the casualties.
The resources of the Russian space program had to be prioritized, and the Buran didn't make the grade. Had shuttles actually been as great as everybody claimed, it would have.
From wikipedia:
Commenting on the discontinuation of the program in his interview to New Scientist, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov confirms their accounts: "We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed. It was originally designed as a military system for weapon delivery, maybe even nuclear weapons. The American shuttle also has military uses.[5]"
Its not like everything stopped in the early 90s; they continued to run Progress and Soyuz missions.
Wow, now that you say it that seems logical that the shuttle could steal a satellite, but did that ever happen? I'm really hoping for some cool declassified stories from one/both sides of such a mission. :)
I'd be very surprised if it did. It's likely that the Russians would know about any Shuttle launch (I'm guessing they had a capability to track orbital objects) so it would be fairly obvious that the American's did it. At the height of the Cold war, things could have escalated pretty quickly is the US stole a spy satellite!
No, I don't believe it ever did. It had several classified missions, but I don't think any of them could have plausibly been used for stealing spy satellites.
Wow, that's quite a margin of error to estimate $630 but for it to cost $60k. Image if you were off by the same factor in your own favour when paying your taxes. That said, a trillion spent on this sort of thing beats a dollar spending on killing and maiming etc, which is what usually happens when big countries face off.
One of the remnants of the Buran to this day is an ancestor of its programming environment -- DRAKON. It is a visual programming language. Unlike others, it seems this one has had quite a bit of thought put into it.
I don't think it is enough to make it popular, but it is nevertheless an interesting niche. There is a small community still building and exploring it.
There is a DRAKON editor, with target languages like Javascript, Erlang, C++ and others. Here is the DRAKON editor program:
He talks about visual programming languages. He defines provocative terms like "intellectual terrorism" and how information overload (he calls it "information stress") is akin to terrorism for the minds of workers tasked to tease out the solution to the problem. It often stems from an impedance mismatched between old methods of solving problems and processing information and the new type and amount of information available. Mind you this was written in the 80's before big data. His environment was building tools to write the avionics system for Buran. Many of the engineers involved were not computer scientists, there were mechanical, chemical, airspace engineers. He was probably wondering how to get them to program better and how to make the whole process more efficient and less stressful for them.
i have never seen this programming environment. its a fascinating concept which resembles the Scratch project out of MIT.
modern scripting languages make iterating software much simpler. however, there are times when i feel having a drag and drop gui such as this to assemble complex operations would be really helpful. i know of modeling tools such as UML are used in the planning phase. but wouldn't it make sense to have a high level overview of your software? is there anything like this for python, javascript, or ruby?
Drag and drop interfaces can be a beautiful thing, but they're most effective when in a split-screen environment with the flowchart on one side and the code it compiles into previewed on the other side. The script being visible as the diagrammatic design changes lets the coder see what's going on behind the scenes, and lets him understand the structure so that he can tweak it in the next stage to do the many things that the GUI designer didn't anticipate.
Soviet technological development was a very weird universe. They had a lot of very talented scientists and engineers and were certainly capable of coming up with many novel innovations on their own. However, within the communist soviet system politics ruled everything. Whether or not a project would receive support was utterly dependent on political factors, which could be affected by prior success of course, but not always. Soviet leadership put a heavy emphasis on espionage in guiding technological development, sometimes without much critical thinking. This goes back to the days of WWII spying on the Manhattan project and copying of captured B-29's into the nearly identical Tu-4. But you see many other projects in the same vein, such as the Tu-144 (Concordski) and of course Buran.
The fascinating thing about Buran is that the Shuttle was built with a really very bizarre set of functional requirements that imposed steep demands on the design of the vehicle but which turned out to be mostly useless in a practical sense and were not actually meaningfully used during the lifetime of the vehicle. For example, the large wings on the Shuttle give it a very high cross-range flight capability during re-entry, but that was only a requirement because it was thought that the Shuttle would perform a particular kind of military mission. A polar launch which would deploy a satellite, or perform other activities, in one orbit and return to the launch site. Such missions never materialized, and such missions were unlikely to be valuable to the Soviets at all. And yet that requirement dictated the size of the wings which forced the frame to be larger and heavier, which reduced the payload, and which created a larger area that needed thermal protection (an issue which contributed to the loss of Columbia, for example), and so forth. A clean sheet design without such a requirement should have had much smaller wings and thus be a more capable and more reliable design, but Buran copied the Shuttle too closely and ended up with all of the faults of the Shuttle design without a good reason for them.
I think you have it backwards in the first paragraph. A general misunderstanding of this 'weird universe' is that 'politics' declared science and technology as the top goals, and the entire soviet planned economy revolved around plans for industrial projects, be they exploratory or defense, or agriculture. Most aspects of Soviet space program were scientific and exploratory in nature. Sending a new lab satellite into space every few month, rovers to Moon, Venus, Mars long before US. What was the military point of that? On the other hand US put a much bigger emphasis on star wars than substantive exploration.
The Soviets undertook missions of exploration for much the same reason as the US did. For scientific reasons, of course, but also for reasons of national prestige on the geopolitical stage.
If you look at the Soviet manned spaceflight missions things are very much different though. Around half of the "Salyut" space stations were actually military "Almaz" stations (Salyut 2, 3, and 5), at least one of which was armed with a fully automatic cannon designed to engage other spacecraft. The Soviets also pioneered the development of anti-satellite systems starting in the 1960s, long before the US had even started an anti-satellite program. The kicker is "Polyus", the first payload of the Energia launcher, it was an 80 ton orbital warship. It was a prototype designed around the missions of anti-satellite/anti-spacecraft warfare and laying nuclear "mines" in space (in contravention of the Outer Space Treaty, of course). Polyus itself did not contain mines though it did contain a set of test targets and a 1 megawatt laser. But Polyus failed to achieve orbit due to a glitch during the launch.
As far as exploration, the US has contributed more to interplanetary exploration than any other nation or group of nations. It has sent more successful missions to other planets and been the only nation to send probes into interstellar space. Excluding spending on ground-based ballistic missile defense the total spending on "Star Wars" is less than the cost of Apollo, ISS, or even NASA's fleet of space telescopes.
I'm kind of at a loss for words. Are you including the past 20 years USSR did not exist in your comparison with US? I remember the timeline of lunches, if you start in 60s, overall it was much more densely packed for USSR compared to US until 90s. Your mention of 'Polyus' is the end of this timeline, 3 years past completely destructive actions of Gorbochev. Do you think Skylab beats Mir?
I can't make sense of what point you're trying to make.
I think Apollo trumps Mir/Salyut/Almaz, and I think Voyager 2 alone trumps the entire Soviet unmanned space program, even the Venera missions. As does COBE, for that matter.
Edit: which is to say, that while the Soviets may have made impressive contributions to science in the form of the peaceful exploration of space the idea that their contributions outclassed those of the US is simply preposterous.
I think my point is that being the first to plant a flag on the moon is not space exploration. You think Voyager 2 trumps the entire Soviet unmanned space program, and I think I would prefer all the papers and progress made by Soviet program. Luckily I can read them in native language. Thanks for your perspective.
Perhaps the Russians surpassed the US in terms of space research and development initially, but the US did more on the moon than plant a flag and play golf. You can't explore someplace you never actually reach in any case.
And as far as Russia being about research and the US being about militarizing space (which you seem to suggest upthread), I'd remind you that the Russians (as far as I know) were the only country to arm one of their space stations and test fire the weapon[1]: To suggest that either the US or Russia weren't keenly interested in using space as leverage against the other, as well as in scientific exploration, is probably not taking the entire picture into consideration.
Especially having more than one space station at the same time. There were Mir and Salut-7, with cosmonauts flying between them, and there were Mir and ISS - without such flights, since they were in the different orbital planes.
> You can't explore someplace you never actually reach in any case.
Meh, the Soviets sent all kinds of robots to the moon. Orbiters, landers that made pictures, moon rovers, three robots that sampled soil and returned it to earth... Not too shabby I'd say.
The U.S. got their edge in space (which I agree is preposterous to rug sweep) after Korolev's death. Without the motivated challenger, bureaucrats-led Soviet space programme (especially the deep space missions part) has stuck in 1960s since.
I also happen to think the Soviet moon project was about 80% complete. No showable results, though - which allowed to deny the very existence of the project - but at least the hardware heritage is still there in the flying systems.
Yes, but also about Blok-D - the fifth stage of N1-L3 stack - being used on Proton and Zenit today for launching telecom sats to GEO, and also about Soyuz spacecraft - which got a lot of development in preparation for Moon flights.
Western media is used to accuse Soviet system in technology copying. However sometimes the accusations go a little bit too far. Particularly in the aerospace area it would be naive to deny the Soviets their prowess - with Buran, which differs significantly from the Shuttle (see the article above), with Tu-144, which flew before Concord, not to mention today's half-broken Soviet-era technology which manages to lift about half of world space payloads to orbit and provides West with rocket technology - RD-180 for Atlas, NK-33 for Antares etc.
I picked my examples carefully, every single one is an example of a determined Soviet espionage operation.
That doesn't discount Soviet prowess in technological innovation, but it's still very much the truth.
As I mentioned, the Buran has many close similarities to the Shuttle. It has many differences as well but the shocking thing about the similarities is that they don't make any sense except in regards to attempting to copy the Shuttle.
Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know that the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as possible.
> It has many differences as well but the shocking thing about the similarities is that they don't make any sense except in regards to attempting to copy the Shuttle.
The major similarity is the physical configuration of the orbiter, no? This was, indeed, a deliberate copy; cut down on the aerodynamic testing required. Most other details of the system were really quite different (particularly the engines; outboard solid fuel and internal reusable hydrogen for the shuttle, with a separate tank, outboard kerosene and external expendable (though with reusable designs studied for a future upgrade) hydrogen for Buran).
> Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know that the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as possible.
There isn't really that much of that going on in Buran. Again, the booster engines are an obvious example; the US had largely abandoned building efficient kerosene engines (they're very expensive to develop) by the time of the shuttle programme.
To choose the shape, the easier path was taken: this one works, so let's safely do the same.
That doesn't mean that the choice wasn't analyzed and justified, not that aerodynamic testing wasn't done - for examples, picture here - http://buran.ru/htm/history.htm - show the evolution of the overall architecture, where the Shuttle scheme was just one of the considered factors.
Buran was copied in shape and in overall capabilites, once on orbit, for the reasons mentioned. Buran wasn't copied both internally and on the launcher side - so we might say Buran copied some things, but had others originally developed.
Soviets were great copiers, in many areas - and in many others there weren't where to copy from. They had to develop great many things themselves.
Well, the point is that it's a common belief the thing A was stolen, not developed independently, and in practice for a state of the art technical achievement you usually already have to be pretty damn good just to be able to copy verbatim, not to mention to have substantial advantages.
I won't say Concord was copied from Tu-144. Similarly, I wouldn't say soviet electronics was just a rip-off; there were enough original works even outside of the relatively well known BESM-6 project. Even to copy chips in 1980-s it takes you to have the necessary technology for reverse engineering - something I doubt any country ever had on that scale, at least at the time.
Wikipedia (unfortunately, sourcing a print book so I can't vouch for its having been quoted fairly) indicates Soviet agents were definitely stealing Concorde plans during the Tu-144's development.
I'm, of course, interested in arguments with some base to them. Wikipedia marks the section as "disputed" and mentions that stolen (if) were the preliminary designs.
Again, you have to know a lot to have use of plans like that - especially when the design is a moving target.
> Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know that the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as possible.
They would be stupid not to? Why spend billions of dollars on research when you can spend $100k to pay off a defector or a mole. It just makes more economic sense.
You did read the article, didn't you? In the case of the Buran they copied the concept, not the technology. Funny thing in aerospace, form ALWAYS follows function. So little surprise the two shuttles resembeled themselves a lot optically.
All the rest is pretty well explained in the article.
The Tu-144 was an absolute disaster and had to have every flight pre-approved by the political leadership. It doesn't matter it flew first if it doesn't work.
We're discussing which projects were original developments and which were follow-ons. The criteria you mention opens doors to wild speculation concerning shortcomings of very many projects on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
It is still a matter of considerable debate as to how much of the Manhattan Project intelligence was actually provided to the scientists in the Soviet bomb program.
The coolest thing is how the first (and only) voyage, including the landing, was completely automated.
Its one thing to drop an unmanned capsule into the ocean, quite another to land it on a runway. Of course, drones do it all the time these days. But this was 27 years ago.
The technical and popular terms are at odds, and currently tend to
reflect whichever element the user wishes to stress:
UAV - Uninhabited Air Vehicle - no "man in the can"
UAV - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle - same
RPV - Remotely Piloted Vehicle - we still have pilots!
drone - military: target, towed or on auto-pilot
drone - media: mindless non-human automaton
From the description of Buran's flight, it sounds like a mostly
pre-programmed auto-pilot from de-orbit to landing. The technology is
impressive for the late 1980s, no matter what it is called.
Probably to a similar extent as airliners these days, though without the pilot actually sitting in it. They can take off and land themselves, though they still have a human sitting around (probably reading a paperback most of the time.)
Autolandings may or may not be common in airliners, but my understanding of drones is that "The pilots are flying the plane through the automation" is in strong effect.
They can (and often are), but some of the drones are capable of completely computer controlled take off and landing. I remember seeing somewhere that the human drone pilots caused more crashes when landing than the computer controlled ones.
Not the latest ones. The trend now is to give a drone a flight plan, not to fly it.
For instance, the X-47B is designed to perform such delicate maneuvers as taking off from and landing on aircraft carriers and performing in-flight refueling automatically.
"Orbiter OK-2.01...was dismantled and sat gathering dust at the Tushina factory near Moscow for years until 2011 when it was reportedly moved to an aviation museum in Germany for restoration"
I just walked through this Buran model a few months ago at the Technikmuseum in Speyer, Germany. It's really there.
The local story (in short) actually is: The director of the museum saw a documentary about a plane graveyard in Bahrain that was aired next to the Formula 1 race there. He saw the Buran in the background, contacted the relevant people and got one short after :).
There was one of the atmospheric test frames just sitting in a vacant block on the outskirts of Sydney about a decade ago. I climbed all over it with a friend one night.
>This should be contrasted with the originally envisioned costs of $118 per kilogram (approximately $53 per pound) of payload in 1972 dollars ($1,400/kg, [approximately $630 per pound] adjusting for inflation to 2011)
Please check these figures. Whatever measure of inflation i try i can't see 12x inflation from 1972 to 2011. It was more like 4x.
Launch rate - correct, problem was Air Force which first dictated the oversized payload capacity and even more oversized payload bay dimensions, and a huge cross-range capability (to enable single-orbit missions), resulting in a system too big and expensive for anything else, then pulling out resulting in vastly lower launch rates. So Shuttle was commercially doomed long before its first flight. U.S. would be better off flying it a few times to prove it works, then getting back to drawing board to design something fitting the market better. Reusable launch systems have been, and still are, realistic, it's only epic fail of Shuttle which make it look too toxic to anyone to try (just like failure of GM EV1 delayed electric car revolution for a decade - nobody dared to try, engineering and business failure of a particular project was mistaken for the whole idea being bad).
The legacy of Buran/Energia lives on in the most powerful operational rocket engines ever created, the RD-170 family. There were four of these engines, each in one of the Buran boosters. One engine has four chambers. The RD-171 derivative is still used in Zenit launched from Russia and from a sea platform by Sea Launch, and the RD-180 derivative which is basically a half engine with two chambers, is used in the American Atlas V.
No other country has replicated the oxidizer rich staged combustion used in these high thrust efficient lox-kerosene engines. The materials technology is especially challenging because of the high temperature oxidizing gases in the turbine. For example SpaceX's Merlin gas generator engines look decidedly fifties compared to these.
The RD-0120 hydrogen engines on the base of the hydrogen tank were quite a feat as well, a Russian SSME. That technology was abandoned. The European Space Agency did some tests with RD-0120 back in the day.
(The article got the name of the booster engines wrong.)
I find it interesting that something that looks so similar to the shuttle (at a glance) is actually a completely different design & configuration (how/where thrust is generated).
> When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or $60,000/kg (approximately $27,000 per pound) to LEO. This should be contrasted with the originally envisioned costs of $118 per kilogram (approximately $53 per pound) of payload in 1972 dollars ($1,400/kg, [approximately $630 per pound] adjusting for inflation to 2011)
> The launch rate was significantly lower than initially expected. While not reducing absolute operating costs, more launches per year gives a lower cost per launch. Some early hypothetical studies examined 55 launches per year (see above), but the maximum possible launch rate was limited to 24 per year based on manufacturing capacity of the Michoud facility that constructs the external tank. Early in shuttle development, the expected launch rate was about 12 per year. Launch rates reached a peak of 9 per year in 1985 but averaged fewer thereafter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_...