Space Shuttle vs. Buran | Hacker News Reader

Space Shuttle vs. Buran

buran.su

57 pointsneverminder48 comments

The principal functional difference between the Shuttles and Buran is buried in the last paragraph:

  The main advantage of Buran over STS is that
  it was made from start to be fully automated.

The entire test flight from launch to the landing was done _completely_ autonomously. The most impressive part of it though was the landing when Buran aborted first landing run that happened to be into a strong crosswind and retried with a different runway, ultimately landing just few meters off the target point.

PS. Now reading the linked article, it appears that all its software goodness fit into less than 4 Megs. I'd totally read the memoirs of whoever was behind that firmware masterpiece.

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON

Back in the day, not everything needed jquery and bootstrap deps to be considered "modern" ;)

Jokes aside, russian space program had some AMAZING developers working in some very low-level languages with unbelievable efficiency. I had the pleasure of working with some of them many years later on enterprise software at large banks.

NASA has written some amazing software as well. Start here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063192

You may joke, but Node.js is still going strong after six years, while Buran never went past test flights. Imagine how much farther Buran could have gotten if they had the ability to share small, focused, reusable modules with the community. Imagine how much more reliable their systems could have been, if they had been able to reason about them at a higher level of abstraction, without getting bogged down into the low-level complexity of left-pad!

I know you are being sarcastic, but remember that there was no community at that time. And besides, open source code would have meant that other countries would have gotten it.

Also, check this out: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

Very different from how a typical Node.js left pad module is implemented.

I get your meaning, but additional abstraction layers are equally dangerous because they obsfucate underlying constraints and result in incorrect reasoning about a system.

There's a reason RTOSs don't have very tall software stacks with multiple layers and virtual machines between them and the hardware.

When your garbage collector invoking at the wrong millisecond 0.01% of the time means everyone on the craft is incinerated in the atmosphere... that's a different level of reliability requirement.

You missed the sarcasm.

If you have some stories you can/would like to share, please do!

4MB is rather a lot for embedded applications, especially if they are written in assembler. I can't imagine having to hand-check 4MB of assembler for flight certification.

Remember we had an entire game industry, graphical assets and all, distributed on 1.44MB floppy disks.

Given the time probably was all assembly, at the time four MB is quite a lot.

Early on, many space data systems used wire core memory to reduce errors.

The Apollo Guidance Computer had about 64KB of memory. The first minicomputer that I was a product manager for in the mid-eighties had a max memory of 4MB.

(In the latter case, not everything was written in assembler but it was all compiled.)

I'm wondering whether they built a simulation environment to test their software.

Your comment makes me think of how they packed Crash Bandicoot into memory. [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-game-developers-pack-entire-ga...

Buran was a neat system. Although it looks like a copy of the US shuttle, it wasn't. Buran was a payload, with no engines.

Because Buran was designed after the Shuttle, the designers had the benefit of knowing US mistakes. Buran's thermal protection is better. The Space Shuttle tile system was a huge headache; not only did it cause one crash, even successful flights required excessive maintenance of the tiles. The US tile system could not handle rain; Buran could.

The US shuttle had autoland.[1] The astronauts didn't want to use it. Post-Columbia, the shuttles did get full unmanned landing capability, so that, in some emergencies, a shuttle could be returned from the ISS with nobody on board. This was never used.

[1] http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/194

Interesting, I was just reading up on the space shuttle design process, and how the shuttle design was hurt by politics and scope creep. Apparently the project was in jeopardy at some point and needed buy-in from the Air Force. So they made a few changes, such as making it much bigger, and the tank disposable for potential military applications.

Well, turns out the shuttle was never used by the military. But the legacy of those decisions enabled but ultimately doomed the shuttle. It did not meet it's economic goals and was less safe because of them. Is that a correct reading of what happened?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/military/read.main/...

This is where the Buran comes in, they largely copied the shuttle, but did they have the foresight to improve the poor parts of the design?

> This is where the Buran comes in, they largely copied the shuttle, but did they have the foresight to improve the poor parts of the design?

Largely, yes. With the added benefit of hindsight they were able to give it much safer heat shielding and boosters, and did a million other small improvements.

But the size remained, because Soviet intelligence couldn't quite figure out what the Shuttle was supposed to be good for. The Buran was essentially a just-in-case program: Once they figured out what the US wanted to do with it, they'd have the launcher necessary to copy it.

Unfortunately, the US never figured it out either. For the roles the Shuttle ended up being used in the 80s and early 90s, existing Soviet hardware was more than a match, so the Buran was cancelled.

Only much, much later was the ISS planned around the Shuttle's capabilities and found a limited use for its construction. (Some Shuttles, the earlier ones were too heavy to reach the ISS with any useful payload.)

> Soviet intelligence couldn't quite figure out what the Shuttle was supposed to be good for.

I'm reminded of this famous joke: http://militaryhumor.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/military...

> Only much, much later was the ISS planned around the Shuttle's capabilities

IIR, the STS program (of which the shuttle was the only surviving part) was always intended to ferry cargo and some future spacestation parts into orbit. The ISS was the eventual compromise station and was a mere shadow of the original proposal.

> But the size remained, because Soviet intelligence couldn't quite figure out what the Shuttle was supposed to be good for. The Buran was essentially a just-in-case program: Once they figured out what the US wanted to do with it, they'd have the launcher necessary to copy it.

As far as I know they could only imagine military uses for it and never envisioned it to be used for civilian purposes.

The military did use the shuttle but maybe not in the way you think: they didn't have a separate military only shuttle, but the shuttle was used to launch many very large military satellites into orbit.

Although the particular modifications were not used, the Shuttle (as a launch system) certainly was used by the military or at least the NRO. Several missions were classified, most were presumably spy satellite launch and maintenance.

It caused a lot of communication problems because everything was coded, astronauts forgot what code words meant and the whole thing was a bit of a joke.

http://www.airspacemag.com/space/secret-space-shuttles-35318...

Space shuttle was actually used for a few military launches, and did deploy military (or NRO) payload(s). If you look at a list of STS missions, the military ones have 'undisclosed' missions.

The pentagon discontinued reliance on STS after the interruption caused by the Challenger explosion.

I like this website more: http://buran.ru/htm/molniya.htm It has tons of info, not only on Buran, but also on the earlier Spiral and Bor prototypes.

Why did I get the vibe I was reading pro-Buran propaganda in 2016?

Perhaps because it takes every opportunity to point out how Buran was superior, sometimes correctly (better automation, for example) and sometimes not (reused boosters, and the thermal protection bit seems dubious), while never once mentioning anything the Shuttle did better (reuse engines, or actually do something useful).

Still, great reading.

The engine reuse isn't exactly the Shuttle program's brightest moment anyway. The SSME was designed for 55 uses… By the time of the Challenger disaster, that number was 4-5. By the end of the Shuttle program NASA counted themselves lucky when some of the engines managed 15 uses; and refurbishment between each flight was only marginally cheaper than building new expendable engines for every flight. Even with the added benefit of 30 years of progress in material sciences, SpaceX is unlikely to manage 55 reuses on their engines specifically designed for it.

The Energia solution wasn't as high-tech, but it was highly pragmatic: The boosters were also used as expendable rockets on their own right (Zenit), so high production volumes – and easier to handle fuels – decreased prices significantly, to the point that several Zenit-derived engines are in use by American and South Korean companies; and the main engine was exactly the scaled-down, cheaper, expendable SSME that NASA could have used to drive down Space Shuttle launch costs.

You're right, reuse didn't work out with the Shuttle nearly the way they wanted it to. But it did work out to some degree, while Buran's version of it never went beyond paper.

But also because they pulled the plug on the Buran program because they had no use for it. They could shoot people up in rockets and that worked out cheaper for them. The Soyuz is the most cost efficient way to shoot people into space.

> The Soyuz is the most cost efficient way to shoot people into space.

The Soyuz has been the most efficient way to shoot people into space since 1968. It was developed in parallel with Apollo, and instead of throwing it away after the end of the moon program, they just kept it, and kept improving it – had NASA kept Apollo and improved it instead of throwing it away, and then throwing its successor away, then cancelling two successors in a row, to spawn a grand total of four parallel programs to maybe find one successor, who knows where the US space program would be now.

NASA's problems are less technical issues, and more a management one.

The Shuttle, despite its many problems, flew 133 successful flights.

At a direct cost of around 1.5 billion dollars per flight. This includes a lot of flights that were essentially milk runs, bringing satellites into orbit or doing other light work that could have been just as easily done with much cheaper capsule flights.

A large number of those missions were flow for the DoD, repairing/refuling satellites and potentially also capturing enemy satellites.

Large? Of the 135 flights, almost 50 went to Mir/ISS, doing work that should have been done by Soyuz/Progress/TKS-equivalent spacecraft in the $100-200 million range. 32 more made Spacelab flights, aka "poor man's excuse for a space station". The remainder were split between commercial satellite deployments (best left to unmanned boosters), regular scientific missions (the same already done on Gemini and Apollo capsules), missions that could have been cheaper put on a satellite (e.g. radar mapping), and very few missions the Shuttle was actually useful for – DoD missions and scientific recovery of large payloads (the only mission profile the Shuttle alone was uniquely suited for). Even Hubble's repair could have been done with capsules (the JWST is planned to be maintainable by Orion capsules, should maintenance ever be needed).

There were at least 11 classified NRO missions, and likely more with NRO tasks. Requirements from the NRO directly influenced the shuttle program design. I guess "large" is an exaggeration though.

They obviously didn't use Shuttle exclusively for military purposes. But most people don't realize that nearly all government-funded scientific programs in the US also have significant defense/NRO objectives. Even The Dish at Stanford was funded to be used for SIGINT work during the Cold War.

I'd wager that these groups are now using advanced robotics to replace classified work previously done via Shuttle missions. i.e. Boeing X-37

I don't think there's any maintenance plan for JWSP, capsule or otherwise. L2 is way too far away. Do you mean maintenance after launch but before deployment?

There was a lot of wishful thinking with regards to the shuttle program. Some ridiculously fanciful, some plain ignorant.

But most of all, it was the test of a theory put into practice. And it should have been to no one's surprise that many things thought true wern't. How much of that was simply ignorance vs being deliberately oversold is a matter of debate. But what those 133 missions did was impart an operational knowhow and lessons learned that went far beyond the immediate mission objectives. These are the same benefits provided by the ISS today.

In short, you really can't begin to determine how well a system works in practice until you put it into production, and start using it a lot. These are the same things SpaceX is learning now (just of a new sort.) It's why Ares is returning to a capsule form.

Buran looks much better on paper, and I've no doubt it's an engineer achievement. But the success of a program, and the benefits derived from it can't be determined purely on a theoretical basis. Buran may have been an excellent orbiter, or it could have been terrible. But we'll never know.

This article says the detached boosters fire rockets as they are landing and deploy landing gear. Was that ever demonstrated to work? I'm curious of there is precedent for this prior to SpaceX or just wishful thinking.

The boosters as tested did not. It were plans for a later revision of the launch system, which were cancelled due to eyewatering costs (– by Soviet standards, the US wouldn't have been able to do a single Shuttle launch for the price of the entire Buran program).

Obligatory shuttle reading: http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

Looks like a great article so far, am about half way through.

Ha! "You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design."

I didn't realize .su domains were still relevant. Also, very interesting content!

Soviet Union. It puzzled me the whole time and only dawned on me when reading your comment.

On engine difference, which is critical but has not been pointed out: - Buran had no launching engines, whole Energia rocket has been lost (apart of boosters?) - Shuttle did, thus the most expensive part has been returned back This resulted in a fact that STS launches were expected to be much cheaper [citation needed]

Although, the plan for the Energia launch vehicle was to return and land (the boosters vertically, like SpaceX is doing, while they planned to put wings on the main rocket) - however the program was canceled before they got to that phase of the project.

If anyone saw that note about the computer systems and wanted to learn more about Soviet-era computers, this may be a good place to start:

http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/argon.htm

I'm no expert in this subject.

The Buran boosters came down on parachutes and then landed on landing gear -- did that actually happen during either test?

The shuttle itself completed several atmospheric and one orbital flight, demonstrating autopiloted runway landings from orbit.

The reusable booster technology was just planned, though. The project was cancelled long before they could be tested. I'm not even sure there were any finalized specifications.

I don't agree - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia

There were two launches - the first of a "fully armed and.. oh" space battle station (I shit you not), the second of the Buran.

Yes, and? Both launches had the Energia in a fully disposable configuration – the launcher was never equipped with the hardware to recover the boosters, nor did the hardware exist.

Only the orbiter returned, like with the Shuttle.

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