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Comment by ShrpErinaceidae | Hacker News Reader

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.

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