Comment by j9461701 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j9461701 | Hacker News Reader

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If it was such an obvious boondoggle why did Russia steal the design and make their own?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)

In retrospect I think it's pretty obvious the actual point of the space shuttle was national prestige. Studies done at the time pointed out it would take something like 60 launches a year for a reusable system to beat the cost of expendable rockets with available (1970s) technology, and yet the project was pursued regardless. Because the real, actual, honest reason we went with the STS was simply - the shuttle was a space ship, like in sci-fi, and was therefore cool and therefore a public darling. Even if it made no financial sense, people still loved it.

It's similar to the USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin serving in the Gulf War. Made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was a total waste of money and time. But battle wagons are cool, and therefore people bent over backwards trying to justify it. They even invented "armored" pods for the tomahawks going on the Iowas:

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

To try and pretend there was some kind of operational point to using thickly armored battleships instead of something more modern.

Rule of cool is strangely powerful in real life in turns out.

The Russians were interested in hypersonic glide vehicles as a platform for nuclear weapons.

They really hated the Pershing 2 because that kind of reentry vehicle can break suddenly two or more times confounding the Moscow ABM system. (which might have been able to fire multiple nuclear shots, get lucky to disable the warhead, and burn out all the electronics for 1000 miles away with the EMP -- the American hit-to-kill ABM will just fail)

Russia was trying to outboondoggle us with Buran and the Energyia booster. Like the space shuttle Buran was a hypersonic glide vehicle that could land on a runway with a wing and a prayer, emphasis on the prayer. The rocket engines were on the booster but not the orbiter, so Energia by itself was a capable heavy lift vehicle which the russians planned to out-boondoggle us: one Energia exploded when Russia tried to launch a 1-MW class laser satellite with optical targeting and all the facilities to start burning up targets. (e.g. in response to the Reagan era SDI talk, the Russians tried to hastily launch real hardware)

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BTW I have seen the boxes on the Iowa class and they are a hoot. The US Congress had a lot of resistance to Robert Macnamara's plan to switch the Navy to vertical launch tubes because they didn't look menacing enough but if you look at Chinese films like Wolf Warrior you see they are very proud of their missile destroyers and their cluster munitions too.

Regarding Buran: Delivery of nuclear weapons was part of the specs of 1950s XB-20 Dyna-Soar project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar). The soviets probably saw the obvious similarities in the basic design, probably also knew about the Space Shuttle specs having been blown up in an otherwise inconceivable fashion by request of the armed forces and drew their conclusions, eventually answering the threat by coming up with a design that actually adhered to these assumed specs. It was a necessity dictated by panic.

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