Declassified spacecrafts and orbital weapons of the USSR (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Declassified spacecrafts and orbital weapons of the USSR (2018)

xissufotoday.space

310 pointseternalban97 comments

Not sure how much I trust this page but if you are interested in an alternative history version of the space race I highly recommend For All Mankind on AppleTV+! It's a great show IMO. It shows what might have happened if the USSR beat the US to the moon and the Space Race never ended. It kicks the US into high gear and leads to a more advanced and in my opinion better USA (more liberal and technological/focused on Science). It's a biased towards a progressive viewpoint (so am I so it works really well for me).

Honestly, I have never understood why landing on the Moon first would amount to winning the space race (except being nice to think about it as such).

I think that's part of the premise for the show. Landing on the Moon did slow down the Space Race, there are a ton of documented plans for the advancement of the Space program but the will to push them through disappeared as soon as the US "beat" the Soviets. I think the real reason was that many, maybe even most people only really cared about Space from a standpoint of beating the other team. The show really leans into that in the early episodes. It does cast the USA as the "good" guys, in that even if we are losing we never give up until we win.

Totally this. I have a little (uniformed) ramble I do when explaining 'Vision' over 'Mission' to people.

In that putting a man on the moon was just the mission, we don't actually know the vision. The vision statement (if there was one) could well have been 'win at space, and therefore have the most developed scientific processes' 'beat the damn Russians' 'show the world the superiority of capitalism'

(then you can rattle down the vmost pyramid - the objectives (bring them back alive, broadcast it in real time etc) - the strategies (a pure oxygen environment simplifies some things for engineering - and is far too dangerous... ) and the tactical day to day/week to week decisions that had to be made. But all the 'MOST' are easier when people on the project understand the vision.

Did the ruskies slow down after the moon landing too?

I remember watching a great video on their giant (unrealistic) N1 rocket that Russia was trying to create to get to the moon (and elsewhere) with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YscKBzvHBSw

Another good video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gklVhRzkVqA

Besides the space-race part, just the pure industrial might of the Soviet Union at the time is quite amazing to even build such a massive rocket, seeing it rolling towards the launcher. Shows the value competition has on society, it's not limited to markets.

It’s too bad the N1 never lifted off successfully.

It lifted off successfully multiple times, it just never reached orbit.

>’show the world the superiority of capitalism’

The funny thing is is that the federal government pumped billions of dollars into the Gemini and Apollo programs. This isn’t capitalism. It’s socialism for the wealthy.

Right - it was able to apply more resources on the problem because its underlying system created more surplus.

I don't have the skills necessary to evaluate the accuracy or relevance of that argument, but it's not inconsistent with the facts.

On one hand, it’s pure propaganda from the side that didn’t already have the first satellite or human in space to their name.

On the other, landing on an extraterrestrial body is a significantly more difficult challenge, particularly the precision computing to steer the lunar lander.

Computers at the time were hand-welded and unsuitable for the rigors of space (turbulence, radiation). The brand new invention of the integrated circuit sought to solve these problems, but they were wildly expensive, so the US dumped boatloads of money into making them cheaper and easier to manufacture. Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, and the foundations for the personal computing era were in place.

So in a way, Silicon Valley owes an eternal debt of gratitude to Cold War propaganda insistent that the finish line of the space race was to be the lunar surface.

OTOH see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9

it seems even more odd if you view the space race as mostly being a fig leaf for ICBM development. I find this argument mostly convincing, but if the main goal is to build effective warhead delivery systems, why spend so much on manned flight specifically? there's not much of a practical case for building stuff that can take humans all the way to the moon and back. ICBMs don't need nearly as much delta-v nor do they need to keep humans onboard alive, and by far the most useful things to put in space are LEO or GEO satellites.

President Johnson made a fascinating comment about the space program:

I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.

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

Yes but the manned space program was very different than the spysat spacelaunch program. If the goal was only unmanned satellites, the space program would have cost a tenth of what it did. just look to the ICBM/SLBM programs, which diverged from the manned rocket programs after only a couple years. The tech looks similar but is actually very different in practice.

At the beginning of the space race automatic solutions were very limited, and manned spacecrafts were planned to be used for some routine operations, like reconnaissance.

A spy satellite program isn't worth much if your adversary can send astronauts up to mess with them and you can't.

Unless sending people up to mess with a sat costs more than launching its replacement, which would be true of everything short of massive weapons stations. And from day one everyone realized that sending men up to intercept wasnt practical, especially if the target didnt want to be intercepted.

If countries were companies, the Apollo Program would have got a large portion of its funding from the "Marketing" department. Because that's what it was.

It was still money well spent. Far greater returns than all the billions that are sunk in the military each day.

In this particular case, I think it started as a means to show off ICBMs (the Sputnik in particular) and I guess spy satellites. But then the race started and it got out of hand.

If the adversary has already managed to put a satellite up, you don't go and put yours as it would just get you to parity (at a later date even, so you are actually behind!). What you do is you one-up them. What can you put up there that's better than a satellite? People. But they did that too. What do you do then? Let's put people on the freaking Moon, let's see you top that!

Had the USSR managed to land people on the Moon too and this kept escalating, we would have orbital habitats on Europa by now.

Didn't the ICBM development come first? The Mercury and Gemini programs used barely modified ICBM boosters and the engineers at first didn't want to put controls in at all, they were already confident of their ability to maneuver and navigate in orbit. At some point I think the simplest explanation is the correct one - it was a giant contest of wills between the superpowers.

By the time of the Apollo program there was very little technology shared from military ICBM programs. ICBMs had moved on to solid fuel for quick response time whereas the civilian manned programs focused on liquid fuel for safety and payload capacity. Those were almost completely different technologies.

I think the U.S. basically won by the Soviets' "forfeiting". If USSR landed on the moon second but soon after, say, landed a man on Mars, and the U.S. unable to accomplish the feat, we would say the Soviets won.

The Soviet program was doomed by technology and circumstance. The USSR was far behind on hydrogen, computers, and control systems; then the linchpin of their program, Sergei Korolev died (likely due in part to his term in the Gulags). They didn't give up, they failed (as exemplified by the N1 rocket failures).

No, the Sovient program was doomed because the military lost any interest in funding Korolev's trips to Moon after they got what they wanted from the program - a fully working ICBM capable of reaching USA.

After that the funding was heavily curtailed and redirected to other near-military projects like spy satellites.

The fact that the program itself was ruinously expensive for USSR (which was still less developed than US) and was burning precious R&D resources was also not insignificant.

Korolev by James Harford is a rather readable insight into what was going on inside the Soviet space program: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213301.Korolev

I think there's a great argument to be made for Kruschev's downfall being the 'but for' cause of the abandonment of the program, but Korolev and technologies were the 'sine qua nons' of a moonshot.

Every race has to have a finish line

The most obvious counterexample to this would be an arms race.

We can reduce this to halting problem. We will never know finish line exists until we reach one?

Maybe we just haven’t hit the “finish line” yet with the arms race...

I really hope that line would have been "the weapons are good enough", but considering the US stockpile of nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War was enough to cause the extinction of humanity a few times over, I guess not...

The claim that we have (or had) enough nuclear weapons to cause the actual extinction of humanity, much less cause it several times over, is dubious. If you google it there are numerous articles debating it. At the very least there isn’t scientific consensus.

> scientific consensus

Do you propose an experimental measurement? /s

Scientific and technological achievement are critical for evaluating the effectiveness of policy. As I understand it, the issue really was that the Soviets believed that socialism should lead to a more scientific society, as they believed that socialism itself was based on the values of scientific progress. So defeat in the sciences was truly a blow to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire Soviet project. Not to mention that scientific advances lead directly to economic power and military superiority. I read that when Reagan announced the plan to fund the hugely expensive Strategic Defense Initiative, Soviet generals, having exhausted all their financial reserves losing the space race, felt that there was no way that the Soviet economy could keep up with the military advances of the West.

I guess recently released Soviet documents don't support the idea that Soviet generals were afraid of the scale of SDI.

[0] http://russianforces.org/podvig/2013/03/did_star_wars_help_e...

The show is great. Without too much of a spoiler, the route it takes toward the end with its need for individual heroics is rather unfortunate.

Very unfortunate because a lot of practical engineering and battle tested systems design practices came from the apollo program and it would not have happened without teams of people working together.

I think they address this pretty well actually. It's hard to say exactly where without spoilers but in particular a character talks about the difference that a death of a hero (astronaut) makes vs the command control guys or nameless ground crew. One of the many things I liked about the show is pointing out how that really matters why it shouldn't.

FYI, there's another season starting in just a few days. Just sharing in case you weren't aware.

I think that's one of the things I really like about the show. That is shows that even in Hard(ish) SciFi there is room for humans to be heroes. Also minor spoiler

------

it show's diverse crews as being able to perform heroics just as much as the standard male heroic type.

May I recommend The Expanse as another, possibly more mature, take on humanity’s space era.

Actually the expanse, for all mankind, and the martian are my erm ... I guess holy trinity of modern hard(ish) sci fi about space exploration. There is a lot of overlap in the fandoms of each and each series references each other to give a very unofficial shared universe feel. For example:

The expanse has had references to the USN Jamestown which is from For All Mankind (it was a model in the expanse in an office of a thing -trying to avoid spoilers - that appears in FAM)

The expanse had a ship named the MCRN Watney (Mark Watney is the name of the character in the Martian)

The Authors of each series have praised the other series and jokingly said that it's the same timeline/universe. I know it's not really but in my head cannon it is and I really LOVE that timeline.

I'd HIGHLY recommend all three as they are my favorite media properties.

The Foundation Series is really great (at least for the first 3/4). Its books obvious but the ideas are so good. The dialogue and characters are a bit basic, but it’s more than made up for by the story.

Yeah I need to read that prior to the Apple TV series launching!

Would add Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy to that last. At the very least, the first one.

It's on my to read list. I need to bump it up to the top I think though!

To be fair in the end it's down to a very small number of individuals a long way from Earth having to deal with extraordinary circumstances. That's hardly unrealistic given the circumstances.

I wish I could recommend "For All Mankind", but I can't. And while I feel the first three episodes were strong and well produced, I just really really didn't agree with where it ended up going. I'll still watch the second season because it's scifi on TV and it's a genuinely interesting show, but I can't shake the "late seasons of Battlestar Galactica" feeling the later 2/3rds or the season left me with.

Maybe the show tries to say that winning leads to slacking off?

I'd say it says the competition can bring out the best in us. Which I find to be generally true, of course it can also bring out the worst in us also!

Sounds interesting, is it filled with drunk angry soviets though?

There has only been one season and the main Russian on the show was actually pretty cool IMO. The show does a decent job of showing the USSR's people as being real people, not evil communists.

For All Mankind is an awesome show, can highly recommend. A very interesting take on how the space race could have gone. Also has some thoughtful insights into how society was in the 60s (well, I suppose that depends on the telling). Starring Joel Kinnaman was also in the 1st season of Altered Carbon (which is what got me to try this series).

Season 2 coming out Friday, looking forward to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)

More comprehensive and authoritative source for same data:

http://www.astronautix.com/

eg Kliper (2004)

http://www.astronautix.com/k/kliper.html

Great link, thanks. Vladimir Chelomei's name is all over that page. 12 counts to 16 for Von Braun.

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

We recently wrote a piece about space warfare for Orbital Index: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-12-02-Issue-93/#space-...

One of the resources we linked to was this recent PDF (https://aerospace.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/Reesman_Ph...) called "The physics of space war: how orbital dynamics constrain space-to-space engagements" from Aerospace Corp. which talks about how the limited ∆v budgets of space vehicles limits warfare and makes planning and timing essential to an attack. The PDF, oddly, has the following invisible text on the first page if you click and drag to highlight it: "THIS MATERIAL IS BEING PROVIDED PRE-RELEASE SOLELY FOR THE USE OF GEN. JAMES DICKINSON, AND IS NOT APPROVED FOR RELEASE."

Such statements are true of low-orbit but once you get out to places like geostationary orbits things do slow down. Sats out there can do things with much lower deltaV, things like direct dashes at targets, that are not practical in lower orbits.

I suspect it is similar to naval warfare: distances are long, there's nowhere to hide, and maneuvers are limited.

Nice find!

From a UX perspective, the moving background on this site literally makes me feel sick.

This worked for me

  document.body.style.backgroundImage = 'url(\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com/noimage.png)'

Came here to say this as well. I can't say I've ever had a website make me feel that way before, so that's really something.

So many sites back in the late 90's had similar backgrounds, good thing most of them stayed in the 90's

So the space laser crashed because the same command was accidentally used for both opening the solar panels and discarding the side module covers?

Or because Gorbachev ordered it...

Beware this page is mostly conspiracy theories

No it is basically correct. A 1 MW chemical laser and optical targeting system of that scale was very possible at that time, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

and

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

for examples closer to Earth. It is by no means an apocalyptic weapon, but a satellite-to-satellite laser attack could make a detectable space junk mess for decades to come.

That generation of chemical lasers use dangerous chemical reactions, like burning hydrogen in fluorine or mixing different kinds of bleach: operator safety concerns kept them from being fielded.

We may never actually know, but I have my doubts anything like that was ever fielded. You're talking about beam-expansion over thousands of km for a sat-to-sat weapon instead of the tens of km for the eventually de-funded ABL/YAL-1 (some two decades after the suggested Soviet space-based system.) You avoid the atmosphere in space but you can't avoid diffraction. Teller's original concepts for SDI space-based lasers proposed literal nuclear bombs to provide the necessary energy density at range; neither those, nor the other host of exotic 80s-era directed energy weapons concepts seem to have made it into operation.

i will have a hell of a time remembering where it was, but a few years ago i read an interview or essay that said this payload was actually a decoy, that the soviets were responding to the SDI program but could not get a workable laser with enough power in such a package, and that it was just there to look like a laser -- including by slowly leaking carbon dioxide, which would be the signature sought by american ground observers

The laser was supposed to take care of SDI sats and other space-borne elements, indeed.

With exception of the RAKS entry, all the other stuff has been confirmed. It's just mostly experimental, but built, systems.

A bit of that happened because USSR ended up assuming that USA was more ready with some techs than they thought, and scaled to match (the amount of crazy that was due to essentially misunderstandings was, well, crazy).

and / or some artists impressions of the systems that were never actually funded or constructed.

Interesting that Sierra Nevada Corp's space plane looks so similar to the USSR Spiral

The SNC Dream Chaser is based on several previous US designs, which probably involved some back-and-forth responding to what the USSR was doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar

If you want a lifting body with a high AOA reentry, maneuverable approach, and runway landing, then the physics probably dictates everyone converging on similar shapes. Also in this group: Buran, Shuttle, and X37.

>> Also in this group: Buran, Shuttle

Buran/shuttle were more than just lifting bodies. They had the large wings necessary for cross-range flight, something more than just landing. This was needed for military single-overflight mission profiles that were never flown.

I've heard from drunk MechEs working at SNC that Dream Chaser is a blatantly soviet design, down to measurements making way more sense in metric than the imperial that they use.

https://www.denverpost.com/2016/02/26/sierra-nevadas-dream-c...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/nasas-newest-cargo-s...

The "Spaceshuttle" BURAN ended up in a German Museum https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran

It’s not the only extant orbiter. Most of them are in Baikonur or Moscow. The one in Speyer was an atmospheric test vehicle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme#List_of_vehi...

These ships reminds me of the old action-strategy PC game named Battlezone from 1998. It was set in an alternate universe during the Cold War where the US and Soviet Union were secretly engaged in an interplanetary war throughout the entire solar system, but concealed from society under the guise of the "Space Race."

On another note, I've always wondered about the feasibility of putting a large caliber one-time use cannon on a satellite. Like a WWII battleship main gun floating in space for highly precise attacks on remote areas without the fallout of tactical nukes.

The website doesn't look really reliable overall.

Wiki lists some primary sources. Not a terribly different story.

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

"Powerful airship overclockers (weight 52 tons, length 38 meters, wingspan of 16.5 m) was dispersed to six times the speed of sound (6M), then with his “back” at an altitude of 28-30 km was supposed to start a 10-ton manned orbital plane 8 m long and 7.4 m span."

What on earth (or not!) is this supposed to mean?

Kliper never was a classified project.

it had huge natural overlap with hypersonic maneuverable reentry vehicle R&D which has been all the rage, at least in the Russian weapon program, in the last couple decades, so a lot of Kliper programs would be highly classified.

Also, while being no weapons by design, there are several USSR satellites in the parking orbits carrying tens of kg of highly enriched uranium.

I wish the US would declassify the space weapon stuff it did in the 70s and 80s.

In 1993 I saw a complete ground-based anti-satellite laser system in New Mexico that had everything to burn a satellite except for the laser (aka. "optical tracking system") It actually did have a 25W laser that excited a "sodium guide star" in the upper atmosphere that controls a mirror that undoes atmospheric twinkling and is necessary if you want to uplink laser energy with high efficiency.

That's nothing - in 1985 I saw a demo for an orbital 5 megawatt laser.

Okay, story time!

I think it's a reference to Real Genius https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/

Classified concept renderings... ooo. Reminds me of those fake YouTube Russian fighter jet plane videos.

(2018)

and here's some more discussion about Soviet space cannon from years back

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10575450

Some of these look like German WWII aircraft eg ME-163

Russians poached some German engineers as well, not only NASA

The Soviets also transferred the entire rocket manufacturing line from Germany to USSR

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/rockets_ussr_germany.html

And a lot of the documentation that was on the territory of the future GDR.

I can't stay on that website long because I start getting motion sick from the background. Animated gif backgrounds belong in the 90s.

Somebody should really call the Polyus.

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