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> What's the point of the Space Shuttle if launches were more expensive than disposable rockets? What's the point of the Buran, if the Soviets didn't feel like they need an answer to the space shuttle "just in case", even though they couldn't see any point in the shuttle design (except as a nuke carrier)?

Rather than nukes, I always thought the main advantage of the Shuttle was the ability to bring things back to Earth. Which it did, a few times:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-57

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-72

When then Shuttle was proposed, this was one of the main selling points. Having used it just 4 times over 133 missions... Well, that's not what was envisioned.

AFAIK the Russians were mainly concerned about the ability of the Space Shuttle to quickly change its orbital plane, combined with the planned high frequency of flights (which never happened though) and high cargo capacity.

Put a few nukes on the Shuttle, and you can drop them anywhere in the world with much less warning time than intercontinental ballistic missiles. At least that's what I read about the reasoning of the Russians building their own shuttle, because when they ran the numbers on the Space Shuttle they concluded that a "civilian use" didn't make much sense.

Changing orbital plane requires delta V, and the Shuttle had barely enough to make it to LEO (the highest it ever went was servicing the Hubble).

Cargo capacity... Not that much really, since you're carrying yourself a whole lot of orbiter already. It had a large volume in the cargo bay, and the mentioned ability to retrieve things in that cargo bay.

But yes, DoD/military influenced the design of the Shuttle. It just turns out they never used the capabilities they requested. And so you end up with a craft that makes little sense for civilian use, except for the building of a massive space station in orbit and eventual servicing of satellites.

Would the ISS be possible without the Shuttle?

From some distant memory the dimensions of the Space Shuttle cargo bay was specifically matched to accommodate the launch and servicing of the Hubble Space telescope. I'm not sure which design drove which.

The HST was a close variant of various military spy satellites. The difference is that it was pointed into space, as opposed to towards Earth.

Consider that a large number of Shuttle missions were classified, then put two and two together...

One designed advantage that, AFAIK, was never leveraged is the ability to launch to space and land in a single orbit.

> without much rational sense just to beat the other side

Assumes that just beating the other side was not a sufficient rational motive. Which, given that the threat both sides faced was "you and your way of life will be utterly obliterated", is a pretty irrational criticism.

What's the point of <X>, if <something we only learned by doing X>? There's tremendous hindsight bias in criticising even the Shuttle program on the basis of what we know now, while disregarding the value of everything we learned from doing it.

Even copying another country's technology on the basis of speculative military applications may not be irrational, unless you're somehow privy to all the knowledge that was available at the time when those decisions were made.

The remarkable MAD doctrine itself can be criticised as inhumane or insane, but hardly irrational. It's a triumph of rationality and a counter-intuitive application of game theory, the iron laws of mathematics elevated to places where we really would rather see common sense and humanity prevail.

> since modern sky scrapers are not expected to "survive" for thousands of years anyway

And maybe that’s a problem! Why exactly are we not building beautiful landmarks that will survive eons like the Romans did?

We have a throwaway culture, and nobody ever dares question it.

I think you are suffering a bit from survivorship bias here. Way less than 0.001% of Roman buildings are still standing and the ones that remain have been continuously maintained over the centuries. If humanity will keep maintaining the White House for centuries it will look just as good in 4021 as it does today.

The White House is not a modernist / postmodernist building that was designed with planned obsolescence in mind, so I'm not entirely sure why you've used it as an example. In fact, it's a perfect example of a beautiful neoclassical landmark that was intended to inspire and last through the ages.

Survivorship bias is always brought up in these discussions, but I believe it to just be a cop-out. Take a look at any well-preserved medieval / renaissance / early industrial era city in Europe (Bruges, Edinburgh, Venice). They are all absolutely gorgeous, even the buildings used historically by the lower classes (ones that were not even built with longevity in mind).

No, something flipped around the 1920s, and architecture, along with our whole societal philosophy around it, has clearly changed. I'd argue that it's for the worse.

Needs changeover time. Thick stone walls can provide insulation, but their hell on WiFi etc.

Growing up in a 200+ year old building you find a lot of architectural designs and modifications that don’t fit with modern usage. Pre AC maximizing summer cooling involved maximizing airflow where now we want maximum insulation. Before central heating we wanted chimney’s everywhere. And before wood stoves we wanted giant fireplaces everywhere. Even central heating has gone through several iterations, many different radiator designs for steam/water, central air, and now a zigzag of pipes underfloor.

Very old buildings may look nice, but they aren’t inherently better.

> Very old buildings may look nice, but they aren’t inherently better

I never said they were. I only said that they were built to last and that they were infinitely more aesthetically pleasing because we actually gave a damn about these things as a society. Now we don't.

Old buildings can be upgraded (I should know, I live in one, and have both functional pipes, insulation, heating, and Wi-Fi). So let's upgrade them, and let's ALSO ensure that whatever we build today includes not only modern amenities, but are also objects we can be proud of leaving as a legacy to future generations. Just like our ancestors did for literally millennia.

> we actually cared about this things as a society

No, the buildings that survived are generally more aesthetically pleasing, most old buildings where shacks. Walk around an old plantation for example and the slaves quarters didn’t survive. Search around for some original outhouses and you realize what survived isn’t simply representative of what was built.

> In fact, it's a perfect example of a beautiful neoclassical landmark that was intended to inspire and last through the ages.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you've never been to the White House: it's a mildewed, creaky mess that was gutted twice (once by war[1], again to prevent it from collapsing under its own misdesign[2]). It undergoes constant, active maintenance, and is not intended by any means to "last through the ages."

But to get to the actual point: the neoclassical style is built on a historical lens. It takes classical architecture on face value, as it was in the 18th century (i.e., weather-washed and in ruins). Its appliers wanted to promote their interpretation of classical greatness, which corresponds in no particular way to the actual greatness of cultures in the classical period. The Romans would have laughed at our neoclassical use of blindingly white marble[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Reconstruction

[3]: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prms/hd_prms.htm

It's mostly not survivorship bias, actually, and the ones that remain haven't been continuously maintained over the centuries. Many of the ones still standing today suffered from centuries of neglect, damage in war and rebellion, and even were actively looted for materials to build other buildings from. Others just got gradually buried by floods (or volcanos, etc) and are intact underground.

That way lies a slippery slope ;) It's pretty close to the "Ruinenwerttheorie" of the German Nazis:

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

From the first wikipedia paragraph, I don't see anything wrong with building things so they'll look cool a) when they're maintained and in use and b) when they're badly maintained and crumbling. I'll take 'Ruinenwerttheorie' buildings over brutalist concrete piles that look disgusting the day they're built and worse as they age.

The 3rd Reich had a lot of problems, but they had some good aesthetics (Huge Boss, etc). To ignore that, and shun a whole realm of aesthetics because it was appreciated by The Devil, is a waste and a poor strategic move; you're abandoning the beautiful elements because they had the misfortune to be mixed into a dark brew. It's an artistic tragedy, and a poor political move, putting you in a similar spot to the 3rd Reich themselves with regards to their ideas about 'degenerate art'.

The height of technology, and we cloak ourselves in ugliness and mediocrity, not daring to build anything beautiful. What a fucking waste. The sorts of small-souled people who build modern western identikit cities don't deserve to go to the moon.

I think the point is that it takes a sort of hubris that's quite typical for autocratic regimes to show off to the rest of the world - and future generations - with gigantomanic architecture.

IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff.

Instead of showing off to the rest of the world, we should ensure that people feel oppressed and demoralized by their every day surroundings. That'll show those autocrats!

Brutalism was adopted by the Soviets, who were also pretty oppressive.

I'd rather live in a beautiful building than a concrete square. The idea that people should live in purely functional environments with no room for beauty or art is a purely modernist idea.

I might be a minority opinion but I think brutalist architecture can be beautiful. My local library (https://www.yelp.com/biz/port-washington-public-library-port...) is quite brutalist but is also one of my favorite libraries. Its reading room alone (the library sits up on a hill and the reading room has one wall of all-glass-and-concrete which looks out onto Manhasset Bay) is amazing.

Actually, it seems that it crept back into vogue while I wasn't paying attention!: https://www.gq.com/story/9-brutalist-wonders-of-the-architec...

Taste is individual, but I just don't understand how you could find a heap of concrete slabs to be beautiful. To me, beauty is life-affirming, and brutalism is the physical embodiment of a philosophy that denies life in favour of rigid functional structure. It's the physical representation of kafkaesque bureaucracy.

I’m glad you’re respecting taste, especially when you’re throwing such anthropomorphological argument against it ;)

I’m not sure why there is such a significant aesthetic difference between cutting stones and stacking them (masonry architecture) and filling the exact same form with concrete, especially when the latter is usually far more robust and thus, safer (read: actually life-affirming, by being neither flammable nor easily collapsible, if designed right) and also permitting structural forms that are simply not possible using any other medium

Architecture follows philosophy. Skyscrapers (internationalist style) and large curved glass buildings (modernist style) have the same core philosophy as neoliberalism, for instance. Brutalism came about as an explicit rejection of aesthetics and "higher purpose" to building facades - an idea deeply rooted in materialist philosophy, hence its adaptation by the Soviets. The grandparent comment demonstrates this perfectly: "IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff". Your argument to building materials is also an example of this - while it's true, it is reductionist; living in a concrete jungle is not better than living in a wooden fishing village just because the materials are less flammable.

The philosophy of architecture isn't really a "anthropomorphological argument" when architecture exists for humans, at the behest of humans, and represents human values. The idea that a building is just a box that people exist in is itself a philosophical position, one that is exemplified by brutalism, and one that I and many other people are opposed to.

Interesting. Very holistic. Which is to say, not very concrete. Wink.

Did you follow the link I posted a few comments up, the "nine brutalist wonders of the architectural world"? Explain how those exemplify "just a box that people exist in"

> Interesting. Very holistic. Which is to say, not very concrete. Wink.

Very modernist thing to say. I suspect we have very different philosophies, and I have a strong distaste for modernism, materialism and reductionism in general. You can't quantify the things that actually matter in your living environment beyond the bare essentials of survival, so of course the concept is not concrete to you if the only things you value are the things you can measure.

> Explain how those exemplify "just a box that people exist in"

Yes I saw the article. The few that actually were buildings instead of sculptures (barbican, bank of London and South America, geisei library and the cathedral) are hideous. The cathedral is the least ugly because its at least not a raw concrete facade, but as far as cathedrals go it has to be the first I've seen that left me with no sense of awe whatsoever.

What we have in our oh-so-humble and "advanced" society is the children of corbusier making horrendous buildings that make the people with no choice but to live in them miserable.

Is the parthenon gigantomanic? Is this? https://cdn.lifedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/22-most...

Is this? https://preview.redd.it/hkwpt88wasv41.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...

Or this? https://blog.eurail.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Florence-...

Because I know a city made of buildings like the above is far more conducive to human dignity than a grid of "humble" glass boxes.

Should we all be living in and surrounded by identikit, homogenous apartments? Except for the architects and the rich, of course; they get to have centuries-old country mansions to flee to.

It isn't humble to humiliate people by making them to live in concrete and glass cages.

I don't quite understand how y'all came to the conclusion that I want people to live in ugly glass and concrete blocks :)

I do doubt however that many people today would want to live in genuine old buildings with the outhouse toilet across the yard. It's more likely that they want to live in a modern flat built into the hull of an old building.

even more insidious is our culture of hollow sentimentality

For what it’s worth, the space race along with the desire to build up missile technology in general are the reason we have computers today as we know them. Not many people outside of the space and defense industries were willing to shell out buckets of cash for a single transistor.

"It is durable due to its incorporation of pozzolanic ash, which prevents cracks from spreading."

Third sentence in the Wikipedia article. Later:

"The strength and longevity of Roman marine concrete is understood to benefit from a reaction of seawater with a mixture of volcanic ash and quicklime to create a rare crystal called tobermorite, which may resist fracturing. As seawater percolated within the tiny cracks in the Roman concrete, it reacted with phillipsite naturally found in the volcanic rock and created aluminous tobermorite crystals."

Neither seems to have been 'lost data'.