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Comment by jackmott42 | Hacker News Reader

When we built the Space Shuttle, russia saw that we were building it, did some napkin math and decided it made absolutely no sense what we were doing, and that it then must have had some secret military purpose rather than any stated purpose. So they built their own lest their be some kind of space weaponry gap. Turns out that, while there were of course some military plans for the space shuttle, it just actually didn't make sense, and Russian paranoia led to the irrational design being built twice!

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They didn't just go out and build some. The KGB was stealing NASA's plans. NASA caught on (with help from CIA) and implanted falsified heat tile formulas, which the Soviets copied. Their first Buran only flew once and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles. The Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine.[1] Then the USSR collapsed. Currently they are sitting in decaying hangars in Baikonur, just rotting away. There's video on youtube of people sneaking in (it's a guarded base), flying drones around them and climbing around in and out of them. It's pretty cool. [2]

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM

> The Soviets copied most of the design but used their own engine.

This is overselling it. They were aerodynamically very similar, but the shuttle had the SSME (space shuttle main engines, ~250tonnes thrust each) burning from liftoff to orbit, while Buran had only orbital thrusters (9 tonnes thrust)- all the thrust from liftoff through orbit came from the engines on Energia + boosters.

In other words: reusable upper stage vs fully reusable rocket minus the drop tank

For certain definitions of reusable, yes. Certainly retaining the SSME's for refurbishment was a big accomplishment. I wish Energia+buran could have maintained funding for a few decades - concepts for the flyback boosters were cool and possibly promised to be more quickly/reliably reusable than the space shuttle ended up being.

Today the Shuttle is largely regarded as refurbishable, not reusable. Reusability was the goal, but the SRBs actually cost more to recover and refurbish than to just spin a new casing, and the orbiter was so thoroughly disassembled and inspected after each flight - including disassembling each SSME - that no definition of reusable for any other product would apply.

That said, it does seem that at least one of the X-37Bs actually is reusable, in the sense that that it seems to have no major disassembly occur between flights. But it is so closely guarded that we really have only hints, not facts.

My favorite tidbit about the Buran is that it executes a complicated roll maneuver immediately after lift off. You can see the Shuttle do the exact same thing when it launches from Cape Canaveral. The reason is that the lunch pad at the Cape is orientated particular way because it was an upgraded launch pad from the Saturn V, and they couldn’t just rebuild from scratch to meet Shuttle specs. So it rolls after clearing the launch tower to achieve the correct orientation.

The Buran launch pad, by contrast, is able to rotate 360 degrees. They could have just rotated the pad to be correctly aligned before launch. But no, they execute the same complicated, mission-risk-adding roll maneuver verbatim. Exactly like shuttle.

I guarantee you the Buran was running stolen launch sequence code from the Shuttle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMV-3ldMvpA

Here's the Energiya launch site (a sequence of 360° photos, you can look around). What part of it could rotate, in your opinion? Keep in mind the tower is also missing the massive supports and the cosmonaut escape route, a humongous tube slide that couldn't move anywhere.

You might be thinking of the first R-7 launchpads that had to be rotated to a fixed angle before the launch because the control system from 1950's was unable to compute the roll maneuver in flight, aerodynamics being too complex for it.

Where are you taking this info from?

Wikipedia makes no mention of that reasoning: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Roll_program

The roll is part of the gravity turn, every craft does that kind of stuff to 'aim'.

So much wrong here. Seems to be a trend on hn this morning.

Food for thought, even if they did steal code, what would that have looked like in the 70s and 80s? Printing out reams of paper? Wheeling in a giant hard disk?

Taking pictures with microfilm.

Yet the Saturn V rolled as well. https://www.popsci.com/why-does-rocket-need-to-roll-going-in...

Thanks for all the corrections everyone! I trusted the source of this story, but it looks like I should have investigated myself a bit more before repeating. Glad to be corrected!

The buran did some cool things though. It took off, orbited the earth twice, then landed pretty close to target completely remotely. Apparently it only lost like 8 heat tiles on that flight too. Imagine if the program really got going and they were running automated space shuttle missions while the U.S. was still crudely sending people up. That would have been an even bigger a PR disaster for NASA than the shuttle disasters were already.

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

All of Shuttle launch and most of reentry was automated; the landing itself was always done manually but a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle).

We "crudely sent people up" with the Shuttle because sending people up with the Shuttle was part of what we wanted to do with the thing. If there had been sufficient demand for fully-unmanned Shuttle missions, it could've been done; the fact that it wasn't means that there were too few such missions that couldn't be better served by other vehicles (that didn't have to worry about carrying around a ton of baggage focused around keeping people alive).

  > a fully-automated landing was theoretically possible (the software was there, but it was never fully tested on the real Shuttle).

Actually, the only hardware missing for a fully automated landing was a relay to deploy the landing gear. Later shuttle flights - maybe only one - actually carried a wiring harness that _could_ have been configured to enable remote / automated landing gear deploy.

That said, landing the shuttle was a challenge and an achievement. No pilot would give up the opportunity to perform such a prestigious landing. And the shuttle commander was always a pilot.

That is actually impressive. Imagine if Russia kept their sh#t together and continued progressing. They got some things right.

The USSR had no shortage of brilliant technical talent, although they did have a habit of imprisoning them even after they had had a major success.

They had like 300 million people population and for a long time were the country training the largest number of engineers every year. So yeah a small percentage of these engineers did turn out to be brilliant.

Its not only the populations size. Technical people were precised as prestigious and well paid. After soviet collapse, this changed causing exodus of talent to west and overall decline in numbers.

Apparently noways a lot of industries are loosing institutional knowledge/expertise built and past down by each generation. because there is no one to pass it down to.

Technical people were never prestigious nor well paid. That was not desired in communism where workers were presented as ruling class. Engineers salary was 110-130 rubles, casual worker ~70 rubles and small caliber boss ~200 rubles. Depending on workplace engineers could steal way less than workers (who had direct access to product) and resourceful bosses.

Edit: a car in comparison was going for 7000 rubles.

I believe (not an expert) that during Stalin times technical people were very well paid. But Khrushchev returned to the policy of leveling (uravnilovka) and tried to make worker and engineer salaries the same.

Fair enough. I'm not saying they were necessarily unique. And they did do a good job of doing horrible things to much of the talent that got to the top.

No shortage, but no surplus either. They just sank a ruinous portion of their GDP into that stuff.

One of them is actually sitting out in the open and now visible on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.5712292,38.1431209,154m/data...

  > and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles

This is not true so far as I know. If you have some source documenting heat damage to the orbiter I'd love to see it. I believe that the Buran lost about half a dozen tiles on reentry, contrast with STS-1 which lost more than a dozen. In fact, the maiden launch of Columbia was actually delayed over a year because when transporting the shuttle something like 2000 tiles were lost on the flight - subsonic on the back of a 747.

Wow that was a good test to run, even if by mistake.

The 747 flight? Yeah, in retrospect STS-1 was lucky on so many counts. And so were at least half a dozen other shuttle flights. In one incident a missing tile on descend allowed the hot plasma to interact with the airframe. By sheer 1 in 24,300 chance that tile was covering a steel antenna, which melted. Had that been almost any other tile, it would have melted the aluminum airframe.

In my opinion, STS-1 was far more dangerous - and lucky - than even Vostok 1. Vostok 1 at least was using a rocket that had a flight history. And no shaky solids. And a proven heat shield. And though both flights had ejection seats, only one was able to launch those seats clear of the rocket exhaust.

The Soviets didn't copy most of the design - actually Buran is a completely different design from the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle had a big tank attached to it at the start, but the main engines where part of the Shuttle. Buran was launched by an Energia rocket (which was planned to eventually be reused like Falcon 9) and the main engines were on the rocket, not on the shuttle.

My wife's dad worked at NASA in the 60s, 70s and 80s - he was appointed to be the manager of one of the Apollo missions that was later cancelled. According to him Congress told NASA they'll partially fund the Shuttle program and NASA can ask the Air Force for any extra money required. Air Force involvement ruined the Shuttle, as the military wanted to have options to use the Shuttle for military operations (such as stealing Soviet satellites out of Soviet radar coverage, dropping nuclear bombs from outside any ground defense range and launching the Shuttle from military fields).

The other thing that ruined the Shuttle was NASA was not able to make any real improvements to it. The initial design had a lot of shortcomings and there was never enough funding to improve it.

That's just plain wrong. Energiya/Buran was a fundamentally different system from STS, and only had a superficially similar look, as the silhouette was the only copied part to conform with party requirements. For one, the orbiter was a separate autonomous spacecraft with its own fuel tanks and the main engines, not an integral part of the launcher. It used LOX/RP1 - in orbit! - for both RCS and main engines, with larger dV budget as a result. The control system was absolutely different. Etc etc etc.

The Buran design process is pretty well documented in general, and a lot was written about it. The original starting OS-120 concept was pretty much a verbatim copy of the layout and high-level decisions of the Shuttle (they didn't have the "NASA plans", they only had a layout and open data), but they a) realized they couldn't make the SRBs as they used liquid fuels for ICBMs and didn't have the production capability for such large diameter solid rockets, and b) their own additional requirements crept in. So the design evolved over time into an entirely different one.

>NASA caught on (with help from CIA) and implanted falsified heat tile formulas, which the Soviets copied. Their first Buran only flew once and mostly burned up on reentry due to the bad heat tiles.

The heat tiles used a different material, and it didn't burn up, so this makes little sense.

The buran. That is an awesome spy Vs spy story. Thank you, this made my day.

Of course they just copied heat tiles and launched them without any prior testing. This is how things are done in space exploration.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) is more accurate regarding its only and uncrewed flight. Especially interesting is the automatic landing. Oh, and it has something about the tiles, too.

Maybe you should discover some other magazines.

MIT did a special course on the Space Shuttle, and one of the lectures was by a historian on the decision to build it: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-885j-aircraft-systems-enginee...

This newer research by Bart Hendrickx sheds a new light on the decision. [1] [2] The actual decision to build it was made by engineers, not the party or the paranoid military, and was based on wrong assumptions, like the US military requirements that were already known to be dropped, not making it into the final Shuttle design.

[1] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3873/1

[2] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3876/1

My understanding is the space shuttle was originally slated to have less cargo space but the airforce demanded more cargo space for reasons they never fully elaborated on. It was speculated they might’ve wanted their own vehicle to capture satellites or launch a space weapon. So the Soviet Union’s paranoia did have some justification. With that said, at least as far as we know, the space shuttle was never used for such things.

> With that said, at least as far as we know, the space shuttle was never used for such things.

There were a number of classified space shuttle activities.

For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-C

The actual weapon issue came from the wings. They were far too big. They were designed for a massive cross-range, such as a single surprise overflight then return to the launch center rather than risk overflying the target twice. That looked very much like a weapons delivery profile.

The cargo retrieval potential was also suspect. Nukes are the one thing that could never be de-orbited into the atmosphere. Shuttle looked like something that could enable nuke weaponry in orbit.

In particular, the Space Shuttle looked like it could nuke Moscow from the south where there weren't any early warning radars pointed.

I mean isn't the B in ICBM for ballistic reentry, that's probably about as fast a deorbit from the height of the space station as you would get?

A nuke warhead can certainly be made to survive reentry, but that isn't the same as safely bringing one back for maintenance.

Actually, intercontinental suborbital trajectories get even higher than the space station. The space station is only 400 km up.

Newer ICBMs are actually orbital, so they don't have to go so high and thus be visible over the horizon to radar. But they obviously deorbit after less than half an orbit. It also enables them to get to the target in much, much less time.

The cross range capability was supposedly also intended for military reconnaissance missions. Back then film cameras were still used. So they wanted to be able to launch from California into a polar orbit, make a single pass over the USSR, and land back at the launch site for immediate film processing. Of course they never actually flew such a mission.

It's kind of an open secret that the space shuttle payload bay dimensions were specified to fit the satellites the NRO used[1]. Similarly, the Hubble Space Telescope is widely acknowledged to be based on the KH-11 Kennen, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is unused NRO hardware from the Future Imagery Architecture[2]

1 https://mashable.com/article/nasa-space-shuttle-secret-spy-s...

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

in the 1980s Reagan's defense department executed a series of (still classified) missions using an all-military crew taking the shuttle to the moon known as Project Athena.

Gonna have to ask for a source on that one.

I think this was the crew with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.

Dude, the Space Shuttle totally had enough delta v to get to the moon. If you don't believe me, why don't you ask Louie Armstrong yourself? /s (I know the xkcd I'm ripping of says Lance Armstrong, but I like the idea of a jazz musician on the moon better than the idea of a troubled athlete.)

That may be the case, but still keen for a source referencing that particular usage…

I think you missed the "/s". There's no way the Space Shuttle Launch System has enough delta v to reach the moon. For one, the need the IUS or another booster on satellites released by the Space Shuttle that need to make it to geosynchronous orbit, which is still significantly less delta v than a translunar orbit.

they rendezvoused with a separately launched fuel supply while in earth orbit

Did they visit the secret Nazi base on the Far Side of the Moon? /s

> the airforce demanded more cargo space for reasons they never fully elaborated on

I have read in several places that one of the USAF's requests, re the dimensions of the Shuttle's Cargo Bay, was that it be big enough to hold a Delta upper stage (I think technically called an Altair) and payload.

The idea was that the Shuttle would take the upper stage and payload to LEO, and then the Altair would boost it into GEO (or trans-lunar) orbit. No need to jettison a payload fairing.

Supposedly NASA eventually won and quashed the idea, since it involved putting a non-man-rated upper stage into the cargo bay of a manned craft. And as far as I know, nothing more powerful than some maneuvering rockets was ever carried in in the Cargo Bay.

It's almost certain the secret mission was to capture a satellite in a single orbit, that's the only reason for the wings to be so big, in addition to the cargo space. If you're in space for a long time, you can time your deorbit so that you're landing close to KSC, but in a single orbit Earth's rotation gets you about 20 degrees away, so you need good gliding and steering to get back. Scott Manley has a good video about this.

In fairness to the Soviets, a lot of the design of the Shuttle was constrained by requirements the Air Force put in for military purposes so that they'd contribute to the expense too. Except they backed out after the design was finalized.

Unless the real military objective was to bait the USSR to spend their resources on a fool’s errand!

Just like remote viewing on Mars

A good cop doesn't really know why he does anything.

That's because the Space Shuttle was supposed to carry out military missions too, and the USAF made lots of design requirements that made the Shuttle not really viable.

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