Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethagknight | Hacker News Reader

Its reasonable to build something that your competitor has, for which you have no use for today, but may need ASAP tomorrow for unforeseen reasons. In the case of a nuclear icebreaker, it may be rescuing stranded covert operatives or getting a certain ship with certain capabilities to a certain location.

View on HN

Especially with a potential war partner - if they have a capability you do not, even if you can't figure out a reason for that capability; the enemy may have and you'll need to be able to counter it.

That is apparently the reason the USSR made the Buran space shuttle. They couldn't figure out what the US needed that capability for. Turns out, we didn't either, at least for military applications.

Arguably the Buran was more advanced than the shuttle (it completed one solo flight, orbiting twice and auto-landing), but they never got a chance to do anything else with it.

Put a bunch of nukes in the cargo bay and you have a good idea what the shuttle could be used for.

Or you could just put nukes in missiles that can go in the ground, on planes, in artillery, on ships, or on submarines?

A space shuttle gives zero warning when it starts a bombing run. Which is why the USSR build one of their own.

The space shuttle could be used to steal satellites. I don't think it was ever used in this role or in the related role bringing any satellite back down but it was in the mission profile.

I wonder if there were any missions where a foreign spy satellite was captured inspected in orbit then sent on it's way?

My best guess for the continuing air force interest in a shuttle like platform (the x-37) is for exactly this reason. not bombs but satellite capture.

Spy satellites are usually in very high inclination orbits, particularly polar orbits, so they can sweep out different parts of the earth as the earth rotates under them. From what I understand the Shuttle's very large wings were meant to give it a sufficient glide ratio / cross-range capability to reach a landing strip when returning from a polar orbit, where most spy satellites would be. But the Shuttle was never sent into a polar orbit, so it's safe to assume that sort of mission was never performed.

> Shuttle's very large wings

Surprisingly, the first result from the search returns [0]

[0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/28243/could-space-...

Why would you need more range returning from a polar orbit? The point of a polar orbit is to make more land features available under the orbit. Shouldn't this give a more flexable deorbit profile?

edit, I actually read the posted message. The requirement was for a once around then land. so consider my question unasked. Salutes

Yep, once around then landing. I think they didn't want to hang around in orbit after doing something that sketchy. I think this sort of capability / mission profile spooked the Soviets; it seemed like a capability that would be useful to an orbital bomber.

> Turns out, we didn't either, at least for military applications

The military purposes for the Shuttle were primarily servicing and refuelling the KH-11 satellites and launching other NRO payloads that couldn't ride a normal launcher.

The cargo bay and cross-range landing performance specifications were derived from those mission requirements.

See Buran.

From the Soviet point of view the Space Shuttles were the largest and fastest first strike nuclear bombers ever created. With enough of them in orbit you just obsoleted all other nuclear delivery methods.

Just because something pretends to be a civilian craft doesn't mean it can't be repurposed into a military one in no time at all.

This. For example, the Brits had developed more efficient engine designs which they reused in Spitfire which Germany didn't have because they were barred from competing in seaplane races https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Trophy

That sort of thinking helped bankrupt the Soviet Union into oblivion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com