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Comment by daveslash | Hacker News Reader

The potential Military applications of the Space Shuttle were why the Soviets copied it so closely. They didn't know why or what clandestine military purpose the shuttle had, but they knew that when they found out, they'd want the same capabilities. So they just copied it, not knowing why.

"Faced with the poorly understood threat of a military space shuttle, the Soviets decided that copying the American spacecraft exactly was the best bet. The logic was simple: if the Americans were planning something that needed a vehicle that big, the Soviets ought to build one as well and be ready to match their adversary even if they didn’t know exactly what they were matching." [0] [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6428205

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131001110918/http://arstechnic...

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Buran was radically different - no internal rockets, just jets. Unmanned optionally.

The most interesting thing is that the launcher (Energina) was actually also used to launch a space battlestation.

No - I am not kidding.

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

The fun part about the polyus is due to something being mounted backwards, or software error, it did a backflip immediately after being released from its booster, thrusted retrograde and deorbited itself. It was supposed to burn prograde. Oops.

This was very probable for so brave new program.

- Energia, unlike most other Soviet rockets, only launch to suborbital trajectory (perigee under sea level), so payload have to add few hundreds m/s speed by its own engines to stay on more or less stable circular orbit, and have only few minutes to do this.

Development of Polyus was not careful enough, to make this operation reliable, because on all previous Soviet rockets top stage launched to payload target orbit.

Buran was born dead, because it was so expensive, eats all money from programs it could launch.

Examples, Soviets planning space telescope like Hubble; martian sample return; long-duration heavy Venus rover.

Unfortunately, Soviet non-market economy was about 4-5 times smaller than US, so US have money for Shuttle payloads, but Soviets don't have.

BTW, Buran was by design much more expensive than Shuttle.

Because non-reusable parts of Shuttle where cheap SRB's and fuel tank, but expensive LOH-LOX engines saved. On each launch of Buran sacrificed equivalent to three Zenith rockets (essentially, Energia was unificated with Zenith, side boosters where very similar to Zenith 1st stage, and central block was Hydrogen, but costs similar).

> They didn't know why or what clandestine military purpose the shuttle had, but they knew that when they found out, they'd want the same capabilities. So they just copied it, not knowing why.

This is the exact same thing that's happened with the Chinese and the X-37B:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2022/08/22/mysterious-...

A specific case of the general idea of superpower convergence.

"...the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap." — AdS (fict)

"This is preposterous! I never approved of anything like that!" ~ PM (fict)

"Our source was The New York Times." ~ AdS (fict)

This movie was too clever for it's time.

> The potential Military applications of the Space Shuttle were why the Soviets copied it so closely

It was just impossible for soviets, to copy STS.

First, they just don't have (still) anything similar to Tiocol enterprise, and can't build huge SRB's.

Second, soviets have huge weakness in electronics and computers, so they just don't have payloads for such system.

So Buran was pure political decision, without any rational foundations.

Unfortunately for Russians, this is typical for their culture, to make something enormous and than thinking, what to do with it.

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