The life and death of Buran, the USSR shuttle built on faulty assumptions
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or $60,000/kg (approximately $27,000 per pound) to LEO. This should be contrasted with the originally envisioned costs of $118 per kilogram (approximately $53 per pound) of payload in 1972 dollars ($1,400/kg, [approximately $630 per pound] adjusting for inflation to 2011)
> The launch rate was significantly lower than initially expected. While not reducing absolute operating costs, more launches per year gives a lower cost per launch. Some early hypothetical studies examined 55 launches per year (see above), but the maximum possible launch rate was limited to 24 per year based on manufacturing capacity of the Michoud facility that constructs the external tank. Early in shuttle development, the expected launch rate was about 12 per year. Launch rates reached a peak of 9 per year in 1985 but averaged fewer thereafter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_...
They were right about the Space Shuttle and the US military too; much of the design of the Space Shuttle was influenced (compromised) by the DoD so that the Shuttle would be able to get into polar orbits for military missions (such as launching US spy satellites, and stealing Soviet spy satellites). These design requirements forced them to design a shuttle with dimensions that were not optimized for the missions the shuttle ultimately carried out.
One of the problems with the ultimate design is that the Shuttle stack relied in part on the SSMEs to get into orbit. This meant that the fuel tank/SRBs were worthless for anything other than getting the Shuttle into orbit, while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).
As for the Russians "ripping off" the Shuttle, I think the Encyclopedia Astronautica article for the Energia engines is interesting: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd0120.htm
In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.
> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).
The engines used for its boosters, however, are used in modified form in the Zenit (RD-171, like RD-170 with extra axis of movement) and Atlas V (RD-180; size-reduced version) rockets, and will be used in Angara.
They were reused and were extremely efficient with a much higher unit cost than the equivalent energia stack main engine. The Soviets intended to design a carrier shuttle with reusable engines just like the US Shuttle but abandoned the effort due to reliability concerns.
That is the whole point of the space shuttle design in any case. If you can't reuse very powerful main engines that can be made to be very efficient there is no point in using a shuttle-truck design in the first place.
> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).
The energia was suboptimal for launching very large items due to its requirement that payloads have to carried on the side. This increases the weight due to atmospheric shielding that cannot be jettisoned and, more importantly, means a third stage cannot be used for efficiency. Every payload also has to be able to deploy itself into the correct orbit which requires custom development for each launch payload. So while energia was powerful it was very expensive as a standalone launch platform and never would have seen much use and consequently was never seriously considered as a future development platform.
The soviets would have done better just to develop a lh2/lox successor to the failed n1 rocket in the first place; especially if they didn't think the shuttle was going to be economical. Instead, they developed a sub-optimal launch vehicle that was itself based on a flawed concept and they had every intention of running the program out to the year 2000 even with a handful of launches scheduled and development costs that were already higher than the US shuttle.
Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to work with if you want a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was really only nominally reusable, the engines had to practically be rebuilt every time to make sure everything was alright (the SRBs were hardly any better, though at least they were simpler.) (Really, hydrogen is just a pain in the ass in general though. It isn't very dense and needs to be kept much cooler than LOX to boot (requiring all that foam on the external tanks), which is why the Shuttle external tank had to be so goddamn big. The massive efficiency of LOX/LH2 are somewhat mitigated by these factors.)
If SpaceX can get their F9R working well, that will likely be the first properly reusable rocket (first stage anyway). Those will burn RP-1 which won't suffer from hydrogen embrittlement.
The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they discontinued Energia). Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.
>>The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they discontinued Energia).
I have to disagree with this. The soviets began developing LH2/LOX technologies immediately after the N1 failure for the same reason that the Saturn V used LH2/LOX as an upper stage fuel: it is hard to make the math work for massive rockets that only consume RP-1. The weight penalty on the upper stages is just too large to be cost effective. You might as well pay the cost of LH2/LOX development if you intend to launch super heavy payloads.
>>Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.
If the criteria for deciding between SLS/Buran-Energia is which one can launch the most payload then, yes, you would choose Energia. This wasn't an intended benefit of Energia and was simply due to reliability concerns about reusing rocket engines(especially with fuel sources that the Soviets didn't have experience with).
It is hard to evaluate the cost of reusing Energia technology and developing a new booster that would be more optimal going forward. If the Soviets had the money and the political foresight to cancel Buran they might have been able to do it and use Soyuz and Energia together.
No, that's not what happened. Post-Perestroika economy collapse and massive inflation happened. The R&D funding crashed to absolute zero across all domains and Buran was just one of the casualties.
From wikipedia:
Commenting on the discontinuation of the program in his interview to New Scientist, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov confirms their accounts: "We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed. It was originally designed as a military system for weapon delivery, maybe even nuclear weapons. The American shuttle also has military uses.[5]"
Its not like everything stopped in the early 90s; they continued to run Progress and Soyuz missions.
Wow, now that you say it that seems logical that the shuttle could steal a satellite, but did that ever happen? I'm really hoping for some cool declassified stories from one/both sides of such a mission. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
I don't think it is enough to make it popular, but it is nevertheless an interesting niche. There is a small community still building and exploring it.
There is a DRAKON editor, with target languages like Javascript, Erlang, C++ and others. Here is the DRAKON editor program:
http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/
EDIT: (adding some interesting translated tid bits from Parondjanov's writings)
If you happen to speak Russian it is also quite an interesting read to go over author's (Parondjanov) writing on programming in general:
http://drakon.pbworks.com/w/page/18205516/FrontPage
He talks about visual programming languages. He defines provocative terms like "intellectual terrorism" and how information overload (he calls it "information stress") is akin to terrorism for the minds of workers tasked to tease out the solution to the problem. It often stems from an impedance mismatched between old methods of solving problems and processing information and the new type and amount of information available. Mind you this was written in the 80's before big data. His environment was building tools to write the avionics system for Buran. Many of the engineers involved were not computer scientists, there were mechanical, chemical, airspace engineers. He was probably wondering how to get them to program better and how to make the whole process more efficient and less stressful for them.
modern scripting languages make iterating software much simpler. however, there are times when i feel having a drag and drop gui such as this to assemble complex operations would be really helpful. i know of modeling tools such as UML are used in the planning phase. but wouldn't it make sense to have a high level overview of your software? is there anything like this for python, javascript, or ruby?
For a much longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
The fascinating thing about Buran is that the Shuttle was built with a really very bizarre set of functional requirements that imposed steep demands on the design of the vehicle but which turned out to be mostly useless in a practical sense and were not actually meaningfully used during the lifetime of the vehicle. For example, the large wings on the Shuttle give it a very high cross-range flight capability during re-entry, but that was only a requirement because it was thought that the Shuttle would perform a particular kind of military mission. A polar launch which would deploy a satellite, or perform other activities, in one orbit and return to the launch site. Such missions never materialized, and such missions were unlikely to be valuable to the Soviets at all. And yet that requirement dictated the size of the wings which forced the frame to be larger and heavier, which reduced the payload, and which created a larger area that needed thermal protection (an issue which contributed to the loss of Columbia, for example), and so forth. A clean sheet design without such a requirement should have had much smaller wings and thus be a more capable and more reliable design, but Buran copied the Shuttle too closely and ended up with all of the faults of the Shuttle design without a good reason for them.
If you look at the Soviet manned spaceflight missions things are very much different though. Around half of the "Salyut" space stations were actually military "Almaz" stations (Salyut 2, 3, and 5), at least one of which was armed with a fully automatic cannon designed to engage other spacecraft. The Soviets also pioneered the development of anti-satellite systems starting in the 1960s, long before the US had even started an anti-satellite program. The kicker is "Polyus", the first payload of the Energia launcher, it was an 80 ton orbital warship. It was a prototype designed around the missions of anti-satellite/anti-spacecraft warfare and laying nuclear "mines" in space (in contravention of the Outer Space Treaty, of course). Polyus itself did not contain mines though it did contain a set of test targets and a 1 megawatt laser. But Polyus failed to achieve orbit due to a glitch during the launch.
As far as exploration, the US has contributed more to interplanetary exploration than any other nation or group of nations. It has sent more successful missions to other planets and been the only nation to send probes into interstellar space. Excluding spending on ground-based ballistic missile defense the total spending on "Star Wars" is less than the cost of Apollo, ISS, or even NASA's fleet of space telescopes.
I think Apollo trumps Mir/Salyut/Almaz, and I think Voyager 2 alone trumps the entire Soviet unmanned space program, even the Venera missions. As does COBE, for that matter.
Edit: which is to say, that while the Soviets may have made impressive contributions to science in the form of the peaceful exploration of space the idea that their contributions outclassed those of the US is simply preposterous.
And as far as Russia being about research and the US being about militarizing space (which you seem to suggest upthread), I'd remind you that the Russians (as far as I know) were the only country to arm one of their space stations and test fire the weapon[1]: To suggest that either the US or Russia weren't keenly interested in using space as leverage against the other, as well as in scientific exploration, is probably not taking the entire picture into consideration.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz
... and yes, having more than one space station puts a check in the Russian column.
But on the bright side we did prove that telepathy doesn't work on the moon at all.
Meh, the Soviets sent all kinds of robots to the moon. Orbiters, landers that made pictures, moon rovers, three robots that sampled soil and returned it to earth... Not too shabby I'd say.
That doesn't discount Soviet prowess in technological innovation, but it's still very much the truth.
As I mentioned, the Buran has many close similarities to the Shuttle. It has many differences as well but the shocking thing about the similarities is that they don't make any sense except in regards to attempting to copy the Shuttle.
Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know that the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as possible.
Buran was copied in shape and in overall capabilites, once on orbit, for the reasons mentioned. Buran wasn't copied both internally and on the launcher side - so we might say Buran copied some things, but had others originally developed.
Soviets were great copiers, in many areas - and in many others there weren't where to copy from. They had to develop great many things themselves.
There's a lot of work prior to first flight.
I won't say Concord was copied from Tu-144. Similarly, I wouldn't say soviet electronics was just a rip-off; there were enough original works even outside of the relatively well known BESM-6 project. Even to copy chips in 1980-s it takes you to have the necessary technology for reverse engineering - something I doubt any country ever had on that scale, at least at the time.
Again, you have to know a lot to have use of plans like that - especially when the design is a moving target.
Pretty much any documentary on the tu144 will explain all this in great detail. YouTube it!
The major similarity is the physical configuration of the orbiter, no? This was, indeed, a deliberate copy; cut down on the aerodynamic testing required. Most other details of the system were really quite different (particularly the engines; outboard solid fuel and internal reusable hydrogen for the shuttle, with a separate tank, outboard kerosene and external expendable (though with reusable designs studied for a future upgrade) hydrogen for Buran).
> Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know that the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as possible.
There isn't really that much of that going on in Buran. Again, the booster engines are an obvious example; the US had largely abandoned building efficient kerosene engines (they're very expensive to develop) by the time of the shuttle programme.
That doesn't mean that the choice wasn't analyzed and justified, not that aerodynamic testing wasn't done - for examples, picture here - http://buran.ru/htm/history.htm - show the evolution of the overall architecture, where the Shuttle scheme was just one of the considered factors.
They would be stupid not to? Why spend billions of dollars on research when you can spend $100k to pay off a defector or a mole. It just makes more economic sense.
All the rest is pretty well explained in the article.
Its one thing to drop an unmanned capsule into the ocean, quite another to land it on a runway. Of course, drones do it all the time these days. But this was 27 years ago.
Passenger aircraft definitely don't auto takeoff and don't really use auto land. See http://www.boston.com/community/blogs/askthepilot/2013/03/th... and http://www.askthepilot.com/cockpit-claptrap/
UAV - Uninhabited Air Vehicle - no "man in the can"
UAV - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle - same
RPV - Remotely Piloted Vehicle - we still have pilots!
drone - military: target, towed or on auto-pilot
drone - media: mindless non-human automaton
From the description of Buran's flight, it sounds like a mostly pre-programmed auto-pilot from de-orbit to landing. The technology is impressive for the late 1980s, no matter what it is called.
For instance, the X-47B is designed to perform such delicate maneuvers as taking off from and landing on aircraft carriers and performing in-flight refueling automatically.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/x47b/
It has a wearable remote control for carrier crews to use to direct it while on deck.
I just walked through this Buran model a few months ago at the Technikmuseum in Speyer, Germany. It's really there.
(not my video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8tNp4bldzQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI
(BTW: living in Speyer is very cool for tech-freaks: every once in while, they bring in a new plane, or a submarine...)
And yeah, the Speyer museums are totally amazing. What they did to that B747 just blew my mind.
Please check these figures. Whatever measure of inflation i try i can't see 12x inflation from 1972 to 2011. It was more like 4x.
Launch rate - correct, problem was Air Force which first dictated the oversized payload capacity and even more oversized payload bay dimensions, and a huge cross-range capability (to enable single-orbit missions), resulting in a system too big and expensive for anything else, then pulling out resulting in vastly lower launch rates. So Shuttle was commercially doomed long before its first flight. U.S. would be better off flying it a few times to prove it works, then getting back to drawing board to design something fitting the market better. Reusable launch systems have been, and still are, realistic, it's only epic fail of Shuttle which make it look too toxic to anyone to try (just like failure of GM EV1 delayed electric car revolution for a decade - nobody dared to try, engineering and business failure of a particular project was mistaken for the whole idea being bad).
No other country has replicated the oxidizer rich staged combustion used in these high thrust efficient lox-kerosene engines. The materials technology is especially challenging because of the high temperature oxidizing gases in the turbine. For example SpaceX's Merlin gas generator engines look decidedly fifties compared to these.
The RD-0120 hydrogen engines on the base of the hydrogen tank were quite a feat as well, a Russian SSME. That technology was abandoned. The European Space Agency did some tests with RD-0120 back in the day.
(The article got the name of the booster engines wrong.)