Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome | Hacker News Reader

Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome

ralphmirebs.livejournal.com

397 pointsjpatokal119 comments

On reading up, "finding" isn't quite accurate, as the locations of these two shuttles were perfectly well known. They're OK-1K2 and OK-4M on Wikipedia's list below, located in MZK building 80, area 112a, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme#Buran-class_sp...

However, obviously sneaking in to take pictures is not an everyday occurrence, it's still a Russian military base and parts of the site remain in active use for the Russian space program.

It's perfectly possible the photographer had no idea of what he would find. Not everyone knows where the Soviet shuttles are. It's still a find, if not a discovery. No pun intended.

from the writeup it seems to me like the photographer had researched and knew what to expect. He never claims to have discovered anything.

Well. Then the title is incorrect.

You can 'find' things by research too. If the photographer set out to find and photo the Buran, and started by googling, then that's still 'finding'?

He not only managed to sneak inside the base, he apparently made it into the shuttle itself. If the last photo is a picture of him, he's dressed in military clothing, so maybe he just blended in and no one bothered to check him.

Very interesting because he's wearing what look like US Marine Corps MARPAT camouflage...which is distinctly non-Russian. There are a lot of them floating around in that part of the world that were smuggled out of Iraq and Afghanistan though.

http://battlerattle.marinecorpstimes.com/wp-content/uploads/...

I think this web site is a non-original content. I remember reading the exact same sequence of photos in English a few months ago. I think some Western journalist/enthusiast managed to get the access to this hangar and he posted the original story. These guys just picked up the content and re-posted it. Notice copyright on the pictures to Ralph Mirebs. Maybe he was there with his Marine friend?

I'm sure it's not impossible to come to an arrangement with the locals to go and have a look at the shuttles.

Well, you can pay to go on Baikonour tours. 10k around launch times, cheaper when its not a launch time.

I'm sure if you're got that type of cash to drop - dropping a few more k to see the Buran isn't an issue

Or you can sneak in. It's in the middle of nowhere.

I think being able to walk away from a project like this is actually quite commendable, in a way. Not that it's always the right call, but to be able to avoid the 'sunk cost fallacy'[1] on this scale is something that large governments/companies seem rarely capable of. That said, in this case, maybe they just didn't have a choice and ran out of money...

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

I agreed. I have thought the same thing about the Superconducting Super Collider. Imagine the thoughts on the people that had to walk away from these projects.

Anecdotes & analysis of the psychology of "just walk away" under such scale & conditions would be fascinating.

Prior company I worked for was next to another business that "just walked away": seems everyone at the vaccine supply company literally just up & left one day all at once, leaving everything including lunches behind.

> I think being able to walk away from a project like this is actually quite commendable, in a way.

Oddly enough, this is much easier to do without a democracy. It was not what happened there (it was the Soviet Union's collapse that did it) but the reasoning stands.

Well put - centralized decision-making with a minimum of public interest groups does tend to speed things up. But yeah, it was their utter economic collapse that caused this particular case.

Well they did keep their Soyuz and other space programs. I think even the wasteful Socialist bureaucrats realized this is not a project worth pursuing.

It was built, most likely, to replicate the American capability of launching, stealing a satellite and returning within a single orbit (hence the cargo bay the size of a Hubble/Keyhole and the enormous wings). Since the Energia was a stand-alone heavy launcher (that didn't rely on shuttle engines), that they had a whole fleet of lighter launchers and the Soyuz/Progress were excellent for carrying astronauts and cargo to LEO, the only mission for which the Buran was indispensable was stealing American spy satellites.

That's a very narrow niche for a very expensive spaceplane.

There was also the appeal of having a reusable spacecraft. The Buran's similarities to the Space Shuttle are no coincidence; the Soviets weren't about to let the United States have the coolest spaceship ever, so they had to build one that was cooler.

And by God was the Buran cooler.

Robert Gates killed a couple of large-budget defense projects while Secretary of Defense. The airborne laser which had "16 years of development and a cost of over $5 billion"[1] was cancelled in 2010 under his watch.

Quoting from Wikipedia, sorry:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

Sounds like it wouldn't have done anything useful, especially compared to other missile defense strategies like SM-3 deployments.

"If the ABL had achieved its design goals, it could have destroyed liquid-fueled ICBMs up to 600 km away. Tougher solid-fueled ICBM destruction range would likely have been limited to 300 km, too short to be useful in many scenarios, according to a 2003 report by the American Physical Society on National Missile Defense."

I worked for General Dynamics on the A-12 Avenger II program[1] that was cancelled by Dick Cheney. Even when the Navy threatened to cancel the project, a lot of people thought they would never do it because so much money had been spent on it. However, the end of the Cold War, some technical problems, and the need to rebuild political capital after the Gulf War all contributed to it being cancelled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_A-12_Avenger...

Wow, I've never heard of that plane. Its gorgeous. I guess the B-2 took its place a few years later.

The tip-up wings are wild, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_A-12_Avenger...

History spirals. This is an objective process, repeated over and over again. You can regret for the lost time and to mourn about the past greatness, but the facts remain above this - Russia is rapidly losing its status as a leading space power. For more than twenty years, the country does not produce anything new in principle, continuing to exploit the legacy of the Soviet Union. Only lead the modernization of the old backlog, but otherwise everything is just words on paper and projects. Sure, notable past will allow to stay afloat even a decade or two in the role of a space cab, but only as long as the Chinese missiles are not overstep its proper boundary changes and hurl prices on the conclusion of cargo into orbit. From Space romance gone, leaving her only dry figures of financial statistics. Why spend billions on the space, if it does not bring profit for the foreseeable future? In times of confrontation of political systems, the race between the two superpowers has a beneficial effect on the scientific and technical progress. The possible use of military and ideological gave rise to dozens of various projects. Yes, most of them did not go beyond the drawings and models, but the ones that leaked through the sieve test and commissions received unlimited support. The future of the Soviet reusable orbiters not been predetermined even before birth. Despite the huge financial loss ratio of such starts, they can hold out for long on the world stage, giving the vector for future horizons. And to finish my article I want to play on the title and epigraph. Rise My God! From ashes rise! Awake, my God! Rise from the ashes!

I assume you are photographer?

If yes, would you share how you got inside? What arrangements were needed? I am curious!

Also, thank you for these pictures. Despite what happens politically (projects die, or supported to success), it is inspiring to think about how many people worked on this project. All that effort... as it is now. :(

It is only fair their work gets viewed and known!

PS: I assume English is not your first language. Hopefully my sentences were understandable. Your English is still much better than my (zero) Russian (assuming). :)

PPS: Before someone mentions it, yes, I am aware there were charges thrown around of technology copying in the Buran program. Whether or not those have any truth, they obviously weren't handed "shuttle in a box" plans. Imho, it's still nice to appreciate all the work that was put into something that never flew into space.*

Edit: I stand corrected. As others mentioned, it launched and performed two orbits without a crew before successfully returning in November of '88. Impressive! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme#Orbital_flight...

Putin just cut the space program by a third. Russia is becoming a bit player in space and has no ability to compete with what NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing are building now. The Soyuz work-mule as a LEO transport is pretty much it for them for the forseeable future and with the ISS retirement, it won't have anywhere to go.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/27/news/economy/russia-space-cr...

Or top of corrupt autocrats stealing $2billion from the space program:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/25/technology/russia-space-corr...

and all his recent rocket failures. They cant get those proton-m and briz's to stop blowing up:

http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/pages/images/stories/List%2...

http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/05/16/proton-crash-deals-anot...

Fun fact: Buran was the first fully automated space shuttle. It did a complete flight cycle without human intervention. I believe our space shuttle could that that too eventually but not at the time.

Even funner fact: There is a remnant of software that powered that shuttle still around. In the form of a visual programming language DRAKON (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON)

The STS was purposely designed not to do that due to political reasons, pilots didnt want to feel like they were passangers, emergency restrictions, etc. Eventually those restrictions were lifted and was fully autonomous at a certain point, I don't remember which models have the full autonomy suite, but the capabilities varied as these things were built out.

Considering the Buran has never put a person into space, its still fair to call it an experimental and a failed project. The STS was doing all these things and more. Its an interesting bit of Soviet trivia, but all the attention it gets on the internet is fairly amusing for whats essentially the poster-boy in mismanaging a spacecraft project and what essentially became a Soviet "make work" jobs program, as the higher-ups knew early on that this thing would never be put into production due to a variety of factors including cost and technical issues.

I find it interesting that these things haven't been turned into scrap yet. There's something to be said about how overly prideful and nostalgic Russians are about the USSR. I think Putin put one of the Burans indoors after it was discovered to be sitting out amongst the elements. Most governments would just recycle failed capital projects. Unless they're bringing this thing back, it seems weird to have it sitting around in various corners of their launch complex.

STS was never fully automated, they would have needed to install a temporary cable that allowed the landing gear to be automatically deployed.

It looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-3xx has details on this cable, referred to as the Remote Control Orbiter (RCO) in-flight maintenance (IFM) cable.

The STS was fully automated. There was a political decision to allow landing gear be option-only via a cable that wasn't installed by default, but kept in the cargo area. I don't recall all the reasons why, a lot of it had to do with shuttle pilots not liking they are not actually piloting and the concern that full automation means they now they have a commander and pilot with zero non-simulator flight experience. Or heaven forbid a bug that opened the chute or landing gear too early or too late (although this seems unlikely and fear mongering by those who prefer manual control).

In scenarios where the shuttle was damaged in space, the cable would be deployed and NASA could fly it home safely via remote while the crew stayed in the ISS. In normal scenarios the landing was done by pilot or commander. So yes, NASA had these capabilities and for a long time, it just chose not to use them outside of certain scenarios. Considering the Buran never carried a person to space, its unknown whether they would have gone the NASA approach or gone full automation once in production. The nice thing of having a system that never worked is that you can fantasize about how its better than everything because it never had to get out there and actually launch human beings safely.

Frankly, its pretty dishonest to say the Buran had automation that the Shuttle lacked. That's like saying my computer can't play 3D video games because all I ever do is 2D. I just choose not to.

> The STS was doing all these things and more.

Ok but if Buran failed didn't STS fail too, just took more money and killed more people? No current space vehicles are based on it. It was too big. Too expensive. Too failure prone (it killed a lot more astronauts than Soyuz even though Soyuz is older). Once the concept was proven, after a few space walks, maybe fixing Hubble, it was time to realize it was a bad idea scrape it. Which eventually happened.

Otherwise if you say, "Ok" it was for research, well so was Buran it was research and jobs program. They showed they could build a space plane just like Americans. Cold War was full of such "we can do it too" feats. Some advanced science and engineering some didn't.

> poster-boy in mismanaging a spacecraft project and what essentially became a Soviet "make work" jobs program

Yes but by that token they can still laugh at us for mismanaging it longer and making it into an even more glorified jobs program.

> I find it interesting that these things haven't been turned into scrap yet.

It is not that surprising. Not sure how much nostalgia plays into but it is probably too expensive and cumbersome to go and start tearing the building and the spacecraft apart.

>it killed a lot more astronauts than Soyuz even though Soyuz is older)

The Soviet space program killed 200+ people. I think you USSR die-hards need to stop making excuses and accept history. Safety is not one of your strong suites.

"Nedelin pressured Yangel and the rest of the R-16 team to accelerate their timetable. They did this primarily by ignoring all of the quite sensible safety measures in effect at the time."

http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-disasters/nedelin-c...

Um what? If you look at the actual fatality lists [0], more than three times as many astronauts died than cosmonauts during actual missions (that ratio is much higher if test/training deaths - like that of the Apollo 1 crew - are included). In neither case is the number anywhere near the hundreds.

I don't know the details on ground crew deaths (if that's what you're actually referring to), in which case Soviet recklessness wouldn't be exactly surprising, and you're probably entirely right. I don't think that's what the parent commenter's talking about, though.

Yes, I consider ground crew just as valid human beings as those who go into space. The Soviet program was a dangerous mess that killed a lot of people through purposeful mismanagement. If someone wants to argue safety or mortality rates then ground crews must be part of that argument. A lot of people died in the Nedelin catastrophe, which the USSR covered up until 1989, and now we must acknowledged their sacrifices and place blame on Russian leadership.

> it killed a lot more astronauts than Soyuz even though Soyuz is older

That's only because Soyuz has a smaller crew capacity. Both Soyuz and STS have had the same number of catastrophic failures (Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 on the Soyuz side; Challenger and Columbia on the STS side).

Neat fun fact: Soyuz 11 also has the distinction of being the cause of the only in-space human fatalities (all other spaceflight-related fatalities occurred either during launch or during reentry).

> didn't STS fail too

Ha. If you can look at the images from the Hubble space telescope and call the STS a failure, thats some pretty extreme cognitive dissonance.

I approve of DRAKON's sample lunch-eating algorithm. [0] Now, if someone catches me at the local burger joint slamming down dozens of burgers, I can just say that my programming allows for it.

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Lunch_DR...

The beauty of these pictures reminded me of urban decay photography and Wabi-Sabi. Also made me think of bit rot. I thought that if those spaceships were Software, maybe they would still be flying around, rot and decay included.

For the geeks... Buran had prolog code in its brain and could land on its own...in the 80s!!!

"It was the first space shuttle to perform an unmanned flight, including landing in fully automatic mode."

"[...] despite a lateral wind speed of 61.2 kilometres per hour (38.0 mph), it landed only 3 metres (9.8 ft) laterally and 10 metres (33 ft) longitudinally from the target mark."

That sounds pretty impressive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_%28spacecraft%29

This is the CIA document that noted that (May 1990): http://web.archive.org/web/20120611225718/http://www.foia.ci...

Notably, it also stated:

  The telecommunications deficiency is a particularly serious 
  problem for the Soviets. The USSR lacks the type of extensive, 
  serviceable, open-access, civil telecommunications infrastructure
  has proved to be an essential ingredient in the U.S. software
  industry's capability to support the needs of software uses an 
  all sectors of the U.S. economy technologies critical to the U.S. 
  Industries lead include wide area networks such as INTERNET, 
  TYMNET and TELENET accessible to most software developers in the 
  United States; equally important are the local area networks used 
  to connect software development teams distributed in different 
  locations within large buildings or among several facilities 
  within a large industrial park.

This is a fascinating insight into the projected future, although of the three, it was the INTERNET that hang around and turned the world on its head!

TYMNET by the way is noted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet

The STS could land on its own too, but due to political and safety concerns this functionality was disabled by default. In scenarios where a damaged shuttle was in space, the crew would board the ISS and turn on this functionality via a cable that connected the computer to the landing gear. Once that was set, NASA could fly it home remotely.

The Buran never carried a person into space and Soviet space management never had to make the decision to enable this while pilots sat in the cockpit. I think they would have been under the same pressure as NASA and allowed them to fly and not use full automation outside of emergencies.

This is cool, but if you compare the landing footage from STS-1 and Buran, the Buran landing looks decidedly squirrelly, I'm not sure I would want to be on that ride. On the other hand, John Young waxed the first STS landing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnnTFJ1BcHw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPexsehcMhw

They do say there was a bad crosswind, but really I think a spaceplane should be able to avoid bad weather.

Actually, the Russians developed a completely different programming language Prolog and Prol2 that had nothing to do with the French Prolog. It just happened to have the same name.

Source: http://forum.oberoncore.ru/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=4111

For people wanting to go see a Buran, there's a prototype on display in a museum in (SW) Germany.

http://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran

This reminds me of the cancelled Superconducting Super Collider in Texas.

The argument to keep building it was they'd already invested billions and it would cost millions of dollars to stop building it.

I guess that cost would have been from contract guarantees to the builders or something.

Looks like when the Soviets stop building something they just walk away.

I'd put it the other way: they stopped building because the Soviet Union walked away.

The first Buran test flight was on November 15, 1988. Literally the next day (November 16), the Estonian SSR basically declared sovereignty by saying its laws would precede those of the USSR, and the house of cards started collapsing.

>> Looks like when the Soviets stop building something they just walk away.

According to Wikipedia [1] the Buran-program was cancelled when the Soviet Union stopped existing. It was a time of chaos and many parts of the country were not working. Resuming construction on a space shuttle was probably at the very bottom of their priorities in 1990.

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

The arguments to keep building it were almost as stupid as the arguments to stop building it.

I recall hateful accusations of "mismanagement" that boiled down to supplying liquor at a Christmas party. Drunk physicists... the horror. Oh, and the fact that our contribution to the ISS had roughly the same cost estimate meant... for some reason, that it was prudent to choose between to the two.

Oh, man. The argument to keep building it was that we would have had (in some senses) better knowledge of particle physics in the 90s than what we're currently waiting for from the LHC.

I'm too young to have been part of the physics community at the time, but talking about the SSC can still elicit winces and melancholy today. I'm sure it was over budget; I suspect that most big government projects are. (I've heard people talking about the SSC say that that was standard: that an expectation of overruns was essentially built into the system on all big projects, from the scientists all the way up to Congress.)

It may interest / surprise you to know that the russians were also building / built a super collider near moscow.

It was / is huge. 27KM from memory. It blew over budget, because less relevant, and closed. There is a mini collider that is active in one of its 'corners'.

Today, it's empty, and a little bit flooded. They keep pumps on to keep the water out, but the place is, essentially, ruined.

http://ninjito.com/2008-08-24

Business Insider has a partial translation of most of the captions: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/photos-of-russian-abandone...

This was in the news a few weeks back, in mid June:

http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-russian-abandoned-s...

http://www.popsci.com/why-soviet-space-shuttle-was-left-rot

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/17/buran-soviet-space-...

My only thought is if this is a decommissioned facility, imagine all the steel that could be recycled and reused! With such a shortage of some metals around the world, I see places like this and wonder why nobody does a better job of reusing old steel like this.

What awesome machinery! There's something inexplicable beautiful about old decommissioned equipment.

Fascinating. Why wouldn't it have been scrapped for parts or at least the metal?

Probably because scrapping it would've cost a small fortune and what's left over just wouldn't be worth it.

In the UK you only have to leave something on the pavement and scrap metal hunters will come by and take it ... seems like there has to be a net gain to scrapping this much metal - if it were a ship then salvage companies would have had it already.

I'm surprised that they didn't post a guard there with clean up duty to at least keep it all from rusting in to the ground.

Wonder how much it would be to buy and whether you could get enough visitors to the "secret Russian space base" to make it pay.

I would definitely visit a "secret Russian space base"! Especially if it was inside a mountain! ;)

In many rust belt cities, any building that sits unprotected will be vandalized and stripped of any valuable metals. This is on a Russian military base so it's safe.

Scrap collectors on the street don't charge for their time. It would cost the Russian government more in wages and such to scrap the site than they would ever get back out of it.

That's why you would let some scrap collectors in and basically say to them: What would you pay me for this scrap if you have to haul it away yourself?

The location is very remote, and all of Baikonur remains a closed military zone leased to Russia. So unless the Russians themselves decide to strip it, nobody else can either.

https://goo.gl/maps/k34qZ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikonur_Cosmodrome#Russian_er...

If you let it get old enough, it will become more valuable as it is than as scrap.

Might be already. Probably not, but maybe.

I'd prefer to see them in museums.

Even unfinished spaceplanes are very interesting items.

This is actually much better than I expected. I thought all Burans were thought destroyed, with the last being that one that a building fell onto. It seems that one was the one that actually made a test flight, but there are other incomplete or test vehicles surviving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme#Fleet_status_a...

That's what I thought too. They belong in a museum.

How abandoned is the hangar? There are some other people in the photos, and no matter how isolated the area is, surely the nearest town or two has wandered into the giant complex up the road a few times.

Still, it's amazing that this is the sort of thing people can just potentially wander into. Really makes you want to go explore the world.

So, I just went back and played "Where's Waldo." Either I lost or you are mistaken. the only photos with people in them that I find are the 2 old photos from when the program was still active and the last one with the person who I assume is the photog.

Pretty damned abandoned. I've driven through Baikonour.

For background, it's literally a circle of land, 100km in diameter, in the middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan.

There is one road in, and one road out. From this road, the only trace of 'Baikonour' that you see is a small enclave bearing the same name on the side of the road.

We actually drove past it - it's that small. Inside this enclave (and it is - it's got huge concrete walls around it) - are the famous sputnik hotel, and various bits and pieces. But it's first and foremost a small town for people who live and support the program.

There are armed guards at the entrance - who don't let anyone in that's not a local, or doesn't have permission from ROSMOS.

North of this, is the actual launch / test zone. It's desert. From the road, you see nothing.

The advantage of this being: if something blows up, you just try again elsewhere. There are many abandoned launch pads / facilities in this zone.

The actual 'creeping in' - there are no physical fences keeping you out of the zone. If you've bothered to make the effort to get there, getting into the zone and the hangar itself wouldn't be too difficult at all.

And yes - go and explore the world. Kazakhstan is an amazing place. You wanna find desolation, you can find it there.

By the way, if you go through Baikonour, don't stop in the next town. The cops enjoy extorting cash :D

I've seen a Buran up close - a few years ago (I think in the early 2000s?) one of them was toured around as a static display. Quite impressive - they let you walk right through it. I believe it was the sub-orbital testing craft.

There is one in a museum in germany: http://speyer.technik-museum.de/de/spaceshuttle-buran It was used for the landing tests and is still in pretty good shape.

Great photos. Does anyone have details why soviets thought a carbon copy of the botched shuttle design was a good idea in the first place? Where the economics of the vehicle not so obvious back then?

According to Wikipedia, because they were concerned about military applications of the space shuttle and wanted to match the US's capabilities. Large payload capacity for launching orbital anti-missile lasers or diving to drop bombs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme#Programme_deve...

What do you mean botched shuttle design? They probably started copying its design from very early on.

One can hold the view that the design was affected by concerns that had little to do with the missions the vehicle actually performed and consequently locked human space exploration to low earth orbit for 30 years.

http://m.space.com/12166-space-shuttle-program-cost-promises...

Shuttle was locked to low earth orbit due to design reacting to concerns that were never realized. It was anything but cheap. It was ill suited as a vehicle of human space exploration.

It did lots of valuable things but it can be argued I understand that those things could have been achieved cheaper and better.

According to the book "Energiya-Buran, the Soviet Space Shuttle" by Bart Hendrickx and Bert Vis, they correctly noted that the stated reasons for the US space shuttle did not make any sense, so they assumed there must be some secret rational reason for building it:

> As TsNIIMash [Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building] director Yuriy Mozzhorin later said: "[The Space Shuttle] was introduced as a national program, aimed at 60 launches per year ... All this was very unusual: the mass they had been putting into orbit with their expendable rockets hadn't even reached 150 tons per year, and now they were planning to launch 1,770 tons per year. Nothing was being returned from space, and now they were planning to bring down 820 tons per year. This was not simple a program to develop some space system ... to lower transportation costs (they promised they would lower those costs tenfold, but the studies done at our institute showed that in actual fact there would be no cost savings at all). It clearly had a focused military goal".

As for what the secret military goal be, apparently the Soviet speculations was that either it might be part of some nuclear fractional-orbit bombardment system, or it might be part of a plan to launch lots of laser weapons into orbit. In any case, we can't have a space shuttle gap, so:

> [Central Committe Secretary for Defense Matters, Dmitri] Ustinov had made the following argument: if our scientists and engineers do not see and specific use of this technology now, we should not forget that the Americans are very pragmatic and very smart. Since they have invested a tremendous amount of money in such a project, they can obviously see some useful scenario which is still unseen from Soviet eyes. The Soviet Union should therefore develop such a technology so that it won't be taken by suprise in the future.

Let's build it now, and see what it is good for later! :D

Great summary :) - without the internet the F-35 design would probably be evaluated in similar vein - makes no sense so there must be some hidden purpose.

This is how lots of really creative uses for things come about. If you haven't any idea what something's supposed to do, you're now totally free to come up with your own use.

Thanks so much for this summary. I've always wondered why USSR used a similar design. Based on this, and other comments, it sounds like this was a good design for the mission at hand and that it's debatable that the mission at hand was a worthy endeavor.

"Botched shuttle design"? You don't know much about the orbiter, I take it. Shuttle was meticulously - even lovingly - maintained, a hairy complex scrupulously documented piece of kit, well built and designed if not well conceived.

I'll guess your crack is motivated by shuttle's mission, which was misguided (to say the least). Hampered by its LEO envelope, the Air Force should never have contemplated launching satellites on a man-rated platform at all.

But the orbiter itself... a thing of beauty. I've said here before that I'd like to have seen shuttle reattempted, this time with 21st century technologies. (So long as someone else is paying the expense!)

Botched in Design as in expression of intent since the intent was as you stated misguided. As I grow older I have a harder time separating technological merits from economic ones.

As a piece of hardware... yeah, that's a different thing entirely.

This might be in the same vein as "New Coke" was a genius marketing idea, but what if the "botched system" did exactly what is was supposed to, and helped economically bleed the USSR out of existence?

Well then I guess we would have stopped flying last century.

These are great! Being an American who wasn't taught anything about the Soviet space program I hadn't ever heard of Baikonur until I read about it in Seveneves.

Hey Russia, seeing as your Burans are, like, sitting there literally rotting away... can I have one? I'll take good care of it, promise.

Makes you wonder if Russia's contributions to science back in the Soviet days were bigger than today under Putin's rule...

They need to get rid of the extortion, fraud, and payoffs. They need to get rid of Putin! As a kid, my father was harassing a Russian neighbor. He said if your country was so great--why do you your comrades want to buy Levi jeans, and they were getting $100 at the time used. He looked at my father, and said, 'Russian has its problems, but if went there today you couldn't find a homeless person.' My father didn't have anything left to say. (Actually, back then they were ignorantly called bums.)

"Ignorantly" called bums. The definition of "bum" is a vagrant; a perfectly accurate definition for many of the homeless. However, that being aside, "No homeless in the Soviet Union.." Hmm. I guess if you count being shipped to a brutal gulag in Siberia a "home," then yes. There were no homeless in the Soviet Union. If you failed to work in the Soviet Union, that was considered a crime against the state and thus you were sent to a camp. This would happen even if you didn't have a job nor could you get one. This "crime" was also common in East Germany as well. So technically, there was no unemployment in the Soviet Union either. Full employment is actually not desired in an economy for a variety of reasons. Here's an old paper on the subject: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40729034?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

The Soviet Union was hell, the same for East Germany. There was a reason there were weeks of parties in Berlin when the wall came down. There aren't any homeless in North Korea either.. doesn't mean it's even remotely close to a model society.

I'm not sure how the anecdote here is related to the opinion. They don't seem to support each other in an obvious way. As for the bums/homeless/etc, I'm not sure that being unable to find them is always a strict win: it's easy enough to disappear undesirables to prisons or camps (or just shallow graves).

No, it does not. It is clear that the Soviet Union, for all its flaws, was one of the foremost nations (or collection of such) when it comes to scientific endeavours. Where they failed was in the translation of scientific data to 'products', but that is another story.

Modern Russia still has its share of eminent scientists, but they lack the s(t)olid backing of a nation which felt like it had something to prove.

That was kind of my point - at least in terms of science they have regressed.

Wonder what kind of state support for scientific endeavours they have today?

Lysenkoism was certainly a highlight of the Soviet sciences. Mendelian inheritance was considered a capitalist fabrication.

What Lysenkoism was to the Soviet Union, is Creationism to the United States of America. Both 'doctrines' are completely nonsensical, but supported by strong religious currents in their respective environments. It just so happened the state religion in the Soviet Union had mortal gods versus the man-on-the-cloud of the born-again evangelical religion entertained by some recent US leaders.

People were persecuted and killed because of Lysenkoism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov

Your false equivalences trivializes that persecution.

I'd put this persecution more in the hands of Stalin and his cronies. He hardly needed an excuse to persecute and kill anyone, after all.

That's not how Soviet scientists felt about Lysenko. Just check his Wikipedia page.

In 1962 three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as false science. They also denounced Lysenko's application of political power to silence opposition and eliminate his opponents within the scientific community. These denunciations occurred during a period of structural upheaval in Soviet government, during which the major institutions were purged of the strictly ideological and political machinations which had controlled the work of the Soviet Union's scientific community for several decades under Stalin.

In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:

He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.

You'd have to find a period in which the NIH or NSF or, hell, DARPA were handing out grants to creationists to the detriment of everyone else and research universities were hiring creationist professors and firing evolutionary biologists. After which the biologists got arrested.

The comparison is close to nonsensical.

How much of this is due to post-war context ? The USA left that period stronger while the planet was trying to heal. Also the USA mindset is so well tuned to crafting products. Ideas coming from european/eastern minds blossomed there.

Okay, there has to be someone capable of taking care of the orbiters around? How much would just a minimum amount of maintenance really cost? I think this a real world manifestation of state secrecy and its a shame.

On a similar note, I was very happy to see that parts of both Columbia and Challenger will be on display for the public.

I thought cancelled web projects were hard to deal with mentally, this puts a whole new perspective on no go for launch.

Here's a google translated version https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

The page is in Russian, here is the Google Translate link: https://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fralphm...

Its interesting to see how these shuttles mirror the US ones on the outside due to Soviet spies getting pictures and plans but the interior, especially the cockpit, is all Russian, sparse and uncomfortable. I guess they didn't get intel on that.

I think it looks devoid also because there were no planned manual control, iirc.

Or perhaps because the interiors don't matter much, as long as they do what's required by the mission.

The exterior, however, has aerodynamics constraints. Being a shuttle, you also have to account for reentry effects. Presumably the US had way better computing technology and simulation capabilities that were very expensive.

I'm reading through Skunkworks (http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d...) on a recommendation from HN, and thoroughly enjoying it.

I'd heard this before, but the actual genesis of Lockheed's Have Blue/F-117 was this: 1) Petr Ufimtsev in the 1960s develops the equations for calculating the radar energy reflected by a given geometric configuration 2) USAF notices and translates this into English 3) Denys Overholser and Bill Schroeder at Lockheed find, read, and implement it in software (which the Russians didn't have the computational power to do) 4) Lockheed is looking for a new Skunkworks project (this is post-SR 71, and Kelly Johnson was transitioning out of Skunkworks after handing things over to Ben Rich) and decides to bet on stealth ("What?! That'll never work! It's crazy!") 5) {... many, many, MANY person-hours later} 6) F-117

Side note: the reason the F-117 has geometric surfaces is that when it was being designed in the 60s and 70s there wasn't enough available computational power to calculate more complex shapes (e.g. F-22).

cached version: http://web.archive.org/web/20150702121612/http://ralphmirebs...

I wonder what would go through in the russian people's minds when they saw that their shuttle was a rip-off of the american's. With all the competition to see who was better, how did they rationalize this?

Well, in 1988 when Buran was publicly shown, people already had rather different things in mind to worry about :) - it was third year of Perestroika, and things were changing...

Of course, for those interested in the subject differences became quickly known. A launcher rocket which uses only liquid engines - so you can have a safer flight with an ability to actually shut down stages if necessary. A bigger payload and an automated landing - something which wasn't so clearly demonstrated by the American counterpart. Little details like launch during heavy wind, launcher which is able to fly separately, non-toxic fuel onboard Buran...

this is heartbreaking :(

looks amazing

many more pics here: https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=buran%20launc...

I believe in the next 50 years we will see a lot of this in occidental countries. I don't think the problems will stop with Greece default, it just started with it.

A lot of space shuttles?

Snark aside, I'd guess they meant large abandoned governmental projects.

you get a space program. YOU get a space program. EVERYONE GETS A SPACE PROGRAM!

I have a feeling Oprah could actually afford that.

It's just too cool looking not to be computer generated. You know: That complex hyper-realistic look with lots of fancy shaders to show off the latest hardware.

Is it certain that this isn't some brilliant Blair-Witch-esque promo hoax for a "Soviet Space Race" computer game/movie where you have to save the Earth from destruction by resurrecting one of the old Soviet space shuttles?

I don't actually doubt it's real, but I'd hella love to play that game!

Def. Not. Seen the shuttle myself, one of them sits in a german Museum. Next to a Concorde and a Tu.144.

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