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Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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 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.

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.

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