Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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.

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