posted 04-17-2007 12:57 AM               

Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle
by Bart Hendrickx and Bert Vis

In Energiya-Buran: the Soviet Space Shuttle System, the authors describe the long development of the Soviet space shuttle system, its infrastructure and what was planned to follow the first historic unmanned mission. Comparisons are made with the American shuttle system and details of the talented Soviet test pilots chosen to train to fly the system are included, as well as the operational, political and engineering problems that finally sealed the fate of Buran and ultimately of NASA's Shuttle fleet.

The coverage starts with a Foreword provided by a former Buran cosmonaut, and goes on to provide a detailed description of the first orbital test flight of the Buran shuttle in 1988, giving details of the development of the various Soviet space plane projects of the 1950s and 1960s. A review is included of the decisions to proceed with the US space shuttle in 1972 and the Soviet decision to construct Buran in 1976 and a physical description of the Energiya system and a comparison with the American system is provided in tabular form.

The authors then detail ground support, and the facilities and infrastructure created to prepare, launch, control and recover the Buran vehicle. They go on to detail the selection and training of teams of civilian and military test pilots for crew assessment to Buran missions, and despite the fact that no cosmonaut flew on a space shuttle, the authors describe how several Russian cosmonauts have experienced shuttle missions, courtesy of the American shuttle as part of the ISS co-operative program. In addition to detailing the work on preparing the first flights of the Soviet shuttle which commenced in the l980s and the problems they encountered, the authors conclude with a comprehensive view on what might have been had the Buran program been fully developed.

The Energiya-Buran programme was primarily a story of unfulfilled promises and shattered dreams and is a story that deserves to be told.

• Paperback: 526 pages
  
• Publisher: Springer-Praxis; 2007 edition (August 14, 2007)
  
• ISBN-10: 0387698485
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0387698489

posted 05-03-2007 09:14 AM               

The Energiya-Buran programme was primarily a story of unfulfilled promises and shattered dreams and is a story that deserves to be told.

posted 05-03-2007 09:32 AM               

An exact copy? Not at all: I don't see any SRBs, no SSMEs, Buran accomplished an-all automatic flight from launch to landing (something the US space shuttle can't do?), and Energyia is a heavy-lift vehicle that do not have any equivalent elsewhere (and it could have been used for larger Earth-orbit stations, Moon/Mars missions)...The tools were (almost) available, but the political and financial will were not.

posted 05-03-2007 04:38 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by garymilgrom:
I am no expert but I think the Buran program was primarily a story of theft and espionage. The Buran design is an exact copy of the US Space Shuttle.

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That said, Buran was clearly INFLUENCED by the US shuttle, and here the issue becomes complex.

First of all, they benefited technically from the American data on the tiles and thermal stresses. I've read claims that all of that information was published openly in the United States. However, such claims have lacked detail. How much of that info was published openly? Plus, telling everybody what the tiles and other thermal protection was made of is not the same as telling people how to make it.

Second, and I think equally important, is the question of why the Soviet engineers picked the dimensions that they did for Buran. Why is the payload bay the same size as the US shuttle? It could have been smaller. And why did they seek wings that were roughly the same dimensions? We know that the US shuttle wings were dictated by crossrange requirements. Why did the Buran designers pick the same crossrange requirements?

In summary, I think that the Buran espionage story is overly simplistic on both sides. The people who say that the Buran designers "stole" the US shuttle design are wrong. But the people who counter by saying that Buran had to look the same as the shuttle are also wrong. It could have been smaller. It could have had less crossrange. It could have looked significantly different than it did.

posted 02-20-2014 08:30 AM               

The Russians didn't understand why NASA built the shuttle. Or to be more honest, they understood all too well that NASA's studies were flawed.

They didn't believe it would be capable of rapid turnarounds on the ground, and they didn't believe it would lower the cost to orbit. They believed NASA was lying about both these benefits in order to hide the real purpose.

But they couldn't figure out the purpose either. The only thing they could surmise is the design allowed for a launch, dropping of a nuclear bomb over the Soviet Union, and landing in one orbit. So they decided this must be it's real purpose. Given that threat they needed a counterpart, so they made a vehicle that could do the same thing.

posted 02-20-2014 01:26 PM               

On one hand "they didn't believe it would lower the cost to orbit" and on the other the only real purpose for it would be to allow for launch, drop and landing in a single day. When you put this in light of the fact that we had (and still have) other methods of delivering nuclear weapons, even on Russian soil, that logic doesn't hold water. Why would we develop a new weapons system that costs more to launch than our existing methods and also includes humans at the same time? The risks are higher, the costs are higher and there's no compelling reason to do it in the first place. Not for that reason.

posted 02-20-2014 04:10 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Gonzo:
However, the logic that we built the shuttles to drop nuclear weapons over Russia is, quite frankly, silly.

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A key scenario among the planned missions that drove the shuttle's design was the Pentagon's need for a superfast, single-orbit mission that would deploy or retrieve a military satellite. Strictly speaking, the retrieved satellite need not have been the property of the United States. The shuttle was built to enable this, but the idea was soon abandoned.

posted 02-21-2014 03:50 PM               

Quoting from Chapter 2, Section 6.
THE SPACE SHUTTLE'S MILITARY THREAT
Location 934 in the Kindle version.

TsNIIMash specialists came to the conclusion that the Space Shuttle would never become economically viable if it was only used for the goals that NASA announced ... This was not simply a program to develop some space system ... to lower costs (Russian studies show no cost savings at all). It clearly had a focused military goal.

The IPM studies focused on the Shuttle's possible use as a bomber, more particularly its capability to launch a nuclear first strike...

When we analyzed the trajectories from Vandenberg we saw that it was possible for any military payload to re-enter from orbit in three and a half minutes to the main centers of the USSR. You might feel this is ridiculous but you must understand how our leadership, provided with that information, would react. The military, very sensitive to the variety of possible means of delivering the first strike, suspecting that a first-strike capability might be the Vandenberg Shuttle's objective, and knowing that a first strike would be decisive in a war, responded predictably" (this means they built their own).

Studies ... showed the Space Shuttle could carry out a return maneuver from a half or single orbit ... approach Moscow or Leningrad from the south, and then, drop in this region a nuclear charge, and in combination with other means paralyze the military command system of the Soviet Union.

posted 02-21-2014 04:05 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Gonzo:
Why would we develop a new weapons system that costs more to launch than our existing methods?

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This is also discussed in this well researched book. A comparison of a Shuttle-dropped versus a submarine-launched weapon is made. The sub-launched bomb is much cheaper but takes 6.5 minutes longer to reach its target. That's an eternity when attempting to shoot down or retaliate to an enemy strike.

posted 02-21-2014 04:39 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by garymilgrom:
That's an eternity when attempting to shoot down or retaliate to an enemy strike.

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posted 02-22-2014 04:52 AM               

The Soviets thought the shuttle (however improbable it might seem now) had a theoretical "first strike" role, so they had to have one too - which explains why they copied it exactly and didn't go with one of their own designs which they had been toying with in the 1970s.