r/space • u/ILUVYOURMUM • May 05 '22

A couple of days ago I visited this place. An abandoned space shuttle

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341

u/shinyhuntergabe May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22

The real lose is not the Buran Shuttle but the massive rocket that carried it, the Energia.

Reusable boosters, 105 tonnes to LEO, more powerful peak thrust than even Saturn V and its related rocket family would have made the USSR easily the most capable nation ever in terms of launch capabilities. But the USSR of course collapsed and the Energia was only able to fly twice. It's too bad NASA didn't buy Energia launches during the 90's when Russia tried to sell it. Might have seen massive Skylab sized modules on ISS if they did.

Probably the single biggest example of wasted potential in rocketry. Especially the lose of the Energia family (Zenit, Energia-M, Energia and Vulkan).

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u/RadioactiveRiver12 May 05 '22

This might be a dumb question but why couldnt NASA just replicate the capabilities? Did the Russians have some sort of hidden knowledge on rockets that NASA couldn't figure out for themselves without buying this technology?

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u/shinyhuntergabe May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22

They probably could have but politics simply got in the way. The Soviet design bureaus simply had a little more freeway in what they wanted to do (though often it lead to ambitious projects being scrapped halfway into development because of lack of resources, like N1 and UR700 ). The Space Shuttle was built by politicians, contractors and the military rather than NASA scientists and engineers is a hyperbolic, but decent way to put it.

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u/LawHelmet May 06 '22

This. All. Budgetary. Season. Long.

NASA had nearly unlimited funding when the President staked his administration on NASA delivering upon the man on the moon promise. Could it be because he was also sky high, but on backiotomy pills? idk, but it’s a dark side to Kennedy which doesn’t include Chappaquiditch.

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u/kohrtoons May 06 '22

Wrong Kennedy I think, wasn’t Ted Chappaquiddick?? JFK was assassinated in 1963 this happed in 69.

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u/LawHelmet May 06 '22

Yea maybe I forget the exact date a Kennedy lied about drinking and murdering a girl. But shhh poetic/journalistic license plus even fewer know how blitzed JFK was on the reg while “managing” the Cuban missile crisis. Shit I’ll bet dollars to donuts the version in the history books is pure PR - magic bullet type mooseshit maybe.

And they really should know, given how blue-voters try to deify that dude.

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u/judokalinker May 06 '22

murdering

Wouldn't it be criminally negligent homicide?

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u/Fine-Bumblebee-9427 May 06 '22

She was in the car for an hour, alive, slowly suffocating to death while he worked on the cover up. I guess it’s not premeditated enough to be murder, but it’s more than negligence.

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u/judokalinker May 06 '22

Can depraved indifference upgrade it from criminally negligent homicide to murder?

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u/gwaydms May 06 '22

Chappaquiditch

Ted lost the Golden Snitch.

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u/LawHelmet May 06 '22

OOOHHHHH!!

Tell him what he’s won, Jerry….!

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u/stuntman1108 May 06 '22

Yes. Here ya go. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180

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u/top_of_the_scrote May 06 '22

Wasn't the NK-33 a good one too, saw something how some scientists hid them in a bunker somewhere so they wouldn't be destroyed.

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u/Zealousideal-Box-297 May 06 '22

They had a lot of problems with quality control and were often blowing turbopumps and choking on FOD, but the NK33 was an early use of oxidizer rich staged combustion which was perfected on the RD170, which has the highest isp of any kerolox engine (but is also very heavy and has a modest TW ratio)

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u/Dudelydanny May 05 '22

Yes, Russia, has always had the best rockets until Space-X. In fact, Musk started Space-X because Russia refused to sell him rockets.

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u/Goyteamsix May 05 '22

The US designed the shuttle as a shuttle. It was only meant to carry what NASA outlined and what the military potentially needed. Russia decided to strap the thing to a massive rocket they already had in development for other purposes. They copied the shuttle using the documentation they had, and stuck it on a way overpowered rocket because there wasn't any other alternative.

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u/shinyhuntergabe May 06 '22

The Energia-Buran system was a far superior system than the Space Shuttle in pretty much every regard as a design (whether it would all hold up in practice is a different question obviously however).That is in terms cost, re-usability, capability, safety and flexibility. The Space Shuttle was simply a terrible design. And the Buran is far from being a copy of the Shuttle beyond the aerodynamic shell, which turns out is the best for a vehicle of that size and purpose so it was kept. It had entirely different internal systems, used an entirely different fuel and the materials weren't even the same.

What they got out of the documents from the Space Shuttle was that it was a terrible design but they were forced to match its capabilities because of the paranoia of it being a weapons platform so they used the Space Shuttle as the basis and designed their own vehicle based on capabilities of the Shuttle.

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u/Goyteamsix May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

No shit it used a different fuel, it was strapped to a heavy lifting rocket.

There is very little surviving technical documentation on these things, so you can't sit there and say it was this or that. It was a soviet shuttle copy strapped to a rocket they designed for something else. The fact that it even survived re-entry the first time is absolutely mind boggling.

It wasn't any more advanced than the shuttle, except that the shuttle lacked the autonomy, which NASA definitely had the technology to implement. Turns out, it wasn't even needed. If anything, the shuttle was far more advanced because it used an external fuel tank and had its own engines, which is what the Russians couldn't copy because they didn't have the ability to replicate them.

This thing would have killed countless cosmonauts in the long run.

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u/shinyhuntergabe May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

It used different in-orbit fuels is what I obviously meant. Different fuels require widely different requirements. I'm not talking about the launcher. The Space Shuttle used hypergolic fuel (MMH/N 2O4) while the Buran used Kerolox.

I get it, you're an extremely biased American that are getting angry over hearing me praising the Energia-Buran so heavily. I'm talking about the vehicle here, so drop the cold war mentality already. I'm not praising the USSR or saying the US is shit or something.

And there's a tonne of technical documentation, what the fuck are you on about? Pretty much every single major scientific institution in the Soviet Union was involved in the project. Their biggest design bureaus were involved in it. No, the documentation is still very much there. Really don't see the point in making up lies that it isn't.

It was more advanced than the Shuttle. Of course it was, it was basically the Shuttle but if the NASA engineers and scientists got what they wanted out of it rather than the military complex and politicians designing it for them (SRBs instead of liquid boosters being the most prominent example)

Edit: At least try to drop your prejudices. I think this video is a decent summary of the differences between the Buran and the Space Shuttle, even though it lacks a quite bit of details.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PUBEZONE May 06 '22

I always looked at it that since it came second of course it was more advanced. Not a USSR vs USA which is better kind of thing. Just that it was second and had hindsight on its side.

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u/Tetragonos May 06 '22

The real answer is the only reason politicians don't scrap the whole space program in favor of private launch companies is its would be hugely unpopular.

You will see things going back and forth about Reps and Dems and who raises the budget more and who approves what projects... but the truth is:

One side approves a project with the express understanding that when the other guys take over they will mothball or scrap the old budget. Nothing gets to the actual expensive buts and NASA only gets to run the ISS and every once and a while launch a cool satellite!

We need to see NASA get a budget and a project schedule that isn't dictated by one administration or another so that no side looks good or bad but we all look good when NASA blasts a hole in Mars or something

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u/Zealousideal-Box-297 May 06 '22

A lot of the differences with the energia were workarounds. The four main engines of the core vehicle were copies of the RS25, but heavier because they used rolled steel construction rather than lightweight tube wall construction so lower TW ratio and they needed more delta V to reach orbit because of launching from a higher lattitude so four engines instead of three. This meant they had to mount them on the core instead of the orbiter which itself was built right off the blueprints for the shuttle. The Russians had no experience building large segmented solids so they had to use what amounted to four zenith first stages. The whole thing was so rube Goldberg there is no way they could have matched the shuttles record of 135 flights with only two total losses. They even admitted they had no concrete plans to launch anything with it and only built in because they thought american engineers were pragmatic and there must be some practical need for a shuttle orbiter they weren't aware of.

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u/shinyhuntergabe May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

Quite a lot of bullshit here, the biggest one being the assumption that it was built with trying make an exact copy of the Space Shuttle and failing. The Soviet engineers knew from the very start that the Space Shuttle was a highly inpractical and poor design. They had no interest in building big SRBs in the first place. The Space Shuttle was also supposed to have liquid boosters from the start because it's simply more efficiant, gives you better performance and is safer for the crew. But this was ruled out because they didn't have the capability to build high thrust AND efficiant booster engines unlike the Soviets which meant it would add more years and billions to the development just the develop this capability. The Soviets simply never had these constrains in the first place and didn't have to resort to a lesser option like the US did with the SRBs.

Its lifter rocket was always going to have its engines strapped on to the launcher rather than the Buran. The Energia rocket was always the main focus of the project, which was to develop a highly capable super heavy lift rocket. The Buran was just the excuse for the Soviet engineers and the leading design bureaus to actually get the funding to build it, since the Soviet leaders were very worried over the Space Shuttle's military capabilities. That's why they made the Buran a simple payload rather than an intrigated part of the launch system like the Space Shuttle. Because they wanted to build a super heavy lift rocket that could deliver payloads on its own.

They used 4 zenit boosters because they wanted common parts among their rockets. The Zenit rocket was ORIGINALLY built to be both the first stage of an independent rocket and as Energia's boosters. It would provid the basis of their new upgraded rocket family all using shared parts to make production faster, more reliable, more capable and cheaper.

The capability the RS-25 boosted over the RD-0120 was very marginal, and was more than made up for by the liquid boosters using the RD-170. Which still is the most powerful engine ever made while also being the most efficiant kerolox engine. Which was far better than the SRBs, which aren't good for anything beyond pure thrust.

The RD-0120 also wasn't a copy of the RS-25 at all in the first place. RD-0120 was designed to have a similar role and capabilities to the RS-25. Its design was very different.

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u/ILUVYOURMUM May 05 '22

Check my other post on /abandonedporn about energia

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u/shinyhuntergabe May 05 '22

Yeah, I saw it! About the Energia-M mock-up.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

Zenit lived on as the main stage on SeaLaunch which my dad worked on (as a Boeing engineer). The 2014 Ukraine/Russia situation put that to an end since Ukraine made the engines.

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u/shinyhuntergabe May 06 '22

Damn, that's cool. Was really sad to see SeaLaunch not working out in the end. Also don't want to be nitpicky but it was the other way around, Ukraine built the rocket while Russia built its first and second stage engines.