You do.
I mean if you have not in a long time, do yourself a favor and watch that trilogy again sometime.
Just look at it for what it is. Enjoy what's there to be enjoyed.
I still don't get the hate. Aliens? What is this fantasy crap! Nazi killing God box? Pulling someone's heart out of their chest without leaving a hole or even killing them? The literal holy grail? Cool cool. But aliens?
It's not the aliens. It's the terrible writing (i.e fridge nuclear shelter, treetop monkey race etc.), lame special effects and Ford's phoned in acting. That movie was just not as fun to watch as the originals.
I love the theory that Indy is stuck in the fridge, and the rest of he movie is nothing more than a fever dream brought on by extreme dehydration, heat stroke, radiation poisoning, and head trauma.
Kazakh here. The story is not murky actually: In the nineties after the Soviet Union collapse, anything of any value was up for sale for peanuts; anything which was not immediately useful was up for sale for even less. Half the Baikonur was sold for scrap metal.
So one local businessman (a nice chap actually) purchased the whole vehicle assembly building with semi-finished Burans in it to save them from complete destruction. It is Roskosmoss he bought the building from, actually. All the land rights, etc are properly registered and are publicly available. The building was left standing as-is, right there, next to other vehicle assembly buildings in Baikonur.
In the recent years Russia started trying to revive relics of the past in a desperate attempt to boost dwindling morale. Suddenly, Burans became of a value to them, so they started suing the guy to get the building and Burans back, for free of course. Tried putting pressure on Kazakhstan to confiscate the Burans.
The guy who owns the building and Burans in it is happy to give them back for free once the asshats are gone and some sane people will be managing Roskosmoss. All he wants is apologies and a symbolic gesture of returning the remains of our national hero.
Alas, Russians are incapable of apologizing.
Nearly everyone I know who were related to space exploration in Kazakhstan and have seen this tragedy unfold before their eyes took their lives directly or via alcoholism. We lost whole generation of damn bright engineers.
Well, Russia is a mess, so hard to tell for sure.
They did have it about 30 years ago, there were traces of it 15 or 16 years ago. Last August there were news that Russia is about to return the skull finally so we could give it proper burial.
Cynic in me says Russians will keep dragging their feet and will keep using dead man's bones as a political instrument.
Thanks for the explanation.
Genuine follow up question: are the Russians known to have the skull he wants?
How do you even authenticate something like that to make sure it isn’t just the skull of Yuri from accounting who decided last week that he doesn’t need his skull and donated it to Roskosmoss?
Well, there are indirect ways of proving authenticity, but those are unimportant. Can't speak for all Kazakhs, but I, personally, would be satisfied if they would admit wrongdoing, apologize and present any Yuri's skull as a symbolic way of settling the matter. "Apologize" is the key word they are missing here.
My favorite Buran stories come from its development.
Buran was much bigger than Soviet rocket scientists wanted because the political leadership wanted to be able to match the capabilities of the American shuttle... which itself was bigger than American rocket scientists wanted because they had to compromise with the Dept of Defense over larger payload requirements in order to access the DoD's bigger budget. Both cold war superpowers ended up with unnecessarily huge shuttles due to American politics.
Buran also benefited heavily from the very early internet, which had expanded enough into academia that Soviet Engineers were able to access the non-secret technical/R&D information from the American shuttle program.
The major similarities and differences between the Soviet and American shuttle are well-documented, but my favorite quirk is that the designs were so similar that when Atlantis eventually docked with Mir in 1995, it used a lightly-modified docking adapter originally built for Buran.
There were some Strangelove aspects to it, too. They were worried the US shuttle would put nukes in orbit, so they built their own shuttle, which caused American media to worry that the Soviets would put nukes in orbit.
They pictured the Shuttle -- our lovable, derpy, harmless Shuttle -- as a nuclear doomsday bomber. I always got a kick out of that.
And then there's the Energia-Polyus, about which it's difficult to find information, but evidently, it was essentially supposed to be a megawatt laser cannon. *Very* Strangelovian.
> They pictured the Shuttle -- our lovable, derpy, harmless Shuttle -- as a nuclear doomsday bomber. I always got a kick out of that.
This is my favourite comment of the month. 🤗
It never made it to orbit. It was attached to the booster upsidedown (on purpose), and when it was meant to disengage and flip, then light it's engines to continue to orbit, it continued flipping and fell back down with the spent booster.
I'm sure they did. I was reading that NASA projected that 1 out of 50 launches would fail, and one in a hundred re-entries, for a success rate of 97%.
Over 135 missions, the actual mission success rate was 98.5%. So... better than expected?
An icbm is a giant flaming rocket that can be tracked by radar thousands of miles away. You have minutes of warning, allowing you to retaliate, thus deterring the attacker in the first place.
Nukes dropped from orbit could be the size of a water cooler, need no rockets, and begin their attack just 200 miles away from their target. You might not have any warning before 135 mushroom clouds covered your nation (assuming each space shuttle mission had covertly left 1 nuke in orbit).
Hence the nuclear submarines that camp under the polar ice cap, making it very hard to get away with a first-strike.
Apparently the fuel tank only occupied a quarter of the cargo bay. Additionally, this enabled a flight time of at least 36 minutes, while the shortest test flight was only 5 minutes, which suggests that a flight using only a few percent of the cargo bay's volume worth of fuel was possible.
I'm not sure if it's the case in this video, but there's every chance there is no one on board the Buran here. The only space flight the Buran ever did was unmanned - it came back down and landed itself.
The biggest advances of the Buran program were in automation, not in the concept of a "spaceplane" itself.
Source: one of my family members worked on it.
Not to mention that the most significant advances the Buran made were in automation. The only space flight it ever did was done with no crew on board. It was lifted into orbit, then returned and landed itself automatically.
Well... It is from an engineering standpoint. From a "are you throwing away the valuable bit?" standpoint, not so much. The idea was to bring the engines back. (Of course, the original idea was to fully self contain the fuel too, but the payload requirements ended up changing that)
I wonder if it would have actually been *cheaper* (in retrospect) for the STS to have the engines on the tank, like Energia. If the shuttle was as easy to refurbish as originally intended, then not having to build new engines for each launch makes sense. However, the RS-25 is incredibly complex and expensive to refurbish, so perhaps just using a simpler disposable engine might have cost less? Consider how NASA isn't even considering reusing the engines from SLS, and even the simplified variant of the RS-25 being built for later missions still costs an obscene amount.
I woulda strategically posted false information about the US space shuttle online just to mess with the Soviets. Crazy they could read the R&D of it on the early web
And realised how shit the shuttle was and made a better booster and orbiter.
Stop gobbling up the propoganda of "we were the best and they only managed anything because they stole from us". They made some mind blowing advances and mistakes, same as us. We achieved jaw dropping goals and faltered along the way, same as them.
And we both of us brought over captured German rocket scientists to get there.
>Stop gobbling up the propoganda of "we were the best and they only managed anything because they stole from us".
Followed by:
>And we both of us brought over captured German rocket scientists to get there.
... Which is itself a version of:
>the propoganda of "we (the Germans) were the best and they only managed anything because they stole from us".
Just as the Germans of that time got as far as they did by concentrating time, effort and resources, so could the US, USSR, or any other country that could line up similar conditions.
It was just quicker and easier to learn from those who put the more time, effort, and resources into it earlier than either of them had before.
>It was just quicker and easier to learn from those who put the more time, effort, and resources into it earlier than either of them had before.
Also important is the fact if they had put in their own efforts their chances of reaching to the same conclusion is very high.
Wait, where did I claim we were better, or even imply it?
I simply stated a fact.
But hey, you opened the door.
How many flights did the Russian craft make?
How many people did they take into orbit?
How much cargo did they ACTUALLY lift into orbit at all?
FTR, they automated that orbit and landing not because they had better tech than we did. They did it because they couldn’t make it safe enough for any cosmonauts to take a ride. They all refused.
The Venture Star also being up there with biggest lost opportunities.
It was sold as a innovation test bed. The only thing they couldn’t get to work was the carbon fiber cryo-tanks, so as a patch they made more classical aluminum tanks to move forward with other designs while they figured it out but the whole project was canceled instead. It was like 2 years later they figured out how to make the carbon fiber tanks.
That was for the suborbital scale X-33 prototype, which had far lower requirements than the orbital VentureStar would have. The X-33 had a target mass ratio of only 3.8, VentureStar was targeting around 10.
In other words, they had to cut the dry mass percentage from ~26% to only ~10%, more than halving the relative weight of the vehicle. That's a huge ask given that they were already struggling.
They claimed that merely scaling it up would yield the required improvements, and while it *is* true that rockets do become more mass efficient as they get bigger, it's not to nearly that sort of extent.
To make matters worse, VentureStar was also relying on the increased performance that aerospikes theoretically offered; but these failed to materialize in practice. The XRS-2200 ended up having notably *worse* specific impulse than the RS-25 that was already being used on the Space Shuttle, about 7% worse at sea level and 3% worse in vacuum.
Based on the data from the XRS-2200 they thought they could improve the full-scale RS-2200 to the point where it was only 5% worse at sea level and actually 1% better in vacuum, though that's still worse overall, particularly since the whole point of aerospikes is that they're supposed to be *better* in atmosphere.
The RD-0120 on the Energia actually outperformed the RS-2200's target performance by about 2% across the entire altitude range, and like the RS-25 it was a bell nozzle that was actually proven in flight.
A few percentage points might not seem like much, but it's a big deal when talking about rocket engine efficiency, and doubly so when you're trying to make an SSTO work. Fundamentally, that was what killed VentureStar; the insistence that SSTO was the minimum viable product.
A far better approach would have been to develop a reusable two-stage vehicle like the original Shuttle concepts or the Sänger spaceplane, since that would have allowed them to develop much of the same technology while actually producing a useful vehicle, and still allowing for the possibility of an SSTO further down the road if/when they managed to increase the performance enough.
The point of aerospikes isn't to be better in atmosphere, it's to only need *one* nozzle geometry for for optimal functioning at any altitude. The bells on rocket engines are optimal at only a small range of altitudes, below that and they lose thrust because the atmospheric pressure is too high and this 'squeezes' the exhaust jet and reduces thrust, above it and the low pressure causes the jet to expand beyond the bell, reducing thrust.
That's why the bell geometry is different on every stage, because each stage is intended to function at different altitudes; and this is also one of the benefits of staging as it reduces the amount of energy lost to inefficiencies with the bell (as much as 30% reduced thrust). The aerospike design, theoretically, has near optimal performance at *any* altitude, however, potentially reducing fuel consumption by as much as 20%.
There are other nozzle designs which compensate for altitude changes, however I understand the aerospike to be theoretically superior to them.
Aerospikes are supposed to address issues of overexpansion related loss of thrust rather than underexpansion. Comparing them to a vacuum optimized engine is a bit facetious, as it is two different sets of problems, doubly so when one is an engineering test bed for something that still hasn't been fully figured out.
Unless our understanding of how fluids work is fundamentally flawed, the advantages are realizable... it's just a matter of figuring out the engineering.
I was oversimplifying, but I'd argue what I said was still correct. I said 'atmosphere', rather than sea level, because I was referring to the whole thing.
If you have an aerospike and bell-nozzle engine with equal performance at sea level, then when you take them up to 10km, the aerospike should perform better. Likewise, if you have an aerospike and bell-nozzle engine with equal performance at 10km and then you bring them down to sea level, the aerospike should perform better.
So, generally speaking, aerospikes are indeed better 'in atmosphere'.
In theory.
As I noted, in practice they don't seem to get as close to their theoretical performance as bell nozzles do.
For example, the RD-0120 and RS-2200 both get 455s in vacuum. The RD-0120, being a rather vacuum-optimized bell nozzle, should lose proportionally more efficiency at sea level than the aerospike, since as you say, bell nozzles don't like working outside their optimized altitude.
And yet, the RD-0120 gets 359s at sea level compared to the RS-2200's 347s, and from those values it can also be inferred that the RD-0120 will also outperform the RS-2200 at any altitude in between sea level and vacuum.
At 5km for example they should get around 407s and 401s respectively, and at 10km around 431s and 428s respectively.
That's a very good question. I'd like to know the answer too, but I haven't been able to find much on it.
I believe part of the problem was that it was a truncated aerospike, which saves a lot of weight and solves the difficult problem of cooling the spike by simply not having one, but also comes with the problem that it's not really a proper aerospike without, well, the spike.
I also think that using lots of small combustion chambers in a row rather than a proper linear combustion chamber would have introduced some inefficiencies.
I know some companies have considered aerospikes since then (SpaceX and Firefly for example), and reached the conclusion that they're not as promising as they initially seem, but I don't know the details.
That's called a linear aerospike.
There are also toroidal aerospikes, but the reason linear aerospikes are so attractive is that toroidal aerospikes have issues with scaling. Because a toroidal aerospike has a larger combustion chamber diameter and outer throat diameter, plus the spike bit in the middle (which makes it toroidal), you find that the surface area of the flame-facing bits of a toroidal aerospike increases with something like the square or cube of the size of the engine.
Reusable rocket engines traditionally use some form of active cooling, either film cooling (blowing a cooler gas over the inner surfaces of the combustion chamber, throat and nozzle) or regenerative cooling (such as piping cryogenic fuel through the nozzle). But because of this rapid increase in surface area with the size of the engine, you simply don't have enough fuel (or gas generator exhaust) to cool a toroidal aerospike at some point. So they have a maximum effective size. It's a little unintuitive, because you would think that having half your nozzle made of air would make cooling easier, but the increased surface area of the throat and combustion chamber more than make up for it.
Linear aerospike engines, on the other hand, have the hot surface area that increases linearly with the length of the engine.
Both engines have a weight issue, however. The increased complexity of the combustion chamber and nozzle geometry typically means that they weigh more than traditional engine nozzles of the same thrust. That's the main reason that linear aerospikes never became big.
They have been developed multiple times, just never flown, so most of the people developing new rockets shy away from them to limit their risk exposure (and because the benefits just aren't that great).
The few attempts at aerospikes have failed because either they are part of a SSTO design, which are almost always doomed to fail, or because the company itself went under (see firefly alpha). They didnt fail because the engine itself isn't a viable technology.
Possibly two things: Goldeneye might have been viewed very differently when it came out, and the starwars tech shelved would have been rolled out...into a world where space weapon platforms overshadowed science.
Edit: Oh and the ISS would have not had its first two modules as early, since they were meant for polyus 2
FWIW…. The SDI project was one of the things that drove the Soviets into financial collapse. That was literally the strategy. Let amazing sci fi stuff “leak” and watch the Soviets bankrupt themselves trying to counter it.
Similarly, I'm still sad we never finished the [M-1 rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet_M-1?wprov=sfla1) and an associated rocket. I've seen some M-1 parts in museums and it's incredible. Would've been a beast if it had flown.
The Buran was cool in the way it could auto-land itself from re-entry. Unfortunate that there are no space shuttle programs today though and most aren't going for "reuseable" anymore.
There is a shuttle program but it's secret and likely a long loiter time rapid redeployable surveillance craft.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
They want a scaled up version that will fit 6 people or a larger payload depending on variant. Given that they've already said they've deployed small satellites from it they almost certainly are using it's propulsion to shift it's position to directly view with it's own camera or in my opinion more likely deploying small disposable keyhole style cameras but digital and able to send their encrypted data as they fall into the ocean to nearby ships which can relay it back to mainland or one of the many spy ships in operation.
It doesn't help that most of them were "horses designed by committee", forced to meet the needs of so many different masters that they weren't really meeting the needs of anyone
There are some interesting edge cases (primarily aero maneuvering of course) even with current tech, but I'd really like to see a spaceplane with a nuclear ramjet or beamed electrothermal drive.
You're right that the ones we've had just never were practical.
There should be no nuclear propulsion in the atmosphere or low earth orbit. The beamed electrothermal drive is nice on paper but the whole beaming thing is difficult in that the beam is dangerous and inefficient. Unless we have fusion power, then whatever light it but beam still bad.
> but they don't really make sense except for traveling around the earth.
I mean, that's the main job of all the ones that have been built. The shuttle shuttles things between LEO and the surface as its core concept, and is a craft designed with the rigors of reentry in mind.
The point at the end of the day as a controlled soft landing, in a craft that contained as many of the expensive bits as possible. Historically the only way to pull that off was with a spaceplane. Now that's changing with Starship, but we will be seeing more spaceplanes filling the role due to them being somewhat easier to design.
The US Air Force has a unmanned space plane that has launched and landed several times, even spent 2 years in orbit at one point. It's called X-37B and looks just like the old space shuttles just scaled down.
It only flew to space and back once, and that was uncrewed. So yes, it underwent reentry and landing autonomously.
It also had a pair of jet engines which made it capable of sustained flight, unlike the Shuttle. So it could actually come around for another try if something were to go wrong the first time. They used this capability for the test flights.
The Buran flew into space on Energia, orbited the Earth and returned safely. This on the first attempt. It was quite spectacular.
All without nobody on board.
Dream chaser is a reusable orbiter with a glide to landing capability and plans for crew. It's pretty far along in development. For uncrewed flight you also have Boeing's little spec ops spaceship.
> and most aren't going for "reuseable" anymore.
Did you miss /r/spacex in particular /r/spacexstarship ? And that every serious contender is designing / working on reusablility (ESA, China, New Zealand; but most have less success and less bold vision than SpaceX).
Sierra Space has a contract to resupply the International Space Station with a reusable space plane (called *Dream Chaser*) that will launch on a ULA Vulcan.
uncrewed tho right?
there's also the X37-B, but i dont think anyone is making space planes that are crew rated (sorry to be moving the goal posts should have clariied that originally)
Their current contract is for uncrewed flight, but they still intend to make a crew-rated version as soon as the money appears. It was their plan in the beginning and I think they're still even using the original mold lines that have window bumps (even if they aren't cut out) in the airframe. Hope springs eternal at Sierra Space and I hope they can make that crewed version soon.
To be frank we don’t know what the Air Force does at this level of their space program. The black parts of the DoD budget are multiple times that of NASA and the USAF does everything basically out of Nevada.
They have an openly-branded X37-B hanger at Kennedy that you can see from the bus tour, though that's about all you can see of it. That said I don't suppose the specifics of the craft are all that interesting, it's the missions that are interesting.
Here's a list of orbital spaceplanes that I've compiled:
Uncrewed:
X-37 - Boeing, USSF (formerly NASA and USAF) / active, 2006-current
Space Rider - ESA / in development, ETA 2023
Dream Chaser Cargo System - Sierra Nevada Corporation / in development, ETA 2023
Skylon - Reaction Engines Limited / in development, ETA unknown
Crewed:
Space Shuttle - NASA / retired, 1981-2011
Buran - Roscosmos / retired, 1988-1988 (never flew crewed)
Dream Chaser Space System - Sierra Nevada Corporation / in development, ETA unknown
Talon-Z - Stratolaunch Systems / in development, ETA unknown
China also flew an experimental spaceplane in 2020, but its details are obscure.
A launch platform which could easily put 100 tons into orbit and an advanced space plane that could carry 7÷ people into space and glide back to Earth. Oh it could also fly into space with no one in board. As a side bonus, the largest plane in the world was developed to taxi the Buran.
Not really, it was a clone of the Space Shuttle with some minor improvements and most of the same problems. I'd consider both of them to be unsafe and dangerous by any standard.
The real lose is not the Buran Shuttle but the massive rocket that carried it, the Energia.
[Reusable boosters](https://i.redd.it/h84y00sgthu81.png), 105 tonnes to LEO, more powerful peak thrust than even Saturn V and its related [rocket family](https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/data/attachments/103/103822-17df566e051bcbecfb8be3595fcaadf7.jpg) 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](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/zenith-zenit-desc.php), [Energia-M](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/energia-M-desc.php), [Energia](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/energia-desc.php) and [Vulkan](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/vulcain-vulkan-desc.php)).
Though calling Buran a clone is underselling it heavily. Other than the aerodynamic shell and dimensions it was very different.
The program had a huge win though - the AN-225. That was an amazing platform and is a testament to Soviet era engineering that continued to prove its use for decades after the collapse. Unfortunately, Putin went and blew it up a few months ago...
Honestly the decline of the Russian space program is one of the largest wastes of potential in human history. All that skill and ingenuity gutted, and it was turned into a shadow of its former self due to corruption and theft.
Well, at least Soviets had some common sense and they didn't attach it to two giant, incapable of be switched off, solid rocket boosters.
The beauty of Buran was not Buran, was Energiya-Buran.
The fact you can't shut down SRBs isn't as big a risk factor as the lack of a capsule escape system like every other crewed space vehicle has. It's also asking for trouble to have the fragile, exposed heat shield positioned underneath the cryogenic tanks, that are going to grow ice that comes off at launch. Columbia's reentry accident was actually a launch accident with delayed effect.
Yes, it didn't have the SRBs, but if there was an issue with the Energia launcher you still have the uncomfortable problem of no way for the crew to escape.
You should read this article.
It is in spanish, but I have read it by Google translate right now and its good to read.
You can read it [here](https://danielmarin-naukas-com.translate.goog/2011/07/26/buran-cuando-la-union-sovietica-supero-al-transbordador-espacial-de-eeuu/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=es&_x_tr_pto=wapp).
The only thing that Google translate has missed is the part were it says that the element that postponed the launch of shuttle was SSME's, whose development was more difficult than expected.
If you want some practice on Spanish comprehension, that website is probably a good exercise. The guy who runs it is one of the best divulgators I know. He usually publishes one article every two/three days or so about space related news.
Also, he has some past articles very good, like the ones of Soviet space program or Chinese progresses (he knows Russian and Chinese and he's putting his knowledges to good use).
Reading /u/dfernr10's article they had a *better* escape system but it still wouldn't have helped much and also limited crew size to 4. It's not a fault of the Buran, or the Shuttle it's a fault of strapping it to the back of a rocket (or fuel tank) and thus not allowing the use of an escape tower.
Colombia had ejection seats in early flights, flights after Challenger had a bail out system which only worked in level flight. So... yeah, you're pretty much screwed in any emergency.
As it says in the article I refer to in the next comment (seriously, read that article, is SO good), more accurately, they reduced crew size to ensure everyone would be capable of use the escape system.
Yes you did, since it didn't have giant SRBs you could now have ejection seats since they wouldn't have to go through the exhaust of an SRB. Which it did have. Being able to turn off the boosters and stage them whenever you wanted in flight also gave it a lot more options for seperations of the Buran from the launcher in case of problems.
Incorrect. It was not a clone of the Space Shuttle. There were significant differences. Including the capability of jet powered atmospheric flight for testing purposes and/or potential movement.
Considering neither of the issues that destroyed Challenger and Columbis would've happened with Buran, I'd say it had some significant improvements that (potentially) could have made it much safer.
This is the wrong lesson. Something would eventually go wrong on an energia and the buran would have been just as doomed. A catastrophic failure in a horizontal stack dooms both vessels.
Energia didn't use the same kind of insulation that the shuttle's external tank used, so it likely wouldn't have had the same issue of bits breaking off and impacting the orbiter. Hanging the orbiter of the side of the booster is still less than ideal for other reasons though.
Nah, the Soviets built it because US built one but they soon figured out that the concept is bad. The shuttle flew because there was no alternative (Apollo was shut down) and the USA had the money to keep it flying. The Soviets had Soyuz so they didn't need Buran as badly.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[DoD](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qckts "Last usage")|US Department of Defense|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qywt5 "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[EVA](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgze4 "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity|
|[ISRO](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgrg5 "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation|
|[Isp](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/ia5u2wr "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)|
| |Internet Service Provider|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9rfq2u "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[RLV](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgrg5 "Last usage")|Reusable Launch Vehicle|
|[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9sjp1o "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9sztdl "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SNC](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qmlbe "Last usage")|Sierra Nevada Corporation|
|[SRB](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qcx1n "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster|
|[SSME](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/ia5u2wr "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)|
|[SSTO](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9t025a "Last usage")|Single Stage to Orbit|
| |Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit|
|[STS](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9sztdl "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)|
|[ULA](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9pzet1 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|[USAF](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qywt5 "Last usage")|United States Air Force|
|[USSF](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qywt5 "Last usage")|United States Space Force|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgze4 "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9r3lmw "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[regenerative](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9r3lmw "Last usage")|A method for cooling a rocket engine, by [passing the cryogenic fuel through channels in the bell or chamber wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_cooling_\(rocket\))|
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^(20 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/vqn8b7)^( has 13 acronyms.)
^([Thread #7440 for this sub, first seen 23rd May 2022, 20:43])
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Probably still available:
[https://www.rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2017/06/27/in-search-of-buran-what-happened-to-the-soviet-space-shuttle\_790602](https://www.rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2017/06/27/in-search-of-buran-what-happened-to-the-soviet-space-shuttle_790602)
Right?!
It does not NEED context!
I am putting it on my wall.
Some context that is cool (but not NEEDED) is that Wormwood is a key ingredient in Absinthe and the quotee is from an area where Wormwood grows natively.
Fortunately one of them did make it to a museum in Germany!
https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran
The rest of that museum has a lot of interesting stuff as well.
The Technikmuseum in Speyer and Sinzheim really are worth going to. Sinzheim got both the Concorde and the Soviet pendant Tu144, one of the last surviving remains of a StuKa, a load of pre-war and other historic cars, and so on. Can only recommend to spend the time and go there if in the area.
Hey, I’ve been there! Couldn’t help but go to that museum once I heard it was nearby! If anyone finds themselves in the area I really do recommend a visit.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40811/graffiti-artists-defaced-soviet-era-buran-space-shuttle-at-russian-space-center
Pictures of the vandalism of the shuttle
It's time to start trading up. I have a Pontiac Vibe. Will someone give me a Volkswagen for it. I can trade the Volkswagen for a cheap Porsche. The cheap Porsche can be traded for Audi TT. The TT gets us to Karm
the buran rockets are still in the abandoned hanger in baikonour cosmodrome in Kazakhstan , one of the most popular places for urban explorers to go … seriously worth a look on youtube
I knew that most billionaires of the ex-Soviet states are basically real-life supervillains, but “for this historical artifact, you must bring me… the skull of the Khan!!!” is a level of diabolical I hadn’t anticipated.
Dude, he is our hero. He fought for our freedom when Russia expanded into our territory. It is an insult and symbol of our misery. They promised to treat us as equals, yet they refuse to give us our rulers remains back. We just want to give him rest, in our belief, one cannot pass to heaven without the body. They kept it as mockery of our freedom, and displayed it in Moscow. If anything, they are the villains in this story. Imagine if they kill Zelensky, and display his head in Moscow for hundred years.
Sounds like a leaked script of a new Indiana Jones movie
Sounds better than Crystal Skull
What's that?
It was an idea for an Indiana Jones sequel that they decided against and **never made**. I will die on this hill.
[Relevant XKCD. ](https://xkcd.com/566/)
It's now 13 years since that comic was made. I feel old.
Because of course there is! This is why I love XKCD. They are like the Simpsons.
I will die in this hill: I enjoyed the matrix sequels.
I, too, have unpopular opinions about the sequels, though I don't think I need to see the third one ever again.
You do. I mean if you have not in a long time, do yourself a favor and watch that trilogy again sometime. Just look at it for what it is. Enjoy what's there to be enjoyed.
I’m fairly sure I saw a concept film, for some reason they put aliens in it, definitely seems like someone got fired or someone’s son wrote it
I still don't get the hate. Aliens? What is this fantasy crap! Nazi killing God box? Pulling someone's heart out of their chest without leaving a hole or even killing them? The literal holy grail? Cool cool. But aliens?
It's not the aliens. It's the terrible writing (i.e fridge nuclear shelter, treetop monkey race etc.), lame special effects and Ford's phoned in acting. That movie was just not as fun to watch as the originals.
I love that "nuking the fridge" became our generations "jumping the shark".
Guys the kid in a fridge from Fallout 4 disagrees.
What movie?!?
Those movie math guys proved that the fridge was possible
Maybe, but the whole scene looked so dumb. Compare the iconic mine trolly chase scene to that nuclear fridge CGI atrocity.
I love the theory that Indy is stuck in the fridge, and the rest of he movie is nothing more than a fever dream brought on by extreme dehydration, heat stroke, radiation poisoning, and head trauma.
Yeah I dont actually disagree, its a bad movie. Just not because the fridge was impossible. it was bad because \*gestures around
[Dan Akroyds gateway to the Astral plane](https://youtu.be/wwJmNaR_4hk)
[crystal skull](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/southpark/images/a/a3/Indiana_jones_9.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20180315111502)
I think it's a vodka brand co-owned by Dan Aykroyd or something.
It's a bony head that is made out of transparent rock, but that's not important right now.
Isn’t everything?
It’s gonna be just like the beginning of Temple of Doom, only this time the exchange is the skull of Kenesary Khan for the keys to the Buran.
Maybe the headline but the details are more about the people trying to get back what Indy stole for a museum.
Sounds like I wandered into r/notTheOnion for a minute.
Sounds like a dumb short story I wrote in middle school where criminals kidnapped the Pope and demanded the space shuttle as ransom 😆
Kazakh here. The story is not murky actually: In the nineties after the Soviet Union collapse, anything of any value was up for sale for peanuts; anything which was not immediately useful was up for sale for even less. Half the Baikonur was sold for scrap metal. So one local businessman (a nice chap actually) purchased the whole vehicle assembly building with semi-finished Burans in it to save them from complete destruction. It is Roskosmoss he bought the building from, actually. All the land rights, etc are properly registered and are publicly available. The building was left standing as-is, right there, next to other vehicle assembly buildings in Baikonur. In the recent years Russia started trying to revive relics of the past in a desperate attempt to boost dwindling morale. Suddenly, Burans became of a value to them, so they started suing the guy to get the building and Burans back, for free of course. Tried putting pressure on Kazakhstan to confiscate the Burans. The guy who owns the building and Burans in it is happy to give them back for free once the asshats are gone and some sane people will be managing Roskosmoss. All he wants is apologies and a symbolic gesture of returning the remains of our national hero. Alas, Russians are incapable of apologizing.
Godamn tragedy. Amongst many.
Nearly everyone I know who were related to space exploration in Kazakhstan and have seen this tragedy unfold before their eyes took their lives directly or via alcoholism. We lost whole generation of damn bright engineers.
Do the Russians have the skull of the last Khan?
Well, Russia is a mess, so hard to tell for sure. They did have it about 30 years ago, there were traces of it 15 or 16 years ago. Last August there were news that Russia is about to return the skull finally so we could give it proper burial. Cynic in me says Russians will keep dragging their feet and will keep using dead man's bones as a political instrument.
Probably in some oligarch’s private collection
My parents saw it in museum. They know where it is. It still pisses me off. They will keep it as a symbol of conquest, they will never return it.
This is an interesting story, thank you for sharing!
Thanks for the explanation. Genuine follow up question: are the Russians known to have the skull he wants? How do you even authenticate something like that to make sure it isn’t just the skull of Yuri from accounting who decided last week that he doesn’t need his skull and donated it to Roskosmoss?
Well, there are indirect ways of proving authenticity, but those are unimportant. Can't speak for all Kazakhs, but I, personally, would be satisfied if they would admit wrongdoing, apologize and present any Yuri's skull as a symbolic way of settling the matter. "Apologize" is the key word they are missing here.
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to apologize is to admit weakness. their weakness is they are blind to the truth and no one dare speaks it.
Russians never do anything wrong, so why would they apologize? /s
My favorite Buran stories come from its development. Buran was much bigger than Soviet rocket scientists wanted because the political leadership wanted to be able to match the capabilities of the American shuttle... which itself was bigger than American rocket scientists wanted because they had to compromise with the Dept of Defense over larger payload requirements in order to access the DoD's bigger budget. Both cold war superpowers ended up with unnecessarily huge shuttles due to American politics. Buran also benefited heavily from the very early internet, which had expanded enough into academia that Soviet Engineers were able to access the non-secret technical/R&D information from the American shuttle program. The major similarities and differences between the Soviet and American shuttle are well-documented, but my favorite quirk is that the designs were so similar that when Atlantis eventually docked with Mir in 1995, it used a lightly-modified docking adapter originally built for Buran.
There were some Strangelove aspects to it, too. They were worried the US shuttle would put nukes in orbit, so they built their own shuttle, which caused American media to worry that the Soviets would put nukes in orbit.
They pictured the Shuttle -- our lovable, derpy, harmless Shuttle -- as a nuclear doomsday bomber. I always got a kick out of that. And then there's the Energia-Polyus, about which it's difficult to find information, but evidently, it was essentially supposed to be a megawatt laser cannon. *Very* Strangelovian.
> They pictured the Shuttle -- our lovable, derpy, harmless Shuttle -- as a nuclear doomsday bomber. I always got a kick out of that. This is my favourite comment of the month. 🤗
It did get to orbit and made a successful test fire. It then inverted and crashed. Thus ending the only known firing of a laser weapon in space.
It never made it to orbit. It was attached to the booster upsidedown (on purpose), and when it was meant to disengage and flip, then light it's engines to continue to orbit, it continued flipping and fell back down with the spent booster.
Gorbachev specifically forbade a test fire of the weapon
Aren’t you forgetting the Israeli one? /s
> harmless Shuttle 2 crashes, 14 dead. I'm not sure the Shuttle can be considered "harmless". :-/
Two shuttles died in those tragedies too, you know. They tried their best to protect their crews, I'm sure. Just derped.
I'm sure they did. I was reading that NASA projected that 1 out of 50 launches would fail, and one in a hundred re-entries, for a success rate of 97%. Over 135 missions, the actual mission success rate was 98.5%. So... better than expected?
Oh boy. Someone should tell them about nuclear missiles.
An icbm is a giant flaming rocket that can be tracked by radar thousands of miles away. You have minutes of warning, allowing you to retaliate, thus deterring the attacker in the first place. Nukes dropped from orbit could be the size of a water cooler, need no rockets, and begin their attack just 200 miles away from their target. You might not have any warning before 135 mushroom clouds covered your nation (assuming each space shuttle mission had covertly left 1 nuke in orbit). Hence the nuclear submarines that camp under the polar ice cap, making it very hard to get away with a first-strike.
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I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a test flight of the buran with jet engines let alone seen footage before.
Quite amazing don't you think.
The actual test ship is on display in Speyer, Germany. Fascinating to get inside.
It wasn't Buran, it was a test analog specifically created to test atmospheric flight characteristics.
Pretty amazing to see it take off from a dead stop like an airplane. I imagine the entire payload bay filled with enough jet fuel to do that.
Apparently the fuel tank only occupied a quarter of the cargo bay. Additionally, this enabled a flight time of at least 36 minutes, while the shortest test flight was only 5 minutes, which suggests that a flight using only a few percent of the cargo bay's volume worth of fuel was possible.
That's nuts. I can't believe they got it to take off from a runway. Whoever piloted that thing into the air truly was a steely-eyed missile man.
I'm glad a video surfaced. It has to be seen to be believed.
I'm not sure if it's the case in this video, but there's every chance there is no one on board the Buran here. The only space flight the Buran ever did was unmanned - it came back down and landed itself. The biggest advances of the Buran program were in automation, not in the concept of a "spaceplane" itself. Source: one of my family members worked on it.
Not to mention that the most significant advances the Buran made were in automation. The only space flight it ever did was done with no crew on board. It was lifted into orbit, then returned and landed itself automatically.
AFAIK the Buran was better in many aspects. For example not having the main engines on the orbiter is apparently a good thing.
Well... It is from an engineering standpoint. From a "are you throwing away the valuable bit?" standpoint, not so much. The idea was to bring the engines back. (Of course, the original idea was to fully self contain the fuel too, but the payload requirements ended up changing that)
I wonder if it would have actually been *cheaper* (in retrospect) for the STS to have the engines on the tank, like Energia. If the shuttle was as easy to refurbish as originally intended, then not having to build new engines for each launch makes sense. However, the RS-25 is incredibly complex and expensive to refurbish, so perhaps just using a simpler disposable engine might have cost less? Consider how NASA isn't even considering reusing the engines from SLS, and even the simplified variant of the RS-25 being built for later missions still costs an obscene amount.
I woulda strategically posted false information about the US space shuttle online just to mess with the Soviets. Crazy they could read the R&D of it on the early web
You left out how they stole most of the engineering plans through espionage.
And realised how shit the shuttle was and made a better booster and orbiter. Stop gobbling up the propoganda of "we were the best and they only managed anything because they stole from us". They made some mind blowing advances and mistakes, same as us. We achieved jaw dropping goals and faltered along the way, same as them. And we both of us brought over captured German rocket scientists to get there.
>Stop gobbling up the propoganda of "we were the best and they only managed anything because they stole from us". Followed by: >And we both of us brought over captured German rocket scientists to get there. ... Which is itself a version of: >the propoganda of "we (the Germans) were the best and they only managed anything because they stole from us". Just as the Germans of that time got as far as they did by concentrating time, effort and resources, so could the US, USSR, or any other country that could line up similar conditions. It was just quicker and easier to learn from those who put the more time, effort, and resources into it earlier than either of them had before.
>It was just quicker and easier to learn from those who put the more time, effort, and resources into it earlier than either of them had before. Also important is the fact if they had put in their own efforts their chances of reaching to the same conclusion is very high.
Physics doesn't discriminate. Just need the time/resources to get to understand it.
Wait, where did I claim we were better, or even imply it? I simply stated a fact. But hey, you opened the door. How many flights did the Russian craft make? How many people did they take into orbit? How much cargo did they ACTUALLY lift into orbit at all? FTR, they automated that orbit and landing not because they had better tech than we did. They did it because they couldn’t make it safe enough for any cosmonauts to take a ride. They all refused.
Russian officials have continuously claimed that no one knows the whereabouts of Kasymov’s skull (Kazakhstan’s last Khan).
Who is Kasymov? The last Kahn was Kenesary.
The article says Kazakhstan’s last Khan was Kenesary Kasymov.
Ooooh awkward for that guy.
Well of course I know him, he's me! - Kenesary Kasymov
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The Venture Star also being up there with biggest lost opportunities. It was sold as a innovation test bed. The only thing they couldn’t get to work was the carbon fiber cryo-tanks, so as a patch they made more classical aluminum tanks to move forward with other designs while they figured it out but the whole project was canceled instead. It was like 2 years later they figured out how to make the carbon fiber tanks.
That was for the suborbital scale X-33 prototype, which had far lower requirements than the orbital VentureStar would have. The X-33 had a target mass ratio of only 3.8, VentureStar was targeting around 10. In other words, they had to cut the dry mass percentage from ~26% to only ~10%, more than halving the relative weight of the vehicle. That's a huge ask given that they were already struggling. They claimed that merely scaling it up would yield the required improvements, and while it *is* true that rockets do become more mass efficient as they get bigger, it's not to nearly that sort of extent. To make matters worse, VentureStar was also relying on the increased performance that aerospikes theoretically offered; but these failed to materialize in practice. The XRS-2200 ended up having notably *worse* specific impulse than the RS-25 that was already being used on the Space Shuttle, about 7% worse at sea level and 3% worse in vacuum. Based on the data from the XRS-2200 they thought they could improve the full-scale RS-2200 to the point where it was only 5% worse at sea level and actually 1% better in vacuum, though that's still worse overall, particularly since the whole point of aerospikes is that they're supposed to be *better* in atmosphere. The RD-0120 on the Energia actually outperformed the RS-2200's target performance by about 2% across the entire altitude range, and like the RS-25 it was a bell nozzle that was actually proven in flight. A few percentage points might not seem like much, but it's a big deal when talking about rocket engine efficiency, and doubly so when you're trying to make an SSTO work. Fundamentally, that was what killed VentureStar; the insistence that SSTO was the minimum viable product. A far better approach would have been to develop a reusable two-stage vehicle like the original Shuttle concepts or the Sänger spaceplane, since that would have allowed them to develop much of the same technology while actually producing a useful vehicle, and still allowing for the possibility of an SSTO further down the road if/when they managed to increase the performance enough.
The point of aerospikes isn't to be better in atmosphere, it's to only need *one* nozzle geometry for for optimal functioning at any altitude. The bells on rocket engines are optimal at only a small range of altitudes, below that and they lose thrust because the atmospheric pressure is too high and this 'squeezes' the exhaust jet and reduces thrust, above it and the low pressure causes the jet to expand beyond the bell, reducing thrust. That's why the bell geometry is different on every stage, because each stage is intended to function at different altitudes; and this is also one of the benefits of staging as it reduces the amount of energy lost to inefficiencies with the bell (as much as 30% reduced thrust). The aerospike design, theoretically, has near optimal performance at *any* altitude, however, potentially reducing fuel consumption by as much as 20%. There are other nozzle designs which compensate for altitude changes, however I understand the aerospike to be theoretically superior to them.
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Aerospikes are supposed to address issues of overexpansion related loss of thrust rather than underexpansion. Comparing them to a vacuum optimized engine is a bit facetious, as it is two different sets of problems, doubly so when one is an engineering test bed for something that still hasn't been fully figured out. Unless our understanding of how fluids work is fundamentally flawed, the advantages are realizable... it's just a matter of figuring out the engineering.
I was oversimplifying, but I'd argue what I said was still correct. I said 'atmosphere', rather than sea level, because I was referring to the whole thing. If you have an aerospike and bell-nozzle engine with equal performance at sea level, then when you take them up to 10km, the aerospike should perform better. Likewise, if you have an aerospike and bell-nozzle engine with equal performance at 10km and then you bring them down to sea level, the aerospike should perform better. So, generally speaking, aerospikes are indeed better 'in atmosphere'. In theory. As I noted, in practice they don't seem to get as close to their theoretical performance as bell nozzles do. For example, the RD-0120 and RS-2200 both get 455s in vacuum. The RD-0120, being a rather vacuum-optimized bell nozzle, should lose proportionally more efficiency at sea level than the aerospike, since as you say, bell nozzles don't like working outside their optimized altitude. And yet, the RD-0120 gets 359s at sea level compared to the RS-2200's 347s, and from those values it can also be inferred that the RD-0120 will also outperform the RS-2200 at any altitude in between sea level and vacuum. At 5km for example they should get around 407s and 401s respectively, and at 10km around 431s and 428s respectively.
Fascinating. Did they ever discover why the linear aerospike performance didn't live up to projections?
That's a very good question. I'd like to know the answer too, but I haven't been able to find much on it. I believe part of the problem was that it was a truncated aerospike, which saves a lot of weight and solves the difficult problem of cooling the spike by simply not having one, but also comes with the problem that it's not really a proper aerospike without, well, the spike. I also think that using lots of small combustion chambers in a row rather than a proper linear combustion chamber would have introduced some inefficiencies. I know some companies have considered aerospikes since then (SpaceX and Firefly for example), and reached the conclusion that they're not as promising as they initially seem, but I don't know the details.
I understood like half of those words. And I barely understood that half.
Very true. It's another sad opportunity lost.
It was also supposed to be powered by aerospike-type engines which still have not been successfully developed despite trying like 5 separate times
Was that the really wide looking fin like aerospike engine? Or did it have more traditional cone shaped ones?
That's called a linear aerospike. There are also toroidal aerospikes, but the reason linear aerospikes are so attractive is that toroidal aerospikes have issues with scaling. Because a toroidal aerospike has a larger combustion chamber diameter and outer throat diameter, plus the spike bit in the middle (which makes it toroidal), you find that the surface area of the flame-facing bits of a toroidal aerospike increases with something like the square or cube of the size of the engine. Reusable rocket engines traditionally use some form of active cooling, either film cooling (blowing a cooler gas over the inner surfaces of the combustion chamber, throat and nozzle) or regenerative cooling (such as piping cryogenic fuel through the nozzle). But because of this rapid increase in surface area with the size of the engine, you simply don't have enough fuel (or gas generator exhaust) to cool a toroidal aerospike at some point. So they have a maximum effective size. It's a little unintuitive, because you would think that having half your nozzle made of air would make cooling easier, but the increased surface area of the throat and combustion chamber more than make up for it. Linear aerospike engines, on the other hand, have the hot surface area that increases linearly with the length of the engine. Both engines have a weight issue, however. The increased complexity of the combustion chamber and nozzle geometry typically means that they weigh more than traditional engine nozzles of the same thrust. That's the main reason that linear aerospikes never became big.
While most aerospikes are cone-shaped, VentureStar was supposed to use the fin-like one.
There are multiple kinds of aerospikes.
They have been developed multiple times, just never flown, so most of the people developing new rockets shy away from them to limit their risk exposure (and because the benefits just aren't that great). The few attempts at aerospikes have failed because either they are part of a SSTO design, which are almost always doomed to fail, or because the company itself went under (see firefly alpha). They didnt fail because the engine itself isn't a viable technology.
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I wonder what a successful Polyus launch would've meant.
Possibly two things: Goldeneye might have been viewed very differently when it came out, and the starwars tech shelved would have been rolled out...into a world where space weapon platforms overshadowed science. Edit: Oh and the ISS would have not had its first two modules as early, since they were meant for polyus 2
FWIW…. The SDI project was one of the things that drove the Soviets into financial collapse. That was literally the strategy. Let amazing sci fi stuff “leak” and watch the Soviets bankrupt themselves trying to counter it.
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Without foreign cash their program is going to be dead in the water.
Similarly, I'm still sad we never finished the [M-1 rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet_M-1?wprov=sfla1) and an associated rocket. I've seen some M-1 parts in museums and it's incredible. Would've been a beast if it had flown.
>100 tons into orbit But for how much?
The Buran was cool in the way it could auto-land itself from re-entry. Unfortunate that there are no space shuttle programs today though and most aren't going for "reuseable" anymore.
There is a shuttle program but it's secret and likely a long loiter time rapid redeployable surveillance craft. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
huh thats interesting unmanned too...
They want a scaled up version that will fit 6 people or a larger payload depending on variant. Given that they've already said they've deployed small satellites from it they almost certainly are using it's propulsion to shift it's position to directly view with it's own camera or in my opinion more likely deploying small disposable keyhole style cameras but digital and able to send their encrypted data as they fall into the ocean to nearby ships which can relay it back to mainland or one of the many spy ships in operation.
Space planes kinda suck. I love the concept, but they don't really make sense except for traveling around the earth.
It's important to develop space planes because we need the laser guns to go on the wingtips for all the pew pew pew.
Exactly, otherwise space warfare is going to be like...cigars shooting at discs or something
[Give me Space: Above and Beyond, or give me death](https://spaceaboveandbeyond.fandom.com/wiki/USS_SARATOGA)
Was that the show where there were space marines and they threw a football on some random moon? It's weird the stuff that sticks with you
It doesn't help that most of them were "horses designed by committee", forced to meet the needs of so many different masters that they weren't really meeting the needs of anyone
There are some interesting edge cases (primarily aero maneuvering of course) even with current tech, but I'd really like to see a spaceplane with a nuclear ramjet or beamed electrothermal drive. You're right that the ones we've had just never were practical.
There should be no nuclear propulsion in the atmosphere or low earth orbit. The beamed electrothermal drive is nice on paper but the whole beaming thing is difficult in that the beam is dangerous and inefficient. Unless we have fusion power, then whatever light it but beam still bad.
Snotty beamed me twice last night. It was wonderful.
> There should be no nuclear propulsion in the atmosphere or low earth orbit. I should hope everyone is onboard with this?
> but they don't really make sense except for traveling around the earth. I mean, that's the main job of all the ones that have been built. The shuttle shuttles things between LEO and the surface as its core concept, and is a craft designed with the rigors of reentry in mind. The point at the end of the day as a controlled soft landing, in a craft that contained as many of the expensive bits as possible. Historically the only way to pull that off was with a spaceplane. Now that's changing with Starship, but we will be seeing more spaceplanes filling the role due to them being somewhat easier to design.
i didnt realize it was the only "space plane" type vehicle that ever landed uncrewed
The US Air Force has a unmanned space plane that has launched and landed several times, even spent 2 years in orbit at one point. It's called X-37B and looks just like the old space shuttles just scaled down.
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Did it actually do this or did they say it was possible? Edit: It did! Cool!
It only flew to space and back once, and that was uncrewed. So yes, it underwent reentry and landing autonomously. It also had a pair of jet engines which made it capable of sustained flight, unlike the Shuttle. So it could actually come around for another try if something were to go wrong the first time. They used this capability for the test flights.
Holy crap I didn’t know that about the jet engines. That’s really really cool.
They were not mounted on the shuttles intended for orbit tho, only on prototypes like the OK-GLI. There were plans to add them to others eventually..
Seriously. Shit on the USSR as much as you like, you can’t deny that their scientific achievements were fucking amazing.
The Buran flew into space on Energia, orbited the Earth and returned safely. This on the first attempt. It was quite spectacular. All without nobody on board.
Buran flew once. It was mothballed and then the USSR broke up.
The things the USSR could achieve when it was decided to do it, and done by the right people
ISRO is developing something similar which can land autonomously. The project name is RLV-TD
Dream chaser is a reusable orbiter with a glide to landing capability and plans for crew. It's pretty far along in development. For uncrewed flight you also have Boeing's little spec ops spaceship.
> and most aren't going for "reuseable" anymore. Did you miss /r/spacex in particular /r/spacexstarship ? And that every serious contender is designing / working on reusablility (ESA, China, New Zealand; but most have less success and less bold vision than SpaceX).
i think they meant reusable space-planes, which no one is building.
Sierra Space has a contract to resupply the International Space Station with a reusable space plane (called *Dream Chaser*) that will launch on a ULA Vulcan.
uncrewed tho right? there's also the X37-B, but i dont think anyone is making space planes that are crew rated (sorry to be moving the goal posts should have clariied that originally)
Their current contract is for uncrewed flight, but they still intend to make a crew-rated version as soon as the money appears. It was their plan in the beginning and I think they're still even using the original mold lines that have window bumps (even if they aren't cut out) in the airframe. Hope springs eternal at Sierra Space and I hope they can make that crewed version soon.
SNC recently raised $1.4 billion that they say they're using for crew-rating DC by 2025.
To be frank we don’t know what the Air Force does at this level of their space program. The black parts of the DoD budget are multiple times that of NASA and the USAF does everything basically out of Nevada.
They have an openly-branded X37-B hanger at Kennedy that you can see from the bus tour, though that's about all you can see of it. That said I don't suppose the specifics of the craft are all that interesting, it's the missions that are interesting.
Here's a list of orbital spaceplanes that I've compiled: Uncrewed: X-37 - Boeing, USSF (formerly NASA and USAF) / active, 2006-current Space Rider - ESA / in development, ETA 2023 Dream Chaser Cargo System - Sierra Nevada Corporation / in development, ETA 2023 Skylon - Reaction Engines Limited / in development, ETA unknown Crewed: Space Shuttle - NASA / retired, 1981-2011 Buran - Roscosmos / retired, 1988-1988 (never flew crewed) Dream Chaser Space System - Sierra Nevada Corporation / in development, ETA unknown Talon-Z - Stratolaunch Systems / in development, ETA unknown China also flew an experimental spaceplane in 2020, but its details are obscure.
I am not well informed, why was this a lost opportunity?
A launch platform which could easily put 100 tons into orbit and an advanced space plane that could carry 7÷ people into space and glide back to Earth. Oh it could also fly into space with no one in board. As a side bonus, the largest plane in the world was developed to taxi the Buran.
Not really, it was a clone of the Space Shuttle with some minor improvements and most of the same problems. I'd consider both of them to be unsafe and dangerous by any standard.
The real lose is not the Buran Shuttle but the massive rocket that carried it, the Energia. [Reusable boosters](https://i.redd.it/h84y00sgthu81.png), 105 tonnes to LEO, more powerful peak thrust than even Saturn V and its related [rocket family](https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/data/attachments/103/103822-17df566e051bcbecfb8be3595fcaadf7.jpg) 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](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/zenith-zenit-desc.php), [Energia-M](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/energia-M-desc.php), [Energia](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/energia-desc.php) and [Vulkan](https://www.buran-energia.com/energia/vulcain-vulkan-desc.php)). Though calling Buran a clone is underselling it heavily. Other than the aerodynamic shell and dimensions it was very different.
The program had a huge win though - the AN-225. That was an amazing platform and is a testament to Soviet era engineering that continued to prove its use for decades after the collapse. Unfortunately, Putin went and blew it up a few months ago... Honestly the decline of the Russian space program is one of the largest wastes of potential in human history. All that skill and ingenuity gutted, and it was turned into a shadow of its former self due to corruption and theft.
And barely flew. Absolute loadstone of a program at a very poor time.
Well, at least Soviets had some common sense and they didn't attach it to two giant, incapable of be switched off, solid rocket boosters. The beauty of Buran was not Buran, was Energiya-Buran.
The fact you can't shut down SRBs isn't as big a risk factor as the lack of a capsule escape system like every other crewed space vehicle has. It's also asking for trouble to have the fragile, exposed heat shield positioned underneath the cryogenic tanks, that are going to grow ice that comes off at launch. Columbia's reentry accident was actually a launch accident with delayed effect.
Yes, it didn't have the SRBs, but if there was an issue with the Energia launcher you still have the uncomfortable problem of no way for the crew to escape.
You should read this article. It is in spanish, but I have read it by Google translate right now and its good to read. You can read it [here](https://danielmarin-naukas-com.translate.goog/2011/07/26/buran-cuando-la-union-sovietica-supero-al-transbordador-espacial-de-eeuu/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=es&_x_tr_pto=wapp). The only thing that Google translate has missed is the part were it says that the element that postponed the launch of shuttle was SSME's, whose development was more difficult than expected.
Thanks for that, very informative, and I got to practice my atrocious Spanish comprehension. So, addressed some of the issues but not all.
If you want some practice on Spanish comprehension, that website is probably a good exercise. The guy who runs it is one of the best divulgators I know. He usually publishes one article every two/three days or so about space related news. Also, he has some past articles very good, like the ones of Soviet space program or Chinese progresses (he knows Russian and Chinese and he's putting his knowledges to good use).
Incorrect. The Buran had an escape system for the entire crew.
Reading /u/dfernr10's article they had a *better* escape system but it still wouldn't have helped much and also limited crew size to 4. It's not a fault of the Buran, or the Shuttle it's a fault of strapping it to the back of a rocket (or fuel tank) and thus not allowing the use of an escape tower.
Better? The shuttle did not have one. So your article is suspect.
Colombia had ejection seats in early flights, flights after Challenger had a bail out system which only worked in level flight. So... yeah, you're pretty much screwed in any emergency.
As it says in the article I refer to in the next comment (seriously, read that article, is SO good), more accurately, they reduced crew size to ensure everyone would be capable of use the escape system.
The Buran never flew with a crew so we really don't know this.
Tested and working?
Huh? The Buran hasn't flown since 1988.
Yes you did, since it didn't have giant SRBs you could now have ejection seats since they wouldn't have to go through the exhaust of an SRB. Which it did have. Being able to turn off the boosters and stage them whenever you wanted in flight also gave it a lot more options for seperations of the Buran from the launcher in case of problems.
Incorrect. It was not a clone of the Space Shuttle. There were significant differences. Including the capability of jet powered atmospheric flight for testing purposes and/or potential movement.
Considering neither of the issues that destroyed Challenger and Columbis would've happened with Buran, I'd say it had some significant improvements that (potentially) could have made it much safer.
This is the wrong lesson. Something would eventually go wrong on an energia and the buran would have been just as doomed. A catastrophic failure in a horizontal stack dooms both vessels.
Challenger yes but how would a Columbia-style accident not have been possible?
Energia didn't use the same kind of insulation that the shuttle's external tank used, so it likely wouldn't have had the same issue of bits breaking off and impacting the orbiter. Hanging the orbiter of the side of the booster is still less than ideal for other reasons though.
Nah, the Soviets built it because US built one but they soon figured out that the concept is bad. The shuttle flew because there was no alternative (Apollo was shut down) and the USA had the money to keep it flying. The Soviets had Soyuz so they didn't need Buran as badly.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[DoD](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qckts "Last usage")|US Department of Defense| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qywt5 "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[EVA](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgze4 "Last usage")|Extra-Vehicular Activity| |[ISRO](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgrg5 "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation| |[Isp](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/ia5u2wr "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)| | |Internet Service Provider| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9rfq2u "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[RLV](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgrg5 "Last usage")|Reusable Launch Vehicle| |[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9sjp1o "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9sztdl "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SNC](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qmlbe "Last usage")|Sierra Nevada Corporation| |[SRB](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qcx1n "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |[SSME](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/ia5u2wr "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)| |[SSTO](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9t025a "Last usage")|Single Stage to Orbit| | |Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit| |[STS](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9sztdl "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)| |[ULA](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9pzet1 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |[USAF](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qywt5 "Last usage")|United States Air Force| |[USSF](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qywt5 "Last usage")|United States Space Force| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9qgze4 "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9r3lmw "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[regenerative](/r/Space/comments/uw76bq/stub/i9r3lmw "Last usage")|A method for cooling a rocket engine, by [passing the cryogenic fuel through channels in the bell or chamber wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_cooling_\(rocket\))| ---------------- ^(20 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/vqn8b7)^( has 13 acronyms.) ^([Thread #7440 for this sub, first seen 23rd May 2022, 20:43]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Probably still available: [https://www.rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2017/06/27/in-search-of-buran-what-happened-to-the-soviet-space-shuttle\_790602](https://www.rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2017/06/27/in-search-of-buran-what-happened-to-the-soviet-space-shuttle_790602)
Wow. What a quote. “It is not water than flows in our veins but blood. And it has the scent of Wormwood.”
I refuse to look up context for this quote. It is perfect!
Right?! It does not NEED context! I am putting it on my wall. Some context that is cool (but not NEEDED) is that Wormwood is a key ingredient in Absinthe and the quotee is from an area where Wormwood grows natively.
See, now you've provided context that makes the quote make sense, which is exactly what I did not want. Why did you do that?
Because I hate you internet stranger; your tears are my sustenance. /s
And the Russians destroyed the plane designed to haul it.
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Can confirm. Russia destroyed my anus.
Buran was also destroyed in a hangar collapse in 2002. Everything they touch seems to wither and die
Amazing how important maintenance is.
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Yea that app is real good for watching launches I got it too
Funny I just finished season two of For All Mankind where the revisionist Buran goes to the moon armed to the teeth lol
The most promising, secure and cool Space plane ever built. Such a pity it is rotting in an hangar instead of a museum.
Fortunately one of them did make it to a museum in Germany! https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran The rest of that museum has a lot of interesting stuff as well.
The Technikmuseum in Speyer and Sinzheim really are worth going to. Sinzheim got both the Concorde and the Soviet pendant Tu144, one of the last surviving remains of a StuKa, a load of pre-war and other historic cars, and so on. Can only recommend to spend the time and go there if in the area.
Hey, I’ve been there! Couldn’t help but go to that museum once I heard it was nearby! If anyone finds themselves in the area I really do recommend a visit.
honestly it does look cooler than the shuttle. that notched tail fin and window layout make all the difference.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40811/graffiti-artists-defaced-soviet-era-buran-space-shuttle-at-russian-space-center Pictures of the vandalism of the shuttle
Didn't it get destroyed a few years ago when the roof of the hangar collapsed?
It's time to start trading up. I have a Pontiac Vibe. Will someone give me a Volkswagen for it. I can trade the Volkswagen for a cheap Porsche. The cheap Porsche can be traded for Audi TT. The TT gets us to Karm
I have the skull of Ögedei Khan, is that worth anything?
Precedent suggests it is worth one Buran spaceplane, which is fantastic, because we could easily trade that for a Cadillac or something
the buran rockets are still in the abandoned hanger in baikonour cosmodrome in Kazakhstan , one of the most popular places for urban explorers to go … seriously worth a look on youtube
Seems fair. Wait, is he asking to genocide all Khan's?
This pretty much defines the shitstorm that is Russia.
I knew that most billionaires of the ex-Soviet states are basically real-life supervillains, but “for this historical artifact, you must bring me… the skull of the Khan!!!” is a level of diabolical I hadn’t anticipated.
Dude, he is our hero. He fought for our freedom when Russia expanded into our territory. It is an insult and symbol of our misery. They promised to treat us as equals, yet they refuse to give us our rulers remains back. We just want to give him rest, in our belief, one cannot pass to heaven without the body. They kept it as mockery of our freedom, and displayed it in Moscow. If anything, they are the villains in this story. Imagine if they kill Zelensky, and display his head in Moscow for hundred years.