
The life and death of Buran, the USSR shuttle built on faulty assumptions - pedrocr
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/09/the-life-and-death-of-buran-the-ussr-shuttle-built-on-faulty-assumptions/
======
molecule
The USSR should be commended on not throwing as much good money after bad as
the US did w/ the Space-Shuttle Program, which was built on even worse faulty
assumptions re: cost, reuse, safety, launch frequency, etc.

> When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost
> of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for
> inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or
> $60,000/kg (approximately $27,000 per pound) to LEO. This should be
> contrasted with the originally envisioned costs of $118 per kilogram
> (approximately $53 per pound) of payload in 1972 dollars ($1,400/kg,
> [approximately $630 per pound] adjusting for inflation to 2011)

> The launch rate was significantly lower than initially expected. While not
> reducing absolute operating costs, more launches per year gives a lower cost
> per launch. Some early hypothetical studies examined 55 launches per year
> (see above), but the maximum possible launch rate was limited to 24 per year
> based on manufacturing capacity of the Michoud facility that constructs the
> external tank. Early in shuttle development, the expected launch rate was
> about 12 per year. Launch rates reached a peak of 9 per year in 1985 but
> averaged fewer thereafter.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_program)

~~~
jlgreco
Damn straight. They built a _better_ shuttle, then had the common sense to
realize the idea was silly.

They were right about the Space Shuttle and the US military too; much of the
design of the Space Shuttle was influenced (compromised) by the DoD so that
the Shuttle would be able to get into polar orbits for military missions (such
as launching US spy satellites, and stealing Soviet spy satellites). These
design requirements forced them to design a shuttle with dimensions that were
not optimized for the missions the shuttle ultimately carried out.

One of the problems with the ultimate design is that the Shuttle stack relied
in part on the SSMEs to get into orbit. This meant that the fuel tank/SRBs
were worthless for anything other than getting the Shuttle into orbit, while
the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own
right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).

As for the Russians "ripping off" the Shuttle, I think the Encyclopedia
Astronautica article for the Energia engines is interesting:
[http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd0120.htm](http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd0120.htm)

~~~
rsynnott
> One of the problems with the ultimate design is that the Shuttle stack
> relied in part on the SSMEs to get into orbit.

In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were
rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.

> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its
> own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).

The engines used for its boosters, however, are used in modified form in the
Zenit (RD-171, like RD-170 with extra axis of movement) and Atlas V (RD-180;
size-reduced version) rockets, and will be used in Angara.

~~~
cpleppert
>>In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they
were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.

They were reused and were extremely efficient with a much higher unit cost
than the equivalent energia stack main engine. The Soviets intended to design
a carrier shuttle with reusable engines just like the US Shuttle but abandoned
the effort due to reliability concerns.

That is the whole point of the space shuttle design in any case. If you can't
reuse very powerful main engines that can be made to be very efficient there
is no point in using a shuttle-truck design in the first place.

> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its
> own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).

The energia was suboptimal for launching very large items due to its
requirement that payloads have to carried on the side. This increases the
weight due to atmospheric shielding that cannot be jettisoned and, more
importantly, means a third stage cannot be used for efficiency. Every payload
also has to be able to deploy itself into the correct orbit which requires
custom development for each launch payload. So while energia was powerful it
was very expensive as a standalone launch platform and never would have seen
much use and consequently was never seriously considered as a future
development platform.

The soviets would have done better just to develop a lh2/lox successor to the
failed n1 rocket in the first place; especially if they didn't think the
shuttle was going to be economical. Instead, they developed a sub-optimal
launch vehicle that was itself based on a flawed concept and they had every
intention of running the program out to the year 2000 even with a handful of
launches scheduled and development costs that were already higher than the US
shuttle.

~~~
jlgreco
Part of the problem with reusing SSMEs was that they burned hydrogen and
hydrogen embrittlement basically ensured that any sort of fast or cheap turn
around with SSMEs was impossible.

Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to work with if you want a reusable rocket. The
Space Shuttle was really only nominally reusable, the engines had to
practically be rebuilt every time to make sure everything was alright (the
SRBs were hardly any better, though at least they were simpler.) _(Really,
hydrogen is just a pain in the ass in general though. It isn 't very dense and
needs to be kept much cooler than LOX to boot (requiring all that foam on the
external tanks), which is why the Shuttle external tank had to be so goddamn
big. The massive efficiency of LOX/LH2 are somewhat mitigated by these
factors.)_

 _If_ SpaceX can get their F9R working well, that will likely be the first
properly reusable rocket (first stage anyway). Those will burn RP-1 which
won't suffer from hydrogen embrittlement.

The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus
on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they
discontinued Energia). Also, while the Energia _would_ have been suboptimal
for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they
ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg
and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely
suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.

~~~
cpleppert
Yeah, the SSME's were never as reusable as projected but their efficiency
helped to mitigate somewhat the massive cost in weight of the shuttle. If you
are committed to a shuttle design you might as well choose a very efficient
partially reusable engine over one with RP-1 or a less efficient lox/h20
engine with lower total costs. That isn't an argument in favor of the shuttle
just a reasonable design choice.

>>The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and
focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever
since they discontinued Energia).

I have to disagree with this. The soviets began developing LH2/LOX
technologies immediately after the N1 failure for the same reason that the
Saturn V used LH2/LOX as an upper stage fuel: it is hard to make the math work
for massive rockets that only consume RP-1. The weight penalty on the upper
stages is just too large to be cost effective. You might as well pay the cost
of LH2/LOX development if you intend to launch super heavy payloads.

>>Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it
still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put
32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never
realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort
of thing, it was worthless.

If the criteria for deciding between SLS/Buran-Energia is which one can launch
the most payload then, yes, you would choose Energia. This wasn't an intended
benefit of Energia and was simply due to reliability concerns about reusing
rocket engines(especially with fuel sources that the Soviets didn't have
experience with).

It is hard to evaluate the cost of reusing Energia technology and developing a
new booster that would be more optimal going forward. If the Soviets had the
money and the political foresight to cancel Buran they might have been able to
do it and use Soyuz and Energia together.

------
rdtsc
One of the remnants of the Buran to this day is an ancestor of its programming
environment -- DRAKON. It is a visual programming language. Unlike others, it
seems this one has had quite a bit of thought put into it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON)

I don't think it is enough to make it popular, but it is nevertheless an
interesting niche. There is a small community still building and exploring it.

There is a DRAKON editor, with target languages like Javascript, Erlang, C++
and others. Here is the DRAKON editor program:

[http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/](http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/)

EDIT: (adding some interesting translated tid bits from Parondjanov's
writings)

If you happen to speak Russian it is also quite an interesting read to go over
author's (Parondjanov) writing on programming in general:

[http://drakon.pbworks.com/w/page/18205516/FrontPage](http://drakon.pbworks.com/w/page/18205516/FrontPage)

He talks about visual programming languages. He defines provocative terms like
"intellectual terrorism" and how information overload (he calls it
"information stress") is akin to terrorism for the minds of workers tasked to
tease out the solution to the problem. It often stems from an impedance
mismatched between old methods of solving problems and processing information
and the new type and amount of information available. Mind you this was
written in the 80's before big data. His environment was building tools to
write the avionics system for Buran. Many of the engineers involved were not
computer scientists, there were mechanical, chemical, airspace engineers. He
was probably wondering how to get them to program better and how to make the
whole process more efficient and less stressful for them.

~~~
pplante
i have never seen this programming environment. its a fascinating concept
which resembles the Scratch project out of MIT.

modern scripting languages make iterating software much simpler. however,
there are times when i feel having a drag and drop gui such as this to
assemble complex operations would be really helpful. i know of modeling tools
such as UML are used in the planning phase. but wouldn't it make sense to have
a high level overview of your software? is there anything like this for
python, javascript, or ruby?

~~~
christoph
While completely commercial, Ventuz is a worthy note in software that somewhat
follows this concept -
[https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4007/4418935939_6b3471b34b_o....](https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4007/4418935939_6b3471b34b_o.jpg)

For a much longer list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language)

------
InclinedPlane
Soviet technological development was a very weird universe. They had a lot of
very talented scientists and engineers and were certainly capable of coming up
with many novel innovations on their own. However, within the communist soviet
system politics ruled everything. Whether or not a project would receive
support was utterly dependent on political factors, which could be affected by
prior success of course, but not always. Soviet leadership put a heavy
emphasis on espionage in guiding technological development, sometimes without
much critical thinking. This goes back to the days of WWII spying on the
Manhattan project and copying of captured B-29's into the nearly identical
Tu-4. But you see many other projects in the same vein, such as the Tu-144
(Concordski) and of course Buran.

The fascinating thing about Buran is that the Shuttle was built with a really
very bizarre set of functional requirements that imposed steep demands on the
design of the vehicle but which turned out to be mostly useless in a practical
sense and were not actually meaningfully used during the lifetime of the
vehicle. For example, the large wings on the Shuttle give it a very high
cross-range flight capability during re-entry, but that was only a requirement
because it was thought that the Shuttle would perform a particular kind of
military mission. A polar launch which would deploy a satellite, or perform
other activities, in one orbit and return to the launch site. Such missions
never materialized, and such missions were unlikely to be valuable to the
Soviets at all. And yet that requirement dictated the size of the wings which
forced the frame to be larger and heavier, which reduced the payload, and
which created a larger area that needed thermal protection (an issue which
contributed to the loss of Columbia, for example), and so forth. A clean sheet
design without such a requirement should have had much smaller wings and thus
be a more capable and more reliable design, but Buran copied the Shuttle too
closely and ended up with all of the faults of the Shuttle design without a
good reason for them.

~~~
avmich
Western media is used to accuse Soviet system in technology copying. However
sometimes the accusations go a little bit too far. Particularly in the
aerospace area it would be naive to deny the Soviets their prowess - with
Buran, which differs significantly from the Shuttle (see the article above),
with Tu-144, which flew before Concord, not to mention today's half-broken
Soviet-era technology which manages to lift about half of world space payloads
to orbit and provides West with rocket technology - RD-180 for Atlas, NK-33
for Antares etc.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I picked my examples carefully, every single one is an example of a determined
Soviet espionage operation.

That doesn't discount Soviet prowess in technological innovation, but it's
still very much the truth.

As I mentioned, the Buran has many close similarities to the Shuttle. It has
many differences as well but the shocking thing about the similarities is that
they don't make any sense except in regards to attempting to copy the Shuttle.

Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know that
the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as possible.

~~~
rsynnott
> It has many differences as well but the shocking thing about the
> similarities is that they don't make any sense except in regards to
> attempting to copy the Shuttle.

The major similarity is the physical configuration of the orbiter, no? This
was, indeed, a deliberate copy; cut down on the aerodynamic testing required.
Most other details of the system were really quite different (particularly the
engines; outboard solid fuel and internal reusable hydrogen for the shuttle,
with a separate tank, outboard kerosene and external expendable (though with
reusable designs studied for a future upgrade) hydrogen for Buran).

> Regardless of the capabilities of their scientists and engineers we know
> that the Soviets were obsessed with copying as much western technology as
> possible.

There isn't really that much of that going on in Buran. Again, the booster
engines are an obvious example; the US had largely abandoned building
efficient kerosene engines (they're very expensive to develop) by the time of
the shuttle programme.

~~~
avmich
To choose the shape, the easier path was taken: this one works, so let's
safely do the same.

That doesn't mean that the choice wasn't analyzed and justified, not that
aerodynamic testing wasn't done - for examples, picture here -
[http://buran.ru/htm/history.htm](http://buran.ru/htm/history.htm) \- show the
evolution of the overall architecture, where the Shuttle scheme was just one
of the considered factors.

------
stretchwithme
The coolest thing is how the first (and only) voyage, including the landing,
was completely automated.

Its one thing to drop an unmanned capsule into the ocean, quite another to
land it on a runway. Of course, drones do it all the time these days. But this
was 27 years ago.

~~~
lgieron
Aren't drones (at least the more sophisticated ones, akin to modern
fighters/bombers) 100% remotely controled by human pilots?

~~~
jlgreco
Probably to a similar extent as airliners these days, though without the pilot
actually sitting in it. They can take off and land themselves, though they
still have a human sitting around (probably reading a paperback most of the
time.)

~~~
thedrbrian
Are we talking drones or passenger aircraft?

Passenger aircraft definitely don't auto takeoff and don't really use auto
land. See
[http://www.boston.com/community/blogs/askthepilot/2013/03/th...](http://www.boston.com/community/blogs/askthepilot/2013/03/the_five_most_annoying_myths_a.html)
and [http://www.askthepilot.com/cockpit-
claptrap/](http://www.askthepilot.com/cockpit-claptrap/)

~~~
jlgreco
Autolandings may or may not be common in airliners, but my understanding of
drones is that _" The pilots are flying the plane through the automation"_ is
in strong effect.

------
joezydeco
_" Orbiter OK-2.01...was dismantled and sat gathering dust at the Tushina
factory near Moscow for years until 2011 when it was reportedly moved to an
aviation museum in Germany for restoration"_

I just walked through this Buran model a few months ago at the Technikmuseum
in Speyer, Germany. It's really there.

[http://speyer.technik-museum.de/en](http://speyer.technik-museum.de/en)

~~~
Argorak
No, it's not. The one in Speyer is 0.02 OK-GLI, forgotten and found again in
Bahrain (which is a whole story by itself).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI)

(BTW: living in Speyer is very cool for tech-freaks: every once in while, they
bring in a new plane, or a submarine...)

~~~
joezydeco
Wow, really? Thanks for that.

And yeah, the Speyer museums are totally amazing. What they did to that B747
just blew my mind.

~~~
Argorak
The local story (in short) actually is: The director of the museum saw a
documentary about a plane graveyard in Bahrain that was aired next to the
Formula 1 race there. He saw the Buran in the background, contacted the
relevant people and got one short after :).

------
anovikov
>This should be contrasted with the originally envisioned costs of $118 per
kilogram (approximately $53 per pound) of payload in 1972 dollars ($1,400/kg,
[approximately $630 per pound] adjusting for inflation to 2011)

Please check these figures. Whatever measure of inflation i try i can't see
12x inflation from 1972 to 2011. It was more like 4x.

Launch rate - correct, problem was Air Force which first dictated the
oversized payload capacity and even more oversized payload bay dimensions, and
a huge cross-range capability (to enable single-orbit missions), resulting in
a system too big and expensive for anything else, then pulling out resulting
in vastly lower launch rates. So Shuttle was commercially doomed long before
its first flight. U.S. would be better off flying it a few times to prove it
works, then getting back to drawing board to design something fitting the
market better. Reusable launch systems have been, and still are, realistic,
it's only epic fail of Shuttle which make it look too toxic to anyone to try
(just like failure of GM EV1 delayed electric car revolution for a decade -
nobody dared to try, engineering and business failure of a particular project
was mistaken for the whole idea being bad).

------
Gravityloss
The legacy of Buran/Energia lives on in the most powerful operational rocket
engines ever created, the RD-170 family. There were four of these engines,
each in one of the Buran boosters. One engine has four chambers. The RD-171
derivative is still used in Zenit launched from Russia and from a sea platform
by Sea Launch, and the RD-180 derivative which is basically a half engine with
two chambers, is used in the American Atlas V.

No other country has replicated the oxidizer rich staged combustion used in
these high thrust efficient lox-kerosene engines. The materials technology is
especially challenging because of the high temperature oxidizing gases in the
turbine. For example SpaceX's Merlin gas generator engines look decidedly
fifties compared to these.

The RD-0120 hydrogen engines on the base of the hydrogen tank were quite a
feat as well, a Russian SSME. That technology was abandoned. The European
Space Agency did some tests with RD-0120 back in the day.

(The article got the name of the booster engines wrong.)

------
danjayh
I find it interesting that something that looks so similar to the shuttle (at
a glance) is actually a completely different design & configuration (how/where
thrust is generated).

~~~
avmich
That's the same with all planes, ships and cars in general. At a glance they
all look the same.

------
avmich
Here is a cool screensaver about Buran:

[http://buran.ru/htm/scr_en.htm](http://buran.ru/htm/scr_en.htm)

------
bayesianhorse
"Faulty assumptions" seem to be a thing with the soviets...

