Declassified spacecrafts and orbital weapons of the USSR (2018)

https://www.xissufotoday.space/2018/04/declassified-spacecrafts-and-orbital.html

by eternalban • 5 years ago

310 97 5 years ago

tzfld• 5 years ago

Kliper never was a classified project.

trhway• 5 years ago

it had huge natural overlap with hypersonic maneuverable reentry vehicle R&D which has been all the rage, at least in the Russian weapon program, in the last couple decades, so a lot of Kliper programs would be highly classified.

Also, while being no weapons by design, there are several USSR satellites in the parking orbits carrying tens of kg of highly enriched uranium.

mabbo• 5 years ago

I can't stay on that website long because I start getting motion sick from the background. Animated gif backgrounds belong in the 90s.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

Somebody should really call the Polyus.

sneak• 5 years ago

I wish the US would declassify the space weapon stuff it did in the 70s and 80s.

PaulHoule2• 5 years ago

In 1993 I saw a complete ground-based anti-satellite laser system in New Mexico that had everything to burn a satellite except for the laser (aka. "optical tracking system") It actually did have a 25W laser that excited a "sodium guide star" in the upper atmosphere that controls a mirror that undoes atmospheric twinkling and is necessary if you want to uplink laser energy with high efficiency.

hackeraccount• 5 years ago

That's nothing - in 1985 I saw a demo for an orbital 5 megawatt laser.

joshgoldman• 5 years ago

Beware this page is mostly conspiracy theories

KineticLensman• 5 years ago

and / or some artists impressions of the systems that were never actually funded or constructed.

PaulHoule2• 5 years ago

No it is basically correct. A 1 MW chemical laser and optical targeting system of that scale was very possible at that time, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Energy_Laser

for examples closer to Earth. It is by no means an apocalyptic weapon, but a satellite-to-satellite laser attack could make a detectable space junk mess for decades to come.

That generation of chemical lasers use dangerous chemical reactions, like burning hydrogen in fluorine or mixing different kinds of bleach: operator safety concerns kept them from being fielded.

p_l2• 5 years ago

The laser was supposed to take care of SDI sats and other space-borne elements, indeed.

dplavery92• 5 years ago

We may never actually know, but I have my doubts anything like that was ever fielded. You're talking about beam-expansion over thousands of km for a sat-to-sat weapon instead of the tens of km for the eventually de-funded ABL/YAL-1 (some two decades after the suggested Soviet space-based system.) You avoid the atmosphere in space but you can't avoid diffraction. Teller's original concepts for SDI space-based lasers proposed literal nuclear bombs to provide the necessary energy density at range; neither those, nor the other host of exotic 80s-era directed energy weapons concepts seem to have made it into operation.

nyolfen• 5 years ago

i will have a hell of a time remembering where it was, but a few years ago i read an interview or essay that said this payload was actually a decoy, that the soviets were responding to the SDI program but could not get a workable laser with enough power in such a package, and that it was just there to look like a laser -- including by slowly leaking carbon dioxide, which would be the signature sought by american ground observers

p_l2• 5 years ago

With exception of the RAKS entry, all the other stuff has been confirmed. It's just mostly experimental, but built, systems.

A bit of that happened because USSR ended up assuming that USA was more ready with some techs than they thought, and scaled to match (the amount of crazy that was due to essentially misunderstandings was, well, crazy).

moftz• 5 years ago

Interesting that Sierra Nevada Corp's space plane looks so similar to the USSR Spiral

stetrain• 5 years ago

The SNC Dream Chaser is based on several previous US designs, which probably involved some back-and-forth responding to what the USSR was doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar

imglorp2• 5 years ago

If you want a lifting body with a high AOA reentry, maneuverable approach, and runway landing, then the physics probably dictates everyone converging on similar shapes. Also in this group: Buran, Shuttle, and X37.

monocasa• 5 years ago

I've heard from drunk MechEs working at SNC that Dream Chaser is a blatantly soviet design, down to measurements making way more sense in metric than the imperial that they use.

bri3d• 5 years ago

https://www.denverpost.com/2016/02/26/sierra-nevadas-dream-c...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/nasas-newest-cargo-s...

petard• 5 years ago

Some of these look like German WWII aircraft eg ME-163

nixass• 5 years ago

Russians poached some German engineers as well, not only NASA

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

And a lot of the documentation that was on the territory of the future GDR.

jryle70• 5 years ago

The Soviets also transferred the entire rocket manufacturing line from Germany to USSR

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/rockets_ussr_germany.html

oytis• 5 years ago

The website doesn't look really reliable overall.

imglorp2• 5 years ago

Wiki lists some primary sources. Not a terribly different story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)

sandworm1015• 5 years ago

More comprehensive and authoritative source for same data:

http://www.astronautix.com/

eg Kliper (2004)

http://www.astronautix.com/k/kliper.html

eternalban• 5 years ago

Great link, thanks. Vladimir Chelomei's name is all over that page. 12 counts to 16 for Von Braun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Chelomey

jaegerpicker9• 5 years ago

Not sure how much I trust this page but if you are interested in an alternative history version of the space race I highly recommend For All Mankind on AppleTV+! It's a great show IMO. It shows what might have happened if the USSR beat the US to the moon and the Space Race never ended. It kicks the US into high gear and leads to a more advanced and in my opinion better USA (more liberal and technological/focused on Science). It's a biased towards a progressive viewpoint (so am I so it works really well for me).

sumitviii• 5 years ago

Maybe the show tries to say that winning leads to slacking off?

jaegerpicker9• 5 years ago

I'd say it says the competition can bring out the best in us. Which I find to be generally true, of course it can also bring out the worst in us also!

lostlogin2• 5 years ago

The show is great. Without too much of a spoiler, the route it takes toward the end with its need for individual heroics is rather unfortunate.

simonh• 5 years ago

To be fair in the end it's down to a very small number of individuals a long way from Earth having to deal with extraordinary circumstances. That's hardly unrealistic given the circumstances.

tnorthcutt• 5 years ago

FYI, there's another season starting in just a few days. Just sharing in case you weren't aware.

jaegerpicker9• 5 years ago

I think that's one of the things I really like about the show. That is shows that even in Hard(ish) SciFi there is room for humans to be heroes. Also minor spoiler

------

it show's diverse crews as being able to perform heroics just as much as the standard male heroic type.

andrei_says_• 5 years ago

May I recommend The Expanse as another, possibly more mature, take on humanity’s space era.

itissid• 5 years ago

Very unfortunate because a lot of practical engineering and battle tested systems design practices came from the apollo program and it would not have happened without teams of people working together.

jaegerpicker9• 5 years ago

I think they address this pretty well actually. It's hard to say exactly where without spoilers but in particular a character talks about the difference that a death of a hero (astronaut) makes vs the command control guys or nameless ground crew. One of the many things I liked about the show is pointing out how that really matters why it shouldn't.

Koshkin2• 5 years ago

Honestly, I have never understood why landing on the Moon first would amount to winning the space race (except being nice to think about it as such).

pueblito• 5 years ago

Every race has to have a finish line

jaegerpicker9• 5 years ago

I think that's part of the premise for the show. Landing on the Moon did slow down the Space Race, there are a ton of documented plans for the advancement of the Space program but the will to push them through disappeared as soon as the US "beat" the Soviets. I think the real reason was that many, maybe even most people only really cared about Space from a standpoint of beating the other team. The show really leans into that in the early episodes. It does cast the USA as the "good" guys, in that even if we are losing we never give up until we win.

leetcrew• 5 years ago

it seems even more odd if you view the space race as mostly being a fig leaf for ICBM development. I find this argument mostly convincing, but if the main goal is to build effective warhead delivery systems, why spend so much on manned flight specifically? there's not much of a practical case for building stuff that can take humans all the way to the moon and back. ICBMs don't need nearly as much delta-v nor do they need to keep humans onboard alive, and by far the most useful things to put in space are LEO or GEO satellites.

rm_-rf_slash• 5 years ago

On one hand, it’s pure propaganda from the side that didn’t already have the first satellite or human in space to their name.

On the other, landing on an extraterrestrial body is a significantly more difficult challenge, particularly the precision computing to steer the lunar lander.

Computers at the time were hand-welded and unsuitable for the rigors of space (turbulence, radiation). The brand new invention of the integrated circuit sought to solve these problems, but they were wildly expensive, so the US dumped boatloads of money into making them cheaper and easier to manufacture. Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, and the foundations for the personal computing era were in place.

So in a way, Silicon Valley owes an eternal debt of gratitude to Cold War propaganda insistent that the finish line of the space race was to be the lunar surface.

HeavenFox• 5 years ago

I think the U.S. basically won by the Soviets' "forfeiting". If USSR landed on the moon second but soon after, say, landed a man on Mars, and the U.S. unable to accomplish the feat, we would say the Soviets won.

wwarner2• 5 years ago

Scientific and technological achievement are critical for evaluating the effectiveness of policy. As I understand it, the issue really was that the Soviets believed that socialism should lead to a more scientific society, as they believed that socialism itself was based on the values of scientific progress. So defeat in the sciences was truly a blow to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire Soviet project. Not to mention that scientific advances lead directly to economic power and military superiority. I read that when Reagan announced the plan to fund the hugely expensive Strategic Defense Initiative, Soviet generals, having exhausted all their financial reserves losing the space race, felt that there was no way that the Soviet economy could keep up with the military advances of the West.

f6v• 5 years ago

Sounds interesting, is it filled with drunk angry soviets though?

jaegerpicker9• 5 years ago

There has only been one season and the main Russian on the show was actually pretty cool IMO. The show does a decent job of showing the USSR's people as being real people, not evil communists.

cydonian_monk• 5 years ago

I wish I could recommend "For All Mankind", but I can't. And while I feel the first three episodes were strong and well produced, I just really really didn't agree with where it ended up going. I'll still watch the second season because it's scifi on TV and it's a genuinely interesting show, but I can't shake the "late seasons of Battlestar Galactica" feeling the later 2/3rds or the season left me with.

lsllc• 5 years ago

For All Mankind is an awesome show, can highly recommend. A very interesting take on how the space race could have gone. Also has some thoughtful insights into how society was in the 60s (well, I suppose that depends on the telling). Starring Joel Kinnaman was also in the 1st season of Altered Carbon (which is what got me to try this series).

Season 2 coming out Friday, looking forward to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)

nanna• 5 years ago

From a UX perspective, the moving background on this site literally makes me feel sick.

jaywalk• 5 years ago

Came here to say this as well. I can't say I've ever had a website make me feel that way before, so that's really something.

King-Aaron• 5 years ago

So many sites back in the late 90's had similar backgrounds, good thing most of them stayed in the 90's

tauwauwau• 5 years ago

This worked for me

  document.body.style.backgroundImage = 'url(\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com/noimage.png)'

jugg1es• 5 years ago

So the space laser crashed because the same command was accidentally used for both opening the solar panels and discarding the side module covers?

tdy721• 5 years ago

Or because Gorbachev ordered it...

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

(2018)

and here's some more discussion about Soviet space cannon from years back

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10575450

tectonic• 5 years ago

We recently wrote a piece about space warfare for Orbital Index: https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-12-02-Issue-93/#space-...

One of the resources we linked to was this recent PDF (https://aerospace.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/Reesman_Ph...) called "The physics of space war: how orbital dynamics constrain space-to-space engagements" from Aerospace Corp. which talks about how the limited ∆v budgets of space vehicles limits warfare and makes planning and timing essential to an attack. The PDF, oddly, has the following invisible text on the first page if you click and drag to highlight it: "THIS MATERIAL IS BEING PROVIDED PRE-RELEASE SOLELY FOR THE USE OF GEN. JAMES DICKINSON, AND IS NOT APPROVED FOR RELEASE."

edumucelli• 5 years ago

Nice find!

sandworm1015• 5 years ago

Such statements are true of low-orbit but once you get out to places like geostationary orbits things do slow down. Sats out there can do things with much lower deltaV, things like direct dashes at targets, that are not practical in lower orbits.

nine_k• 5 years ago

I suspect it is similar to naval warfare: distances are long, there's nowhere to hide, and maneuvers are limited.

weinzierl• 5 years ago

The "Spaceshuttle" BURAN ended up in a German Museum https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran

aarchi• 5 years ago

It’s not the only extant orbiter. Most of them are in Baikonur or Moscow. The one in Speyer was an atmospheric test vehicle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme#List_of_vehi...

zelon88• 5 years ago

These ships reminds me of the old action-strategy PC game named Battlezone from 1998. It was set in an alternate universe during the Cold War where the US and Soviet Union were secretly engaged in an interplanetary war throughout the entire solar system, but concealed from society under the guise of the "Space Race."

On another note, I've always wondered about the feasibility of putting a large caliber one-time use cannon on a satellite. Like a WWII battleship main gun floating in space for highly precise attacks on remote areas without the fallout of tactical nukes.

nl• 5 years ago

"Powerful airship overclockers (weight 52 tons, length 38 meters, wingspan of 16.5 m) was dispersed to six times the speed of sound (6M), then with his “back” at an altitude of 28-30 km was supposed to start a 10-ton manned orbital plane 8 m long and 7.4 m span."

What on earth (or not!) is this supposed to mean?

obimod• 5 years ago

Classified concept renderings... ooo. Reminds me of those fake YouTube Russian fighter jet plane videos.

Declassified spacecrafts and orbital weapons of the USSR (2018)

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