The life and death of Buran, the USSR shuttle built on faulty assumptions

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/09/the-life-and-death-of-buran-the-ussr-shuttle-built-on-faulty-assumptions/

by pedrocr • 13 years ago

154 77 13 years ago

joezydeco2• 13 years ago

"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

satori99• 13 years ago

There was one of the atmospheric test frames just sitting in a vacant block on the outskirts of Sydney about a decade ago. I climbed all over it with a friend one night.

(not my video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8tNp4bldzQ

Argorak2• 13 years ago

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

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

joezydeco2• 13 years ago

Wow, really? Thanks for that.

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

stretchwithme• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

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.)

sandfox• 13 years ago

They can (and often are), but some of the drones are capable of completely computer controlled take off and landing. I remember seeing somewhere that the human drone pilots caused more crashes when landing than the computer controlled ones.

dmckeon• 13 years ago

The technical and popular terms are at odds, and currently tend to reflect whichever element the user wishes to stress:

UAV - Uninhabited Air Vehicle - no "man in the can"

UAV - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle - same

RPV - Remotely Piloted Vehicle - we still have pilots!

drone - military: target, towed or on auto-pilot

drone - media: mindless non-human automaton

From the description of Buran's flight, it sounds like a mostly pre-programmed auto-pilot from de-orbit to landing. The technology is impressive for the late 1980s, no matter what it is called.

cynwoody• 13 years ago

Not the latest ones. The trend now is to give a drone a flight plan, not to fly it.

For instance, the X-47B is designed to perform such delicate maneuvers as taking off from and landing on aircraft carriers and performing in-flight refueling automatically.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/x47b/

It has a wearable remote control for carrier crews to use to direct it while on deck.

molecule• 13 years ago

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_...

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

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

rsynnott3• 13 years ago

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.

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

then had the common sense to realize the idea was silly

No, that's not what happened. Post-Perestroika economy collapse and massive inflation happened. The R&D funding crashed to absolute zero across all domains and Buran was just one of the casualties.

furyg3• 13 years ago

[...] and stealing Soviet spy satellites

Wow, now that you say it that seems logical that the shuttle could steal a satellite, but did that ever happen? I'm really hoping for some cool declassified stories from one/both sides of such a mission. :)

lostlogin2• 13 years ago

Wow, that's quite a margin of error to estimate $630 but for it to cost $60k. Image if you were off by the same factor in your own favour when paying your taxes. That said, a trillion spent on this sort of thing beats a dollar spending on killing and maiming etc, which is what usually happens when big countries face off.

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

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.

Demiurge4• 13 years ago

I think you have it backwards in the first paragraph. A general misunderstanding of this 'weird universe' is that 'politics' declared science and technology as the top goals, and the entire soviet planned economy revolved around plans for industrial projects, be they exploratory or defense, or agriculture. Most aspects of Soviet space program were scientific and exploratory in nature. Sending a new lab satellite into space every few month, rovers to Moon, Venus, Mars long before US. What was the military point of that? On the other hand US put a much bigger emphasis on star wars than substantive exploration.

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

The Soviets undertook missions of exploration for much the same reason as the US did. For scientific reasons, of course, but also for reasons of national prestige on the geopolitical stage.

If you look at the Soviet manned spaceflight missions things are very much different though. Around half of the "Salyut" space stations were actually military "Almaz" stations (Salyut 2, 3, and 5), at least one of which was armed with a fully automatic cannon designed to engage other spacecraft. The Soviets also pioneered the development of anti-satellite systems starting in the 1960s, long before the US had even started an anti-satellite program. The kicker is "Polyus", the first payload of the Energia launcher, it was an 80 ton orbital warship. It was a prototype designed around the missions of anti-satellite/anti-spacecraft warfare and laying nuclear "mines" in space (in contravention of the Outer Space Treaty, of course). Polyus itself did not contain mines though it did contain a set of test targets and a 1 megawatt laser. But Polyus failed to achieve orbit due to a glitch during the launch.

As far as exploration, the US has contributed more to interplanetary exploration than any other nation or group of nations. It has sent more successful missions to other planets and been the only nation to send probes into interstellar space. Excluding spending on ground-based ballistic missile defense the total spending on "Star Wars" is less than the cost of Apollo, ISS, or even NASA's fleet of space telescopes.

avmich13• 13 years ago

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.

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

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.

cpleppert3• 13 years ago

The Tu-144 was an absolute disaster and had to have every flight pre-approved by the political leadership. It doesn't matter it flew first if it doesn't work.

zandor• 13 years ago

For those interested in some more background, the Tupolev Tu-4 was reverse-engineered from the Boeing B-29 at the end of the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4

caf• 13 years ago

It is still a matter of considerable debate as to how much of the Manhattan Project intelligence was actually provided to the scientists in the Soviet bomb program.

stcredzero• 13 years ago

The Tu-144 "Concordski" wasn't exactly a nearly identical copy of the Concorde. The retracting canards were one significant difference.

rdtsc3• 13 years ago

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

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/

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

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

While completely commercial, Ventuz is a worthy note in software that somewhat follows this concept - https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4007/4418935939_6b3471b34b_o....

For a much longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language

rdtsc3• 13 years ago

I also believe Python is one of the target languages for DRAKON.

mapt• 13 years ago

Drag and drop interfaces can be a beautiful thing, but they're most effective when in a split-screen environment with the flowchart on one side and the code it compiles into previewed on the other side. The script being visible as the diagrammatic design changes lets the coder see what's going on behind the scenes, and lets him understand the structure so that he can tweak it in the next stage to do the many things that the GUI designer didn't anticipate.

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

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

avmich13• 13 years ago

Here is a cool screensaver about Buran:

http://buran.ru/htm/scr_en.htm

danjayh• 13 years ago

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).

avmich13• 13 years ago

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

anovikov• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.)

The life and death of Buran, the USSR shuttle built on faulty assumptions

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