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My trusted close relative used to do classified work on "Buran", the Soviet Union's answer to the United States Space Shuttle program. According to him, the US

by osipov 7y ago

My trusted close relative used to do classified work on "Buran", the Soviet Union's answer to the United States Space Shuttle program. According to him, the USSR military developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle. Unlike the ICBMs, the shuttles decoupled the event of the payload launch from event of the payload delivery, i.e. bombing. The early shuttle missions demonstrated the ability to "dive" to an orbit from which they could deliver a nuke directly to Red Square and then return back to the low Earth orbit. Shuttles could also perform attack missions against targets in the Earth's orbit, approaching and destroying USSR's satellites as a prelude to a nuclear war. Buran was designed to perform both of these missions. Unlike the shuttles, Buran could perform them while 100% unmanned. Until this X-37B flight, US did not have a public demonstration of a technology matching what USSR had with Buran in the late 1980s. Given the "hot peace" nature of the contemporary relationship between US and Russia, it is not surprising that US would want to demonstrate that it went above and beyond what USSR accomplished in space warfare. X-37B does that. If you are wondering about the 2-year mission for X-37B: when Buran launched in 1980s US immediately started speculating that the "unmanned" capability of Buran was just another lie by USSR. Can't say the same about about X-37B considering that it was in orbit for twice the time of the longest manned mission.

xenophonf 7y ago
Sadly, Buran only launched once. That flight was unmanned, and it completed two orbits before successfully landing. And that was in 1988!
Sommer_Son 7y ago
Shuttle had the capability to land unmanned from the beginning. It just happened that it flew real missions with astronauts on board, so it wasn't used.
- souprock 7y ago
  At best they could have skidded it down the runway, because opening the landing gear doors was purposely impossible without human intervention.
  - Simon_says 7y ago
    Why?
    - souprock 7y ago
      It would be quite deadly if they opened early. There was no need for automation. Some time after the second wreak, NASA added the ability to run a cable for that. The idea was that a rescue mission would be launched, and the cable would be installed in the abandoned shuttle to allow a landing attempt. BTW, the first mission was flown manually. I don't think the landing software could have been written without data from the first flight.
      - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
        They could have installed remote control landing gear if they ever needed it.
bubbleRefuge 7y ago
I remember seeing a classified US military publication in 1984 called "Soviet Military Power 1984" and there were pictures of this smaller soviet space shuttle being hoisted from the ocean onto a barge.
- wolf550e 7y ago
  Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOR-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOR-4 which inspired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System#Lifting-body_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System#... which became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Chaser#Program_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Chaser#Program_history and might fly in a few years!
  - Sommer_Son 7y ago
    You forgot to mention that "Bor" was inspired by USAF program X-20 Dyno-Soar.
catalogia 7y ago
The premise of using a shuttle like this seems like a reinvention of fractional orbital bombardment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... Not the cheapest way to do it by any means, but I suppose masquerading as a harmless civilian space plane gives you some degree of plausible deniability, since it would be violating a few treaties to have such a system.
jasonwatkinspdx 7y ago
Your friend is mixing together some stuff in telephone game style. While there were some military applications to the space shuttle, it rather emphatically was not some sort of covert space bomber. It's ability to glide and boost itself back into orbit is very limited as it can't store a ton of propellant. While gliding it needs to be in a level slightly nose up posture. How do you think it's supposed to release a bomb in that pose? It rather plainly has a thermal protection system on the bottom, and nothing usable as a bomb bay. The whole idea is just preposterous. The military applications of the shuttle were the ability to launch and capture satellites, as well as to potentially act as a reconnaissance platform. The X-37B largely continues those same missions.
- ergothus 7y ago
  > Your friend is mixing together some stuff in telephone game style. Are they? They said: >> developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle "what they saw" being the important part. Everything that follows is a seemingly legit interpretation of what the Shuttle can do, if you (reasonably) assume the U.S. wasn't fully disclosing all capabilities and purposes. Even if they were wrong about the capabilities of the shuttle (I'm in no place to say) that doesn't mean that the friend was at all inaccurate in what they reported.
- wolf550e 7y ago
  You are correct (AFAIK) about the real military capability of the STS. But the Russians, when analyzing the program, came to the conclusion that the stated reason the shuttle was being developed was bogus. They believed that it would never be cheaper to launch satellites using the shuttle than using regular expendable rockets, and so if the stated reason is bogus they concluded it's a cover for a military program. And then they invented military applications that such a system can have, even if you need to slightly modify the shuttle to achieve them. And then they decided to build their own to achieve parity with the West. The US military's idea of military capability of the shuttle was to covertly launch a spy satellite from California going south, release it over the pole and land without completing a full orbit. This would, hypothetically, evade Soviet radar. Because the Earth rotates under the shuttle while this happens, the shuttle comes over far away from the launch site (and from the runway), and so it needed the large cross range ability (1100 miles) and this required the wings, etc. AFAIK, the Soviets said they booby-trapped their military satellites so retrieving them from orbit would be hard. Shooting at satellites from the shuttle is weird - a first strike requires shooting down many satellites, so you would need your weapons platform in many orbits at once. Just shoot from the ground or use something like the ASM-135 ASAT.
jlebar 7y ago
More discussion of the relationship of the Space Shuttle to Braun here: https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
Denvercoder9 7y ago
> Until this X-37B flight, US did not have a public demonstration of a technology matching what USSR had with Buran in the late 1980s. Nitpick, but the first flight of the X-37B program already demonstrated this back in 2010.
- eatmyshorts 7y ago
  Yes, you are correct. And it would appear that the US was unwilling to shelve the Space Shuttle, despite the known problem of them blowing up every one out of fifty launches, didn't shut down the Space Shuttle until 2011, after confirmation that the X-37B could replace the military needs of the Space Shuttle.
tomatotomato37 7y ago
ICBMs can do that too; the MIRV capable ones carry enough delta-V when stripped to a single warhead for orbital insertion and ejection, albeit on crappy trajectories. That's why you can repurpose them for generic satellite launches. Parking a nuke in orbit violates the Outer Space Treaty though so countries don't (publicly) do it. The thing with a shuttle is it's easier to stealthily violate the treaty than launching a bunch of suspiciously poorly built cylindrical tubes and calling them defunct space telescopes.
j8014 7y ago
I think the key difference was the USA preferred people on the space shuttle missions. It wasn't for lack of technology, which the whole system was computer assisted anyway, but manned missions are hard and require more engineering and technology. It was political and memorable, that was part of the demonstration and triumph. It's very cool that the Buran completed a single 3 hour trip unmanned, it went down as the first unmanned space flight that not many people know about. There's nothing much more to say other than that, which is disappointing. The X-37B and its predecessors have been flying for nearly 10 years. I've been following these programs for apparently a lot longer than I realized. The take away with this program is they are launching these missions without much fan fair and the only brag is the incredible amount of time these missions are active in space. Literally every mission I've seen has the same information being released which is a picture of the vehicle touched down and the time spent in orbit... that's it. As with the last mission, this will be forgotten, another will go up to space and in a couple years we will get another press release.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Certainly Sputnik was the first unmanned spaceflight?
no_opinions 7y ago
> USSR military developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle. For more info on this, Mustard's documentary on the Buran: https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=175 https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=175
kjs3 7y ago
That's pretty silly. Considering the huge amount of effort to launch one, the short duration a shuttle can remain on station and the limited number of them we could have ever built and put in orbit, what would be the point? Let's assume for a moment we (well...US leadership) lost our collective minds and decided that we wanted to swoop down and nuke Red Square for the LoLs. Hell, let's assume we had every Space Shuttle up and each one swooped down and toasted a city. It's nowhere near the capability to prevent the next action being the retaliatory strike which would incinerate the US. 10x the number of Space Shuttles wouldn't prevent that. And we'd have to plan months in advance for this 'first strike', and prevent anyone from knowing we were loading nukes in the shuttles. Maybe your 'Trusted close relative' really believed all that stuff. Crazier crap was taken as truth in the Cold War. But in reality, that's not what the Space Shuttle was for.

by osipov 7y ago

xenophonf 7y ago

Sadly, Buran only launched once. That flight was unmanned, and it completed two orbits before successfully landing. And that was in 1988!

Sommer_Son 7y ago

Shuttle had the capability to land unmanned from the beginning. It just happened that it flew real missions with astronauts on board, so it wasn't used.

souprock 7y ago
At best they could have skidded it down the runway, because opening the landing gear doors was purposely impossible without human intervention.
- Simon_says 7y ago
  Why?
  - souprock 7y ago
    It would be quite deadly if they opened early. There was no need for automation. Some time after the second wreak, NASA added the ability to run a cable for that. The idea was that a rescue mission would be launched, and the cable would be installed in the abandoned shuttle to allow a landing attempt. BTW, the first mission was flown manually. I don't think the landing software could have been written without data from the first flight.
    - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
      They could have installed remote control landing gear if they ever needed it.

bubbleRefuge 7y ago

I remember seeing a classified US military publication in 1984 called "Soviet Military Power 1984" and there were pictures of this smaller soviet space shuttle being hoisted from the ocean onto a barge.

wolf550e 7y ago
Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOR-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOR-4 which inspired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System#Lifting-body_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System#... which became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Chaser#Program_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Chaser#Program_history and might fly in a few years!
- Sommer_Son 7y ago
  You forgot to mention that "Bor" was inspired by USAF program X-20 Dyno-Soar.

catalogia 7y ago

The premise of using a shuttle like this seems like a reinvention of fractional orbital bombardment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... Not the cheapest way to do it by any means, but I suppose masquerading as a harmless civilian space plane gives you some degree of plausible deniability, since it would be violating a few treaties to have such a system.

jasonwatkinspdx 7y ago

Your friend is mixing together some stuff in telephone game style. While there were some military applications to the space shuttle, it rather emphatically was not some sort of covert space bomber. It's ability to glide and boost itself back into orbit is very limited as it can't store a ton of propellant. While gliding it needs to be in a level slightly nose up posture. How do you think it's supposed to release a bomb in that pose? It rather plainly has a thermal protection system on the bottom, and nothing usable as a bomb bay. The whole idea is just preposterous. The military applications of the shuttle were the ability to launch and capture satellites, as well as to potentially act as a reconnaissance platform. The X-37B largely continues those same missions.

ergothus 7y ago
> Your friend is mixing together some stuff in telephone game style. Are they? They said: >> developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle "what they saw" being the important part. Everything that follows is a seemingly legit interpretation of what the Shuttle can do, if you (reasonably) assume the U.S. wasn't fully disclosing all capabilities and purposes. Even if they were wrong about the capabilities of the shuttle (I'm in no place to say) that doesn't mean that the friend was at all inaccurate in what they reported.
wolf550e 7y ago
You are correct (AFAIK) about the real military capability of the STS. But the Russians, when analyzing the program, came to the conclusion that the stated reason the shuttle was being developed was bogus. They believed that it would never be cheaper to launch satellites using the shuttle than using regular expendable rockets, and so if the stated reason is bogus they concluded it's a cover for a military program. And then they invented military applications that such a system can have, even if you need to slightly modify the shuttle to achieve them. And then they decided to build their own to achieve parity with the West. The US military's idea of military capability of the shuttle was to covertly launch a spy satellite from California going south, release it over the pole and land without completing a full orbit. This would, hypothetically, evade Soviet radar. Because the Earth rotates under the shuttle while this happens, the shuttle comes over far away from the launch site (and from the runway), and so it needed the large cross range ability (1100 miles) and this required the wings, etc. AFAIK, the Soviets said they booby-trapped their military satellites so retrieving them from orbit would be hard. Shooting at satellites from the shuttle is weird - a first strike requires shooting down many satellites, so you would need your weapons platform in many orbits at once. Just shoot from the ground or use something like the ASM-135 ASAT.

jlebar 7y ago

More discussion of the relationship of the Space Shuttle to Braun here: https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

Denvercoder9 7y ago

> Until this X-37B flight, US did not have a public demonstration of a technology matching what USSR had with Buran in the late 1980s. Nitpick, but the first flight of the X-37B program already demonstrated this back in 2010.

eatmyshorts 7y ago
Yes, you are correct. And it would appear that the US was unwilling to shelve the Space Shuttle, despite the known problem of them blowing up every one out of fifty launches, didn't shut down the Space Shuttle until 2011, after confirmation that the X-37B could replace the military needs of the Space Shuttle.

tomatotomato37 7y ago

ICBMs can do that too; the MIRV capable ones carry enough delta-V when stripped to a single warhead for orbital insertion and ejection, albeit on crappy trajectories. That's why you can repurpose them for generic satellite launches. Parking a nuke in orbit violates the Outer Space Treaty though so countries don't (publicly) do it. The thing with a shuttle is it's easier to stealthily violate the treaty than launching a bunch of suspiciously poorly built cylindrical tubes and calling them defunct space telescopes.

j8014 7y ago

I think the key difference was the USA preferred people on the space shuttle missions. It wasn't for lack of technology, which the whole system was computer assisted anyway, but manned missions are hard and require more engineering and technology. It was political and memorable, that was part of the demonstration and triumph. It's very cool that the Buran completed a single 3 hour trip unmanned, it went down as the first unmanned space flight that not many people know about. There's nothing much more to say other than that, which is disappointing. The X-37B and its predecessors have been flying for nearly 10 years. I've been following these programs for apparently a lot longer than I realized. The take away with this program is they are launching these missions without much fan fair and the only brag is the incredible amount of time these missions are active in space. Literally every mission I've seen has the same information being released which is a picture of the vehicle touched down and the time spent in orbit... that's it. As with the last mission, this will be forgotten, another will go up to space and in a couple years we will get another press release.

jandrese 7y ago
Certainly Sputnik was the first unmanned spaceflight?

no_opinions 7y ago

> USSR military developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle. For more info on this, Mustard's documentary on the Buran: https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=175 https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=175

kjs3 7y ago

That's pretty silly. Considering the huge amount of effort to launch one, the short duration a shuttle can remain on station and the limited number of them we could have ever built and put in orbit, what would be the point? Let's assume for a moment we (well...US leadership) lost our collective minds and decided that we wanted to swoop down and nuke Red Square for the LoLs. Hell, let's assume we had every Space Shuttle up and each one swooped down and toasted a city. It's nowhere near the capability to prevent the next action being the retaliatory strike which would incinerate the US. 10x the number of Space Shuttles wouldn't prevent that. And we'd have to plan months in advance for this 'first strike', and prevent anyone from knowing we were loading nukes in the shuttles. Maybe your 'Trusted close relative' really believed all that stuff. Crazier crap was taken as truth in the Cold War. But in reality, that's not what the Space Shuttle was for.