3 ms·

Buran made an orbital flight. I think the reason of the project's failure was lack of funding, not technology in that case.

rich_sasha 5y ago
It did fly, my point is, as a project it didn’t go anywhere. It’s not like it was some major leap in the Russian space programme.
fsloth 5y ago
Also I think the Soviets realized the shuttle was a badly designed and expensive frankenvehicle that did not fit any mission profile particularly well.
- cameldrv 5y ago
  Perhaps. The Energia booster was quite good. The real reason they stopped flying it is that the Soviet Union went broke, which is also why there is no Soviet Union anymore.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    I think the political narrative of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a bit more complex than that. The root cause was a political dissatisfaction in the "member" states and as Kremlin under Gorbachev tried to create a more financially dynamic political system, they accidentally also gave enough leash to the vassal states to create an unstoppable tidal wave of reforms. They could have rolled the tanks in as during earlier decades (e.g invasion of Checkoslovakia during the Prague spring incident -68) but didn't - for which I think the world is ever grateful for Mr. Gorbachev. So it was not only about money. Although the financial problems were certainly one of the biggest root causes. Then soviet system had faced several humiliating defeats a few years earlier, robbing it's system of it's facade of invincibility - the invasion of Afganistan and Chernobyl disaster among them.
    - cameldrv 5y ago
      I haven't lived there so I appreciate the perspective. There certainly is no single cause. What I see as the proximal cause, or the straw that broke the camel's back was that starting in the seventies, the USSR had become a petrostate. The USSR wasn't producing enough food for the population, but this wasn't a problem through the seventies and early eighties due to the high oil prices. The USSR simply sold oil to pay for food imports. In the mid eighties, the oil price crashed, and in order to feed the USSR, they had to take out increasingly large hard currency loans, which eventually got so big, that the only way to make them happen was with western government backing. The (implicit or explicit) condition was that if they rolled tanks in Poland or East Germany, the money, and hence the grain, would be cut off. Gorbachev said in an interview that in 1988 or 1989, the USSR was months away from mass starvation had the imports ceased. Some give Reagan credit for convincing the Saudis to pump more oil and set this chain of events in motion, but I have no idea if that's true or not. Of course I'm disregarding why exactly it was that the USSR couldn't produce enough food with the massive amount of arable land available to it, or why it exactly there were these pro-democracy movements popping up in Poland and East Germany and other places in the Warsaw Pact.

rich_sasha 5y ago

It did fly, my point is, as a project it didn’t go anywhere. It’s not like it was some major leap in the Russian space programme.

fsloth 5y ago

Also I think the Soviets realized the shuttle was a badly designed and expensive frankenvehicle that did not fit any mission profile particularly well.

cameldrv 5y ago
Perhaps. The Energia booster was quite good. The real reason they stopped flying it is that the Soviet Union went broke, which is also why there is no Soviet Union anymore.
- fsloth 5y ago
  I think the political narrative of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a bit more complex than that. The root cause was a political dissatisfaction in the "member" states and as Kremlin under Gorbachev tried to create a more financially dynamic political system, they accidentally also gave enough leash to the vassal states to create an unstoppable tidal wave of reforms. They could have rolled the tanks in as during earlier decades (e.g invasion of Checkoslovakia during the Prague spring incident -68) but didn't - for which I think the world is ever grateful for Mr. Gorbachev. So it was not only about money. Although the financial problems were certainly one of the biggest root causes. Then soviet system had faced several humiliating defeats a few years earlier, robbing it's system of it's facade of invincibility - the invasion of Afganistan and Chernobyl disaster among them.
  - cameldrv 5y ago
    I haven't lived there so I appreciate the perspective. There certainly is no single cause. What I see as the proximal cause, or the straw that broke the camel's back was that starting in the seventies, the USSR had become a petrostate. The USSR wasn't producing enough food for the population, but this wasn't a problem through the seventies and early eighties due to the high oil prices. The USSR simply sold oil to pay for food imports. In the mid eighties, the oil price crashed, and in order to feed the USSR, they had to take out increasingly large hard currency loans, which eventually got so big, that the only way to make them happen was with western government backing. The (implicit or explicit) condition was that if they rolled tanks in Poland or East Germany, the money, and hence the grain, would be cut off. Gorbachev said in an interview that in 1988 or 1989, the USSR was months away from mass starvation had the imports ceased. Some give Reagan credit for convincing the Saudis to pump more oil and set this chain of events in motion, but I have no idea if that's true or not. Of course I'm disregarding why exactly it was that the USSR couldn't produce enough food with the massive amount of arable land available to it, or why it exactly there were these pro-democracy movements popping up in Poland and East Germany and other places in the Warsaw Pact.