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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 wit
by InclinedPlane 13y 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.
- Demiurge 13y agoI 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.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoThe 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.
- Demiurge 13y agoI'm kind of at a loss for words. Are you including the past 20 years USSR did not exist in your comparison with US? I remember the timeline of lunches, if you start in 60s, overall it was much more densely packed for USSR compared to US until 90s. Your mention of 'Polyus' is the end of this timeline, 3 years past completely destructive actions of Gorbochev. Do you think Skylab beats Mir?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoI can't make sense of what point you're trying to make. I think Apollo trumps Mir/Salyut/Almaz, and I think Voyager 2 alone trumps the entire Soviet unmanned space program, even the Venera missions. As does COBE, for that matter. Edit: which is to say, that while the Soviets may have made impressive contributions to science in the form of the peaceful exploration of space the idea that their contributions outclassed those of the US is simply preposterous.
- avmich 13y agoWestern 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.
- cpleppert 13y agoThe 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.
- avmich 13y agoWe're discussing which projects were original developments and which were follow-ons. The criteria you mention opens doors to wild speculation concerning shortcomings of very many projects on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoI 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.
- avmich 13y agoHow Tu-144 could be spied if it flew earlier? Buran was copied in shape and in overall capabilites, once on orbit, for the reasons mentioned. Buran wasn't copied both internally and on the launcher side - so we might say Buran copied some things, but had others originally developed. Soviets were great copiers, in many areas - and in many others there weren't where to copy from. They had to develop great many things themselves.
- caf 13y agoIt 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 13y agoThe Tu-144 "Concordski" wasn't exactly a nearly identical copy of the Concorde. The retracting canards were one significant difference.