Its interesting to see how these shuttles mirror the US ones on the outside due to Soviet spies getting pictures and plans but the interior, especially the cockpit, is all Russian, sparse and uncomfortable. I guess they didn't get intel on that.
Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
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Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#52Makes you wonder if Russia's contributions to science back in the Soviet days were bigger than today under Putin's rule...
No, it does not. It is clear that the Soviet Union, for all its flaws, was one of the foremost nations (or collection of such) when it comes to scientific endeavours. Where they failed was in the translation of scientific data to 'products', but that is another story.
Modern Russia still has its share of eminent scientists, but they lack the s(t)olid backing of a nation which felt like it had something to prove.
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#53I wonder what would go through in the russian people's minds when they saw that their shuttle was a rip-off of the american's. With all the competition to see who was better, how did they rationalize this?
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#54This was in the news a few weeks back, in mid June:
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-russian-abandoned-s...
http://www.popsci.com/why-soviet-space-shuttle-was-left-rot
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/17/buran-soviet-space-...
My only thought is if this is a decommissioned facility, imagine all the steel that could be recycled and reused! With such a shortage of some metals around the world, I see places like this and wonder why nobody does a better job of reusing old steel like this.
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#55For people wanting to go see a Buran, there's a prototype on display in a museum in (SW) Germany.
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#56Great photos. Does anyone have details why soviets thought a carbon copy of the botched shuttle design was a good idea in the first place? Where the economics of the vehicle not so obvious back then?
According to the book "Energiya-Buran, the Soviet Space Shuttle" by Bart Hendrickx and Bert Vis, they correctly noted that the stated reasons for the US space shuttle did not make any sense, so they assumed there must be some secret rational reason for building it:
> As TsNIIMash [Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building] director Yuriy Mozzhorin later said: "[The Space Shuttle] was introduced as a national program, aimed at 60 launches per year ... All this was very unusual: the mass they had been putting into orbit with their expendable rockets hadn't even reached 150 tons per year, and now they were planning to launch 1,770 tons per year. Nothing was being returned from space, and now they were planning to bring down 820 tons per year. This was not simple a program to develop some space system ... to lower transportation costs (they promised they would lower those costs tenfold, but the studies done at our institute showed that in actual fact there would be no cost savings at all). It clearly had a focused military goal".
As for what the secret military goal be, apparently the Soviet speculations was that either it might be part of some nuclear fractional-orbit bombardment system, or it might be part of a plan to launch lots of laser weapons into orbit. In any case, we can't have a space shuttle gap, so:
> [Central Committe Secretary for Defense Matters, Dmitri] Ustinov had made the following argument: if our scientists and engineers do not see and specific use of this technology now, we should not forget that the Americans are very pragmatic and very smart. Since they have invested a tremendous amount of money in such a project, they can obviously see some useful scenario which is still unseen from Soviet eyes. The Soviet Union should therefore develop such a technology so that it won't be taken by suprise in the future.
Let's build it now, and see what it is good for later! :D
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#57This reminds me of the cancelled Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. The argument to keep building it was they'd already invested billions and it would cost millions of dollars to stop building it. I guess that cost would have been from contract guarantees to the builders or something. Looks like when the Soviets stop building something they just walk away.
Oh, man. The argument to keep building it was that we would have had (in some senses) better knowledge of particle physics in the 90s than what we're currently waiting for from the LHC.
I'm too young to have been part of the physics community at the time, but talking about the SSC can still elicit winces and melancholy today. I'm sure it was over budget; I suspect that most big government projects are. (I've heard people talking about the SSC say that that was standard: that an expectation of overruns was essentially built into the system on all big projects, from the scientists all the way up to Congress.)
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK you only have to leave something on the pavement and scrap metal hunters will come by and take it ... seems like there has to be a net gain to scrapping this much metal - if it were a ship then salvage companies would have had it already. I'm surprised that they didn't post a guard there with clean up duty to at least keep it all from rusting in to the ground. Wonder how much it would be to buy and whether…
In many rust belt cities, any building that sits unprotected will be vandalized and stripped of any valuable metals. This is on a Russian military base so it's safe. Scrap collectors on the street don't charge for their time. It would cost the Russian government more in wages and such to scrap the site than they would ever get back out of it.
That's why you would let some scrap collectors in and basically say to them: What would you pay me for this scrap if you have to haul it away yourself?
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#59I think being able to walk away from a project like this is actually quite commendable, in a way. Not that it's always the right call, but to be able to avoid the 'sunk cost fallacy'[1] on this scale is something that large governments/companies seem rarely capable of. That said, in this case, maybe they just didn't have a choice and ran out of money... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
> I think being able to walk away from a project like this is actually quite commendable, in a way. Oddly enough, this is much easier to do without a democracy. It was not what happened there (it was the Soviet Union's collapse that did it) but the reasoning stands.
Well put - centralized decision-making with a minimum of public interest groups does tend to speed things up. But yeah, it was their utter economic collapse that caused this particular case.
Re: Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
#60I wonder what would go through in the russian people's minds when they saw that their shuttle was a rip-off of the american's. With all the competition to see who was better, how did they rationalize this?
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