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Space Shuttle vs. Buran

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Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#31

Post by pjc50 »

kunai wrote: post #23
huhtenberg wrote: post #17

The principal functional difference between the Shuttles and Buran is buried in the last paragraph: The main advantage of Buran over STS is that it was made from start to be fully automated. The entire test flight from launch to the landing was done _completely_ autonomously. The most impressive part of it though was the landing when Buran aborted first landing run that happened to be into a strong crosswind and retr…

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

4MB is rather a lot for embedded applications, especially if they are written in assembler. I can't imagine having to hand-check 4MB of assembler for flight certification.

Remember we had an entire game industry, graphical assets and all, distributed on 1.44MB floppy disks.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#32

Post by nickff »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #5

Interesting, I was just reading up on the space shuttle design process, and how the shuttle design was hurt by politics and scope creep. Apparently the project was in jeopardy at some point and needed buy-in from the Air Force. So they made a few changes, such as making it much bigger, and the tank disposable for potential military applications. Well, turns out the shuttle was never used by the military. But the lega…

Space shuttle was actually used for a few military launches, and did deploy military (or NRO) payload(s). If you look at a list of STS missions, the military ones have 'undisclosed' missions.

The pentagon discontinued reliance on STS after the interruption caused by the Challenger explosion.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#34

Post by LarryMade2 »

kunai wrote: post #23
huhtenberg wrote: post #17

The principal functional difference between the Shuttles and Buran is buried in the last paragraph: The main advantage of Buran over STS is that it was made from start to be fully automated. The entire test flight from launch to the landing was done _completely_ autonomously. The most impressive part of it though was the landing when Buran aborted first landing run that happened to be into a strong crosswind and retr…

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

Given the time probably was all assembly, at the time four MB is quite a lot.

Early on, many space data systems used wire core memory to reduce errors.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#35

Post by creshal »

grinich wrote: post #28
creshal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a direct cost of around 1.5 billion dollars per flight. This includes a lot of flights that were essentially milk runs, bringing satellites into orbit or doing other light work that could have been just as easily done with much cheaper capsule flights.

A large number of those missions were flow for the DoD, repairing/refuling satellites and potentially also capturing enemy satellites.

Large? Of the 135 flights, almost 50 went to Mir/ISS, doing work that should have been done by Soyuz/Progress/TKS-equivalent spacecraft in the $100-200 million range. 32 more made Spacelab flights, aka "poor man's excuse for a space station". The remainder were split between commercial satellite deployments (best left to unmanned boosters), regular scientific missions (the same already done on Gemini and Apollo capsules), missions that could have been cheaper put on a satellite (e.g. radar mapping), and very few missions the Shuttle was actually useful for – DoD missions and scientific recovery of large payloads (the only mission profile the Shuttle alone was uniquely suited for). Even Hubble's repair could have been done with capsules (the JWST is planned to be maintainable by Orion capsules, should maintenance ever be needed).

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#36

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

creshal wrote: post #15
mixmastamyk wrote: post #5

Interesting, I was just reading up on the space shuttle design process, and how the shuttle design was hurt by politics and scope creep. Apparently the project was in jeopardy at some point and needed buy-in from the Air Force. So they made a few changes, such as making it much bigger, and the tank disposable for potential military applications. Well, turns out the shuttle was never used by the military. But the lega…

> This is where the Buran comes in, they largely copied the shuttle, but did they have the foresight to improve the poor parts of the design? Largely, yes. With the added benefit of hindsight they were able to give it much safer heat shielding and boosters, and did a million other small improvements. But the size remained, because Soviet intelligence couldn't quite figure out what the Shuttle was supposed to be good…

> But the size remained, because Soviet intelligence couldn't quite figure out what the Shuttle was supposed to be good for. The Buran was essentially a just-in-case program: Once they figured out what the US wanted to do with it, they'd have the launcher necessary to copy it.

As far as I know they could only imagine military uses for it and never envisioned it to be used for civilian purposes.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#37

Post by Camillo »

drglitch wrote: post #27
kunai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

Back in the day, not everything needed jquery and bootstrap deps to be considered "modern" ;) Jokes aside, russian space program had some AMAZING developers working in some very low-level languages with unbelievable efficiency. I had the pleasure of working with some of them many years later on enterprise software at large banks. NASA has written some amazing software as well. Start here: https://news.ycombinator.com…

You may joke, but Node.js is still going strong after six years, while Buran never went past test flights. Imagine how much farther Buran could have gotten if they had the ability to share small, focused, reusable modules with the community. Imagine how much more reliable their systems could have been, if they had been able to reason about them at a higher level of abstraction, without getting bogged down into the low-level complexity of left-pad!

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#38

Post by ghaff »

kunai wrote: post #23
huhtenberg wrote: post #17

The principal functional difference between the Shuttles and Buran is buried in the last paragraph: The main advantage of Buran over STS is that it was made from start to be fully automated. The entire test flight from launch to the landing was done _completely_ autonomously. The most impressive part of it though was the landing when Buran aborted first landing run that happened to be into a strong crosswind and retr…

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

The Apollo Guidance Computer had about 64KB of memory. The first minicomputer that I was a product manager for in the mid-eighties had a max memory of 4MB.

(In the latter case, not everything was written in assembler but it was all compiled.)

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#39

Post by ckozlowski »

creshal wrote: post #10
rwmj wrote: post #6

The Shuttle, despite its many problems, flew 133 successful flights.

At a direct cost of around 1.5 billion dollars per flight. This includes a lot of flights that were essentially milk runs, bringing satellites into orbit or doing other light work that could have been just as easily done with much cheaper capsule flights.

There was a lot of wishful thinking with regards to the shuttle program. Some ridiculously fanciful, some plain ignorant.

But most of all, it was the test of a theory put into practice. And it should have been to no one's surprise that many things thought true wern't. How much of that was simply ignorance vs being deliberately oversold is a matter of debate. But what those 133 missions did was impart an operational knowhow and lessons learned that went far beyond the immediate mission objectives. These are the same benefits provided by the ISS today.

In short, you really can't begin to determine how well a system works in practice until you put it into production, and start using it a lot. These are the same things SpaceX is learning now (just of a new sort.) It's why Ares is returning to a capsule form.

Buran looks much better on paper, and I've no doubt it's an engineer achievement. But the success of a program, and the benefits derived from it can't be determined purely on a theoretical basis. Buran may have been an excellent orbiter, or it could have been terrible. But we'll never know.

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