Space Shuttle vs. Buran • Hacker News Board

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#41

Post by the_mitsuhiko » Sat, Apr 09, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #24

creshal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engine reuse isn't exactly the Shuttle program's brightest moment anyway. The SSME was designed for 55 uses… By the time of the Challenger disaster, that number was 4-5. By the end of the Shuttle program NASA counted themselves lucky when some of the engines managed 15 uses; and refurbishment between each flight was only marginally cheaper than building new expendable engines for every flight. Even with the added…

You're right, reuse didn't work out with the Shuttle nearly the way they wanted it to. But it did work out to some degree, while Buran's version of it never went beyond paper.

But also because they pulled the plug on the Buran program because they had no use for it. They could shoot people up in rockets and that worked out cheaper for them. The Soyuz is the most cost efficient way to shoot people into space.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#42

Post by mixmastamyk » Sat, Apr 09, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

hn9780470248775 wrote: post #33

Obligatory shuttle reading: http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

Looks like a great article so far, am about half way through.

Ha! "You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design."

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#43

Post by creshal » Sat, Apr 09, 2016, 10:00 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #41

mikeash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, reuse didn't work out with the Shuttle nearly the way they wanted it to. But it did work out to some degree, while Buran's version of it never went beyond paper.

But also because they pulled the plug on the Buran program because they had no use for it. They could shoot people up in rockets and that worked out cheaper for them. The Soyuz is the most cost efficient way to shoot people into space.

> The Soyuz is the most cost efficient way to shoot people into space.

The Soyuz has been the most efficient way to shoot people into space since 1968. It was developed in parallel with Apollo, and instead of throwing it away after the end of the moon program, they just kept it, and kept improving it – had NASA kept Apollo and improved it instead of throwing it away, and then throwing its successor away, then cancelling two successors in a row, to spawn a grand total of four parallel programs to maybe find one successor, who knows where the US space program would be now.

NASA's problems are less technical issues, and more a management one.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#44

Post by klum » Sat, Apr 09, 2016, 10:03 PM UTC

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…

If you have some stories you can/would like to share, please do!

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#45

Post by IgorPartola » Sat, Apr 09, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

Camillo wrote: post #37

drglitch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I know you are being sarcastic, but remember that there was no community at that time. And besides, open source code would have meant that other countries would have gotten it.

Also, check this out: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

Very different from how a typical Node.js left pad module is implemented.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#46

Post by grinich » Sat, Apr 09, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

creshal wrote: post #35

grinich wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capsu…

There were at least 11 classified NRO missions, and likely more with NRO tasks. Requirements from the NRO directly influenced the shuttle program design. I guess "large" is an exaggeration though.

They obviously didn't use Shuttle exclusively for military purposes. But most people don't realize that nearly all government-funded scientific programs in the US also have significant defense/NRO objectives. Even The Dish at Stanford was funded to be used for SIGINT work during the Cold War.

I'd wager that these groups are now using advanced robotics to replace classified work previously done via Shuttle missions. i.e. Boeing X-37

I don't think there's any maintenance plan for JWSP, capsule or otherwise. L2 is way too far away. Do you mean maintenance after launch but before deployment?

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#47

Post by ethbro » Sat, Apr 09, 2016, 11:16 PM UTC

Camillo wrote: post #37

drglitch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I get your meaning, but additional abstraction layers are equally dangerous because they obsfucate underlying constraints and result in incorrect reasoning about a system.

There's a reason RTOSs don't have very tall software stacks with multiple layers and virtual machines between them and the hardware.

When your garbage collector invoking at the wrong millisecond 0.01% of the time means everyone on the craft is incinerated in the atmosphere... that's a different level of reliability requirement.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#48

Post by paulddraper » Sun, Apr 10, 2016, 3:24 AM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #47

Camillo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I get your meaning, but additional abstraction layers are equally dangerous because they obsfucate underlying constraints and result in incorrect reasoning about a system. There's a reason RTOSs don't have very tall software stacks with multiple layers and virtual machines between them and the hardware. When your garbage collector invoking at the wrong millisecond 0.01% of the time means everyone on the craft is inci…

You missed the sarcasm.

Re: Space Shuttle vs. Buran

#49

Post by foota » Sun, Apr 10, 2016, 6:37 AM UTC

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…

Your comment makes me think of how they packed Crash Bandicoot into memory. [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-game-developers-pack-entire-ga...