The space shuttle wasn't like anything
before it, it was the first reusable spacecraft and it promised to make
travel into space affordable, safe, almost routine. And so by the 1970's America
abandoned expendable rockets, which could only be used once, and went all in on
space shuttles, Building the Columbia, the Challenger, the discovery, the Atlantis
the Braun and the Endeavour. Wait a minute, this is not one of the space
shuttles. In 1988, the world learned that the
Soviet Union also had a space shuttle. They had been secretly developing it for
well over a decade, and it had cost them billions. But maybe you've never heard of
it, and that wouldn't be too surprising, because the Soviet Space Shuttle only
ever launched once. But it's not because it was flawed. Actually its first launch
was a huge success and in a lot of ways it was actually more capable and robust
than the American space shuttle. But after its first launch, the Soviet
shuttle seems to have just disappeared. And to understand why, you need to go
back to the late 1960's. That's when the Soviets would have learned that the
Americans were planning to replace their conventional rockets with a new reusable
spacecraft. But at first the Soviets wouldn't have been concerned. After all,
they had done their own research into reusable spacecraft and space planes. And the Soviets were pretty busy with other space projects. They were still in the
race to put a man on the moon, they had ambitious plans for a space station, even
a potential moon base. But by 1975 the mood had changed, the Soviets had grown paranoid that the American space shuttle might also be used as a space weapon.
Soviet research institutes studied the shuttle program and what they found was
that the publicly stated goals of the program, well, just didn't line up with what the Americans were actually building. For one, the shuttle promised to make getting into space cheaper. But the Soviets could
clearly see that the shuttle's launch costs were actually going to be higher
than the Rockets it was supposed to replace. And the shuttle program promised an incredible 60 launches a year, giving the Americans the ability to get a lot
of material into orbit - ten times more than they had been previously able to.
And yet there was nothing in NASA's plans that called for so many launches.
The space shuttle'ss commercial and scientific goals were starting to look
like a smokescreen for what was likely a military program. The Soviets suspected
that the shuttle could be used to launch something like, say, a laser weapon into
orbit, test it, then bring it back down to earth for further development.
With a shuttle type craft, the Americans could militarize space a lot quicker
than the Soviets. The shuttle could even be used to capture a Soviet spy
satellite and bring it back down to earth for study. And to compound Soviet
fears, they discovered that the Americans were quietly building a second launch
site for the shuttle at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. And here's the
thing with Vandenberg, launch the shuttle from there and by its first orbit it's
over all the major population centers of the Soviet Union. So the shuttle could in
theory deliver a nuclear first-strike faster than any Soviet nuclear delivery
system. The Soviet military pushed hard for the Soviet Union
to start developing its own space shuttle, but few involved in the Soviet
space program actually wanted a shuttle type craft. But four years after the
Americans began working on the space shuttle, the Kremlin quietly gave the go-ahead to start developing a Soviet counterpart
The Soviet Union's space shuttle would be called Buran and its research and
development would be kept a closely guarded secret for years. When the
Americans first launched the Space Shuttle on April 12 1981, which awkwardly enough was the 20th anniversary of the Soviets launching the first man into
space, the Soviet media was scathing. They blasted the Americans for putting in
military craft into space and they reminded viewers that the Soviet Union's
space program was for the betterment of science and humanity. Very few Soviet citizens would have known that their own government was
secretly developing a similar shuttle. There's no way around it the Buran
looked a lot like the American Space Shuttle, and it's got nothing to do with
aerodynamic or thermodynamic laws. The goal had been to build something that
could match the military potential of the Space Shuttle and with a lot of
information about the American Space Shuttle freely available and
unclassified, it's not hard to imagine what happened next. But here's the thing,
the Soviets already knew a thing or two about getting into space, so they didn't
just copy the shuttle, they might have designed a better Space Shuttle
First there's a big difference in how the Space Shuttle and the Buran actually
get into space. The Space Shuttle's orbiter uses integrated reusable main
engines which are fueled by an external tank. But because the main engines were
not powerful enough to put the Shuttle into orbit, it also needed the help of
two expendable solid rocket boosters. But the Buran didn't have integrated engines,
all of its lifting power was provided by a separate super-heavy rocket called
Energia. It consisted of a core stage and four
boosters. Unlike the Space Shuttle, which was a single system, the Buran orbiter
and it's lifting Rockets were actually two separate systems. While the Shuttle
with its integrated engines was more reusable, in practice it required
intensive maintenance between launches, which offset a lot of its advantage, but
once in space the Shuttle's integrated engines no
longer serve the purpose. So for most of the Shuttle's mission, it was forced to
haul around thousands of pounds of dead weight. This meant that the Buran
could carry slightly more payload than the Space Shuttle, but more importantly
the Soviet system had a massive advantage: flexibility. The Energia
rocket could launch by itself without the Buran attached, and that meant it
could carry other things into space. Without the Buran, the Energia rocket could launch an astounding 100 tons. That's three Space Shuttles worth of
lifting power. The Space Shuttle's first stage uses solid rocket boosters. The
Energia's are liquid fueled. The thing with solid rocket boosters is, once they're
started, there's simply no way to shut them off. The Energia's liquid-fueled
rockets could be throttled up down or even shut off completely in an emergency. And in an emergency, the Buran had ejection seats for the entire crew, which
could function while on the launch pad or all the way up to 20 miles.
Only the first two shuttles had ejection seats and only for two crew members.
Later shuttles had no ejection seats at all. From the outset the Buran was also
capable of fully automated flight, meaning it could be launched, put into
orbit, and returned back to earth without any crew on board. Automated flight couldhave been used for rescue missions and an empty Buran could be sent up to
rescue the crew of a space station or another stranded orbiter. The Buran's
first launch was on November of 1988. The western media was impressed. Especially by it's fully automatic landing system. On that autumn day in 1988 the future of Soviet space flight - at least from an outsider's perspective - looked promising. The media speculated that the Buran would be used to build space stations, or
maybe to assemble a spacecraft for a manned mission to Mars. Of course none of that ever happened the Buran was only launched once. In the late 1980's the
Soviet Union began to collapse, and with it funding for the Buran was limited, and
eventually cut off entirely. Tough questions started rolling in about the
program. Soviet engineers had done a fine job, but the entire program was starting
to look absurdly expensive. Like the American Space Shuttle, the Buran was
costly and inefficient, but unlike the Americans the Russians still had other
ways to get into space. A soyuz rocket could launch payload into orbit six
times cheaper than a Braun. But if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, well, we
might imagine Burans being used to assemble orbital space stations, or
spacecraft for missions to other planets. Or maybe not. The Soviets had been so
paranoid about the military potential of the American Shuttle they wanted their
own matching system. But that goal quickly became pretty much the only goal. In the final days of the Soviet Union, when it was clear that the American
shuttle had no meaningful military potential, the Soviet military no longer
wanted anything to do with the Buran, and the Soviet space community was left with
a spacecraft that was expensive, complex, and largely without a real purpose
It was a better design, because the orbiter had no engines so it wasn't subject to the extreme stresses that the USA shuttle had to endure, plus the tiles were laid out better, and it literally could fly without a crew, which it did. The Russians figured out though it was a stupid idea and terribly expensive so they canned it.
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