Soviet Shuttle Buran Found In a Junk Heap 226
gruenz noted the somewhat sad photo slideshow showing what appears to be the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran, lying in a Moscow suburb junk heap. Of course I don't read Russian, so it might also be a carnival ride rusting.
They should be thankful (Score:3, Insightful)
That they did not spend a crazy amount of money on what ended up in the U.S. as a net negative to what we COULD of had. The shuttle had some success and worked but it was way more expensive than it was sold to be and ended up tethering the U.S. to low earth orbit for decades instead of moving on like we should have to a permanent moon settlement and Mars.
Not News (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not News (Score:5, Funny)
THIS. IS. SLASHDOT!
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In Soviet Russia, we send space into junk.
Actually, it is kind of sad, even when stated in the style of the Yakov meme. :-/
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SPARTA. IS. OVER THERE!
Bunny Ears (Score:2)
Screw the shuttle...what's up with the dude wearing the bunny ears?
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I can read Russian just fine thanks. For your information this IS news because it is a carnival ride rusting. Sheesh even Taco pointed that one out for you.
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"I can read Russian just fine thanks.
Yeah, we commentators should have known YOU read Russian. Silly us.
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Wooooosh. There were enough references to the summary in there...
Re:Not News (Score:5, Informative)
I have some doubts about you being able to read russian.
The original article (which is mostly pics) does not refer to any carnival rides. However it is in Moskovskij Komsomolec which is pretty much the Russian equivalent of the UK Sun or the German Build. Classic tabloid stuff.
As far as seeing a rusting hulk of a spaceship on ax Soviet Block scrapyard. Well really - nothing new there. Quite a few other examples come to mind. For example if you drive around Sofia on the ring road there is a fighter jet in a reasonably good condition (much better than the Buran on the picture) parked in one of the laybuys. It is nowdays prime location on the ring road for "truck stop and servicing" by practicioners of the oldest human profession. I can think of at least a couple of examples where there are serviceable tanks, missile launchers and other gear located in similar locations. As the saying goes - welcome to the wild east...
Re:Not News (Score:4, Funny)
For example if you drive around Sofia on the ring road there is a fighter jet in a reasonably good condition (much better than the Buran on the picture) parked in one of the laybuys. It is nowdays prime location on the ring road for "truck stop and servicing" by practicioners of the oldest human profession.
Great, I discover this after I spent all of my time in Burgas!
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And yet with all of this knowledge and my piss-takey reference to the summary you felt the need to write a long response. 10/10 for knowledge about russia, but whoosh none the less
Re:They should be thankful (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll take the Hubble Space Telescope and the myriad of other LEO scientific/communication satellites over your pie-in-the-sky Buck Rogers fantasies any day of the week.
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We would have had all of that and a lot more without the shuttle.
At some point, someone will mention the shuttle mission to fix Hubble's focus, without mentioning that we could have built and launched another five Hubbles for the cost of that mission alone.
Face it: the shuttle was pure PR; they wanted something that looked like a plane. Re-usability looked good on paper but it cost more per launch than using disposable vehicles, and that's without even taking the massive manufacturing cost into account.
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We would have had all of that and a lot more without Congress.
Fix that for you. The shuttle that flies today is not the shuttle that was originally designed. In fact, the design criteria and requirements changes numerous times because of congressional mandate. When Congress was done, we suddenly had a pig on a fuel tank and dual boosters which could only service lower orbits. The original craft was much more utilitarian, capable of servicing much higher orbits, albeit with a smaller payload area.
Realistically, the shuttle, at inception, did have potential to meet some
Re:They should be thankful (Score:4, Insightful)
That was not the critical flaw to the shuttle. The flaw was its basic concept, of having a hypersonic space glider attached to the side of a rocket. It simply can't compete on a cost basis with traditional rockets (of having the payload carried on top of a disposable rocket). It also is more dangerous due to ice and foam falling from the fuel tank which can then strike the shuttle. If you watch old Apollo launches you will see large chunks of ice fall from the boosters but then harmlessly fall to the ground since there was nothing for it to his.
I don't blame congress for that critical flaw since there really was no way to know how difficult it would be to solve the issue of falling ice and foam or how much it would cost to do the shuttle launches until they tried it since it had never been tried at that point in time. Once they saw how expensive it was they probably should have gone back to the drawing board, but this was going on at the end of the Cold War and I'm sure the political pressure to continue building shuttles was immense.
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The reason there's foam is to prevent ice from forming on the fuel tank. Ice is both a weight issue as well as a falling hazard. The Apollo rocket boosters had no foam (or very little, but I'm pretty sure it was none) since falling ice wasn't a hazard.
Of course you wouldn't put a glider on top of the rocket booster. You would put a standard capsule on top, as was done during Apollo.
Look, I love the shuttle but there's no way it can compete on cost with a standard rocket, period. We tried for decades to make
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When NASA was looking for a replacement for the shuttle they didn't even consider another glider due to the cost issue alone.
Far more likely that was because of political funding issues more so than any other factor. This is probably not the best line item to put up as a defense.
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Realistically, the shuttle, at inception, did have potential to meet some level of desired service criteria but Congress ensured that was never going to be possible.
There's a deeper issue: the Shuttle was conceived as part of a larger project, hence the name, Space Transportation System. Most of the System was cancelled, leaving only the Shuttle, an isolated component with no real function.
...laura
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All those things were fantasies once too. We only made them reality because it was cheaper and had an immediate business application.
Rhetorical: Are you a realist or are you just settling?
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Hubble - Could have been Launched without the Shuttle
All other satellites - Could have been launched without the Shuttle
The Shuttle was actually a hinderance for launching some satellites - some where too bit, the wrong shape, or needed to be launched in another orbit .....
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Hubble - Could have been Launched without the Shuttle All other satellites - Could have been launched without the Shuttle
The Shuttle was actually a hinderance for launching some satellites - some where too bit, the wrong shape, or needed to be launched in another orbit .....
Hubble - Pretty difficult to repair without a shuttle; and up until the last servicing mission, couldn't be serviced or returned to earth intact without a shuttle.
Re:They should be thankful (Score:5, Informative)
In many ways, Buran was what the US could have had. It had no SSMEs, which remain one of the most complex engine systems ever built. It had no solid rocket boosters, which caused Challenger's demise and severely limited the failure modes of the vehicle. And it could be operated entirely by computer and remote control, meaning for many missions no crew or their equipment need consume launch weight.
It lacked capabilities that Shuttle had, but it was a pretty reasonable compromise that would have probably had significantly higher return on investment.
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Buran was a nice spacecraft. They had the advantage of doing it after the US, so they were able to avoid some mistakes. Buran's tiles aren't as fragile as the US tiles. Buran could fly through rain; the US shuttle can be damaged by raindrops.
While Buran looks much like the US shuttle, it's not. Buran has no main engines. The carrier booster has the engines.
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and the complex throttling ability was needed for Astronaut comfort/safety.
I read this has to do with cargo capacity and altitude of orbit more so than anything else. Is this not true?
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I don't think you need to throttle engines due to capacity/etc. As long as you can control the burn duration and start/stop the engines (or have an extra stage) to circularize the orbit you shouldn't need throttle control as long as G-forces aren't a factor.
Throttle control is needed to minimize G-forces. As fuel is depleted the rocket gets lighter, which means that a given amount of force gives greater and greater acceleration. For a manned ship that is a big problem, both for the crew and all the fragi
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Energia engines were also supposed to be reusable.
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Actually failure modes are basically the same. A result of having a vehicle attached to the side of the booster that you can't easily eject at lower speeds and altitudes and expect it to glide anywhere.
The US shuttle has one failure mode between T=0 and booster separation: you're screwed. The SRBs can't be shut down, and you can't separate either the shuttle or booster from the stack until SRB burn-out; catastrophic stresses would tear it apart if you tried.
The Buran stack, being entirely liquid-fueled, could be shut down or throttled back at any time, allowing the Russian shuttle to separate safely (in theory; even on the US shuttle, post-launch aborts have always been abort-to-orbit). It might not have
mod parent up (Score:2)
The parent is absolutely correct.
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This is probably a bit of both, since if the ship were unmanned it probably would be a lot easier to design it to just run at full throttle the whole time. If it didn't have big wings and a windshield maybe air resistance wouldn't be a problem.
I do agree that stress and acceleration impacts all aspects of the spacecraft, and not just the crew.
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Actually, Buran probably cost 20B Rubles, and the expenditure was unsupportable. Some would say that this alone precipitated the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, but I think we can give their military and good ol' Ronnie some credit.
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...Space Nuttery is one of the most irrational beliefs to come out of the XXth century.
Re:They should be thankful (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, space is too complicated. Total waste of time and effort. If it can't be built in your garage by one guy, it's not worth building, right? Especially if it takes over a week... Talk about your lust for instant gratification...
Pure masturbation all this space exploration stuff. We have everything we need right here. Why would anybody want to leave? And there's certainly no reason to believe that the whole process could possibly be mechanized in the future, reducing human effort (thus costs) to near zero. Nope, let's just sit here on our duffs, munching on Doritos, and feed the poor... to the gods of war
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+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
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Indeed, because your example is of a comparable magnitude!
"could've" does the trick (Score:2)
problem are the dickheads thinking one has said "could of" & daring to issue a corrections, leading one having to explain that one's using an abbreviated form of "could have" spelt "c-o-u-l-d-'-v-e".
Translation (Score:2)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
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I started this small, unknown, a good thing to hear, many people are in machine translation is complete, there is a very good place. You May Have on the fire [google.com] ;)
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I don't know what's so bad about it. I pasted the word "fuck" and ten translations later it still came out as "fuck".
It seems that, no matter the language, a fuck is still a fuck.
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Basically translation is: "Authentic Buran lying in a junk heap. That's a shame, because no one cares about what had been a symbol of country's space might".
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Chrome asked me if I wanted it translated automatically - did a fairly decent job of it.
The caption says it is Buran. (Score:4, Informative)
I did take a year of Russian in college, and it is a bit (well, very, very rusty), but it seems to say that it is Buran and it has been "sacrificed" and it laments the fact that it was once a symbol of the Soviet power in space but is now junk. That is no where near an exact translation, but a rough translation of parts of the caption.
"" is buran in Russian
"" is essentially "Soviet" (some variation)
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Except that it isn't. The original poster is full of bull. Look at the photos to the rear, no space shuttle takes off with scaffolding welded to it's posterior. This must be a training / simulation mock-up of the real thing.
There's other hints to it being a mock-up, like the lack of full tiling.
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One of the photos DOES show a few tiles on the nose and underbelly near the front. It might be the real thing, the scaffolding might have been welded on as a platform to help disassemble part of it. (Note the wings are missing). I'm sure they did make some partial mockups in order to build the real thing, IIRC there were two obitors built, one was tested on top of a large aircraft. I don't know if any made it into space.
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I guess unicode didn't make it.
The five letter word in quotations (looks like an upside-down "g" then "ypah" is Buran. (5th line, 4th word in the first photo caption)
Then the "cobetckNN" (backwards NN) is essentially "Soviet" (right before Buran).
There are a few other words about it being in the outskirts of Moscow.
Re:The caption says it is Buran. (Score:5, Informative)
Google translate says:
And unprecedented case. Seemingly abandoned spaceship on the streets of Moscow - it is something from the realm of fantasy. But alas, this is the true reality. Correspondent "MK" discovered orbiting Soviet "Buran" play like garbage on the outskirts of the capital. Nobody cares what was once a symbol of cosmic power of our country.
Surprisingly close to accurate.
Actual translation:
"Sometimes impossible is possible. You would think that an abandoned spaceship lying on the streets of Moscow is something out of science fiction, but unfortunately this is reality. A Correspondent of "MK" discovered a soviet orbiter "Buran" lying like trash in the capital's suburbs. Nobody cares about what once was a symbol of the space might of our country"
(And yes, "Buran" is not a name of a ship, its a type of ship.)
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Pity the Smithsonian air and space doesn't pick it up to showcase next to their orbiter. Yeah, its not "american", but it does symbolize the Space Race/Arms Race between the US and USSR.
Which one is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
This page [aerospaceweb.org] contains a list of the Buran airframes and their locations. This page [aerospaceweb.org] has a photo of the OK-1K2 unfinished orbiter, this is the closest match to the photos shown in TFA. Aerospaceweb lists this orbiter as having been sold to the Technikmuseum Speyer in 2004, but I've recently been there and they have the OK-GLI atmospheric test bed on display, not OK-1K2.
Re:Which one is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia has a better list, it seems. Most likely candidate is orbiter 2.02 [k26.com]:
At the time of the halting of the Buran-Energia program, Buran 2.02 was under construction on the factory floor at the Tushino Machine Building Plant just outside of Moscow. Her level of completion was estimated between 10-20 percent.
With funding gone, Buran 2.02 remained unfinished on the factory floor for a number of years. Recently she has been dismantled and moved outside to the back of the premises. She now lies exposed to the elements. Many of her tiles have since been stripped, such as those shown below can now be bought on the internet.
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Looking for it at the site via Google Maps, I came across something interesting in a nearby river.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=moscow&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=0&hl=en&hq=&hnear=Moscow,+Russia&ll=55.851752,37.456099&spn=0.002803,0.008256&z=18&iwloc=A [google.com]
Is that a plane in midair, or is that a huge plane-shaped boat? Perhaps a huge seajet of some sort?
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A plane in midair, the plane is listing slightly to the port (making the tail section appear to be slanting to the bottom of the screen). That said, it's an excellent shot if you wanted to start your own "Soviet super secret giant seaplane conspiracy theory"
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It is real, its not THE buran (Score:2)
Its either part of an incomplete buran-class ship or a static test model.
There were several of them partially built when the program was canceled
in addition to several static test models.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_program [wikipedia.org]
Amazing... (Score:5, Funny)
Kudos to advocate_one (Score:2)
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Ah, it is MK... (Score:2, Informative)
Buran in Germany- (Score:2)
There is a Buran in Germany at the Speyer Technik museum.
http://blog.flightstory.net/681/russian-space-shuttle-buran-transported-to-german-museum/ [flightstory.net]
http://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/node/1327 [technik-museum.de]
http://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/en [technik-museum.de]
They have two awesome sister technical museums near Frankfurt/Stuttgart. Sinsheim has planes (both supersonic passenger planes) and the Buran is at the Speyer along with more space stuff. Both have a good amount of military stuff and tons of autos. Trains. Model trains. Chainsaws.
I love reading about the Buran (Score:2)
...and it's fully automated first flight. As I recall, it did the whole thing under independent computer control -- was this an incredible achievement for the time?
Why is it sad? (Score:2)
I understand that there's a memory associated with the object and certainly the shuttle played a role in Earth history. But ultimately, it's just an object. As I'm gearing and girding up for another hurricane season, I keep on thinking how much *stuff* I have. I admire those people -- and in Russia it seems to be a cultural thing -- who can easily give up objects. Maybe it's years of living under the USSR, or maybe it's the bleak landscape (in some areas), but my Russian friends seem not to fret about throw
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>> maybe it's the crappy cars they keep on telling me about. All of them were just a moment away from the trash heap anyway.\
Boy those Russians really did copy *everything* from America.
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Interesting.
One of the most reliable (and fun to drive) cars I ever had was an old fiat.
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For me, as a space enthusiast and aerospace professional, the sad part is that *anyone* would get a shuttle orbiter project so close to operational that they could launch, orbit, and land a fully-automated prototype -- and then just lose that entire program. The physical remnant is, as you say, just "stuff," and not really important in itself. What I (and, I believe, others) mourn is the loss of a manned space-launch program that came THAT close to being operational, regardless of just whose program it was
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I agree... But I also think that we spend far too much time looking at past accomplishments rather than pushing forward. Keeping a hunk of metal around to inspire a child (or an adult for that matter) may be valid, but maybe those funds are better spent on telescopes or model rockets.
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"I admire those people -- and in Russia it seems to be a cultural thing -- who can easily give up objects. Maybe it's years of living under the USSR, or maybe it's the bleak landscape (in some areas), but my Russian friends seem not to fret about throwing things away. Me? I have a ticket stub from a U2 concert that I'm keeping. I have a cigarette lighter from my crashed 3000GT."
I think your over-generalizing in your grand self-psychoanalysis of this story. People keep things, from Russia to, apparently, your house. I suggest that rather than draw parallels between your own rather nutty para psychological profile to Soviet times, you instead look to more practical matters such as the costs involved in housing and upkeep of a huge spacecraft like the Buran. As a symbol of Soviet technical achievement having made one un-manned space flight, it ranks with the Sputnik. Compared with y
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Compared with your self-absorbed proclivity to pack rat junk, its not even in the same ballpark. Not even on the same planet.
It actually is on the same planet. The rest of your post is invalidated. I win.
Russia looks like fun! (Score:2)
Naked chicks, booze, flipping over cars, and rusting aerospace; fucking awesome.
Didn't they sell it on Ebay? (Score:2)
I seem to remember a slashdot story from a few years ago that the Russians had put the shuttle up for sale on Ebay.
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According to an article someone else posted above - http://www.spacedaily.com/news/buran-00a.html [spacedaily.com] - you may be referring to a theme park company selling their prototype-Buran-turned-ride. They say it was a publicity stunt and that they don't have the legal right to sell it, even though they own it and operate it as a ride.
Um, Google Translate? (Score:2)
Of course I don't read russian, so it might also be a carnival ride rusting.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mk.ru%2Fphoto%2Fsocial%2F1090-buran-prinesennyiy-v-zhertvu.html [google.com]
Seriously, how hard is that?
I wonder what freight is (Score:2)
I wonder what the freight costs are from Moscow to Hutchinson [cosmo.org]?
To hell with the Russian space shuttle (Score:4, Insightful)
I see a much more enjoyable ride [www.mk.ru] on that web page.
Some Buran Articles Online (Score:2)
There's a good history of Buran over at Astronautix. First the article [astronautix.com] about the craft itself, another (with a lot of overlap) about the project [astronautix.com], then a short piece about the Buran Analogue [astronautix.com]. A very good write-up with several good photos (sad ones at the end) over at Aerospaceweb [aerospaceweb.org].
If you've got some time to kill, you can find a Buran mock-up sitting at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Google Earth. Also the final resting place of the Buran that flew and the Energia reusable launch vehicle, but it's a little hard to
Eastern Bloc just threw stuff away... (Score:2)
Reading about the Buran doesn't really surprise me. Back around '95, I was on a business trip in the (fairly new) Czech Republic, and one day on a drive between Hradec Kralove and Pardubice, we passed this junkyard, and it was full of scrapped tanks, and artillery pieces and such, and to cap it all off there were a few old MiGs (old, like -15s and -17s IIRC) strewn across the top of the pile. All just pleasantly rusting away in the Bohemian countryside...
Authentication (Score:2)
Re:The caption says it is Buran. (Score:5, Informative)
Buran is not just one ship but an entire class of ships, there was one finished (destroyed), one partially finished (in Kazakhstan)
and several more in various states of unfinishedness.
This one is possibly 2.02
http://www.buran-energia.com/bourane-buran/bourane-modele-202.php [buran-energia.com]
military operating craft just like this (Score:2)
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"" is buran "" is essentially "Soviet" (some variation)
So when someone accidentally the whole thing they're actually trying to use unicode on Slashdot?
Re:Don't think so (Score:4, Informative)
wikipedia lists 5 russian orbiters at least partially constructed:
- Buran, destroyed in hangar collapse
- Ptichka, 95% completed, stored at the baikonur facility in kazachstan
- Baikal, incomplete, located at baikonur
- 11F35K4, partially dismantled, located outside the Tushino machine building plant near Moscow
- 11F35K5, dismantled
i'd say this might be 11F35K4
i didnt know about Buran being destroyed though, such a shame
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Wikipedia says that it is "Partially dismantled, remains outside Tushino Machine Building Plant, near Moscow." It is sad to know that something pretty much as awesome as that is just sitting outside, but if thats
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yup, i knew they had two (buran and ptichka), but i just found out they had three more orbiters in various stages on construction (among which this K4), and about a dozen static full scale models for structural testing etc...
So yeah, if i had tripped over that thing in moscow, i would have screamed "buran" too (and crawled inside to pretend to be a cosmonaut)
It is a bleeding shame to see these historical artifacts left in the junk-yard like they are, Ptichka apparently is stored at baikonur together with K3
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I would have pretended to be a Space Pirate. Way cooler.
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wikipedia lists the craft in gorky park as the OK-TVA, a static full scale test model built for load/heat/stress/vibration testing
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Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had done the same and gone back to the Apollo program, 14 people would still be alive.
Right, because no one died in the Apollo 1 fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 [wikipedia.org] . And because no one almost died on Apollo 13. And because no Soviets died in craft similar to the Apollo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11 [wikipedia.org] .
If we had stayed with Apollo type craft there would have almost certainly been more fatalities. Space travel is very dangerous. This isn't going to change anytime soon and wouldn't be different if we had used Apollo-like vehicles. Indeed, I'd tentatively guess that the reduced expense of such vehicles might mean many more launches and thus likely even more fatalities.
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NASA learned from their mistakes and did a good job of not repeating them. After Apollo 1 they stopped filling the capsule with 100% oxygen and made some design changes to the capsule to make it safer (and there hasn't been another cabin fire since on any mission).
The Apollo style rockets are fundamentally safer than shuttles. If we had stayed with that kind of rocket we likely would have had something similar to the Russian Soyuz, a rocket that hasn't had an accident since 1971. The reason they are safer i
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And to think how many people would still be alive if we gave up on building ships a few thousand years ago!
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Unlikely. Hard as it may be to believe, Shuttle's safety record (two disasters in 132 flights) was better than Apollo (one disaster in twelve flights) or even Soyuz (two disasters in 106 flights).
Most likely result if we hadn't gone with Shuttle would have been more, smaller disasters (killing people two or three at a time rather than seven at a shot).
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Those two Soyuz disasters happened very early in its program (the first and eleventh flight). There has not been another disaster on the Soyuz since 1971. During the entire lifetime of the shuttle program there hasn't been a single fatality on the Soyuz.
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If we had invested in remote-manned EXPLORATION instead of Cold War cockwaving space tourism, we'd be much further along in exploring space and developing the robotic systems we REQUIRE ANYWAY to support future manned tourism.
Behold "return on investment":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 [wikipedia.org]
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I have no mod points, but I must laugh.
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Actually, this would be it:
http://www.ninjito.com/images/2008-09-12/qx-mongolia-warrior-2.jpg [ninjito.com]
Soviet Warrior, loose translation is: that which was built by the people will be protected for the people. ..and yet..
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"If i remember correctly, it never had a manned flight and the only fully completed orbiter got just one unmanned flight."
THAT is the question I was wondering about; was a Buran ever launched? I remember when they trotted that thing out. My first reaction was "Oh yeah, they copied the shuttle." Except bigger. But then, nothing. I in fact distinctly recall wondering in the late 90's wtf ever happened to it. I guess the Soviets couldn't afford to fill the gas tanks.