A rant about people who are hyperbiased for Russian rockets.

[Kryten]

Whoops, got me there. Energia II was still an interesting concept.

Energia-Vulkan was interesting as well-2 Energia\'s stacked one above the other, with 8 boosters-and powerful to put Mir into orbit, with a good 45 tons to spare, or 3 of China\'s planned modular station.

[Tosh]

the engineers responsible for Buran had seen the Shuttle in action, and could see the weaknesses in the design. Far from suggesting the Americans were in some way defective, I\'d say that if the Russians FAILED to make it an improvement they\'d have been defective!

And actually they did. They failed to duplicate Shuttle even though they were told to do so (and to forget their original Spiral project!), and in spite of they had the blueprints (sorry guys but Soviet intelligence proved to be quite effective =P). Partially because engine constructors failed to create engines comparable with Shuttle ones, partially because USSR suffered a severe lack in SRB technology, partially \'cause Baikonur represents a less advantageous launch facility than KSC (I mean not the Kerbal Space Center ). As a result Energia-Buran system had only one reusable part -- Buran plane itself (compare with Shuttle system which expends only the fuel tank). Energia-Buran would be far less efficient than Shuttle if being operated under the same conditions.

Well, of course Energia could make an interesting heavy-class rocket... if only it (along with its launch facilities, fuel plants and all the stuff) won\'t be that expensive. Some people even say it\'s Energia-Buran project that killed USSR.

[Kryten]

Buran had only one reusable part and the space shuttle had...two-not much of a difference really.

And recycling the SRB\'s probably didn\'t produce much of a cost saving; e.g Ariane V uses similar boosters, which are recoverable, but they aren\'t reused-they don\'t find it worth the effort.

[Tosh]

Buran had only one reusable part and the space shuttle had...two-not much of a difference really.

Remember an engine . Shuttle returned 1st stage liquid fuel engines while Energia\'s engines were lost. And I suppose that those LOX-LH2 monsters cost a helluva lot.

[Johno]

I believe that the reason for that was that the Soviet designers (correctly!) thought that they could manufacture expendable engines with the desired performance characteristics more cheaply than they could refurbish reusable engines. It\'s worth saying that Shuttle engineers would have done this too if they\'d have had their time over again.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

Remember an engine . Shuttle returned 1st stage liquid fuel engines while Energia\'s engines were lost. And I suppose that those LOX-LH2 monsters cost a helluva lot.

And rebuilding the shuttles engines took quite a lot as well. The space shuttle took months to get ready for each flight.

[Tosh]

And rebuilding the shuttles engines took quite a lot as well. The space shuttle took months to get ready for each flight.

Ooops... I didn\'t know that.

[Kryten]

Remember an engine . Shuttle returned 1st stage liquid fuel engines while Energia\'s engines were lost. And I suppose that those LOX-LH2 monsters cost a helluva lot.

But that\'s the same as every single other rocket ever made-so you can\'t really claim that it\'s fundamentally uneconomical.

[Tosh]

But that\'s the same as every single other rocket ever made-so you can\'t really claim that it\'s fundamentally uneconomical.

I wasn\'t speaking of anything \'fundamental\'. We were comparing Shuttle with Buran, two similar machines with similar payload)). Shuttle looked more effective... until GroundHOG mentioned its engines needed to be completely rebuilt between flights.

[Johno]

The big thing is that people really should cut the designers of the Shuttle some slack - in principle, the idea of re-using the engines, the plane and the SRBs looked good. The trouble was that in practice it was a lot more complex than people thought it would be.

Reality has a way of doing that. We simply will never know what kinks they\'d have found in the Energia/Buran concept because it never got past the first test flight (a pity in many respects). However, it was a second generation shuttle, built with the lessons of the American program in mind; given that the Soviet engineers were overall as good as the American engineers (if having a different selection of strengths and weaknesses), you\'d have to expect the Buran was a superior vehicle. It was certainly a simpler concept; a lot of the disadvantages of the Shuttle were a result of the need to keep the three main engines for the next flight! Without those, you\'d have an extra 10.5 tonnes of downmass capability from the elimination of the engines alone, not counting the complexity of all the umbilicals and piping.

That said, for all its weaknesses, the USA had the cash to keep the shuttle flying, whilst Buran starved to death when the USSR collapsed. I really feel for the Russian engineers - they did an excellent job in harsh circumstances, and what happened to their concept really wasn\'t their fault.

[RichieD76]

Location also counted. The Buran had to be a throw away really. Shuttle designers tried the idea of liquid engines for both first stages but realised landing them in salt waters wasn\'t going to be ideal (akin to driving a car in the sea and hoping it starts after) They looked at landing the boosters on land but at 150ft and 12ft diameter...they would have been damaged. Hense why they settled on SRB\'s. When it\'s empty it\'s just a steel tube with little moving parts to go wrong. Even NASA admit that the SRB recovery was more of a economic function than worthwhile. Reusing them sounded a cheaper option to congress than throwing them away. Plus they could argue that reusing them kept people in jobs. For Buran with no water mass around the launch site it would have been just as impossible as the NASA engineers found to try reuse the liquid boosters.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

The big thing is that people really should cut the designers of the Shuttle some slack - in principle, the idea of re-using the engines, the plane and the SRBs looked good. The trouble was that in practice it was a lot more complex than people thought it would be.

Reality has a way of doing that. We simply will never know what kinks they\'d have found in the Energia/Buran concept because it never got past the first test flight (a pity in many respects). However, it was a second generation shuttle, built with the lessons of the American program in mind; given that the Soviet engineers were overall as good as the American engineers (if having a different selection of strengths and weaknesses), you\'d have to expect the Buran was a superior vehicle. It was certainly a simpler concept; a lot of the disadvantages of the Shuttle were a result of the need to keep the three main engines for the next flight! Without those, you\'d have an extra 10.5 tonnes of downmass capability from the elimination of the engines alone, not counting the complexity of all the umbilicals and piping.

That said, for all its weaknesses, the USA had the cash to keep the shuttle flying, whilst Buran starved to death when the USSR collapsed. I really feel for the Russian engineers - they did an excellent job in harsh circumstances, and what happened to their concept really wasn\'t their fault.

The space shuttles was a good vehicles. They did there jobs well. Thats it. Thats all that is required of a launch system. Sure it could have been better but they didn\'t have the funding for more than that.

The soviet space program always was harder than the US space program as it was more adhoc than the US space program. The funding was always tighter and that whole program was based around spare rockets. 'For example, the government in February 1962 abruptly ordered an ambitious mission involving two Vostoks simultaneously in orbit launched 'in ten days time' to obscure John Glenn\'s Mercury-Atlas 6 that month; the program could not do so with Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 until August.' Wikipedia.

It also wasn\'t just one group or organisation directed by one person. It was multiple design groups.

In the case of salyut it was 2 different programs merged, the original Salyut designed by Mishin (Salyut 1, Salyut 4, Salyut 6, Salyut 7) and the Almaz program designed by Vladimir Chelomei (Salyut 2, Salyut 3, Salyut 5).

[Newman]

Most important thing is to look at things in their historical context and what they were designed to do, at what budget, and during what time period. Saying that the Saturn V was crap is a fallacy. It\'s the only launcher that was used in a successful Moon mission, and did so 7 times (6 if you don\'t count the Apollo 13, but it\'s problems had nothing to do with the launcher itself). It had much more powerful engines thanks to Von Braun\'s design, allowing less of them to be used. Largely due to budget reasons, the Russians were unable to create an engine that powerful, resulting in clustering a lot of them - which lead to it\'s own set of problems. In N1\'s cases, the problems were catastrophic, as the rocket never had a successful flight (none of them were manned, fortunately).

But what\'s important to understand with N1 is, it didn\'t get half the requested funding that was projected as needed for successfully completing the project. That meant having literally no test facilities capable of properly testing this behemoth of a rocket. Korolev (their chief rocket designer at the time, the man responsible for putting the first satellite, living being, and finally first human being into space) and Glushko (rocket engine designer) had a falling out over which fuel to use (Glushko insisted on some pretty insanely toxic stuff that already resulted in some nasty accidents, because it also meant that the design could be simplified by not having to use a separate ignition mechanism - the fuel\'s two components would ignite by themselves on contact). As a result, they switched the rocket designer from Glushko to Kuznetsov, who was an accomplished jet engine engineer, but had no experience with rocket engines. His engines were good, but somewhat underpowered, leading to the insane amount of them used on the N1, and largely contributing to the complexity of the design.

To add to the problems, Korolev died before the project could be completed, and he was literally the driving force behind much of their space program. So, plagued with all these problems and a cronic lack of funds, the N1 never really had a chance.

But just saying 'this is crap' in some sort of an international **** measuring contest is a flawed discussion from the very beginning. All spacefaring nations had their successes and failures. Saturn V was a marvel of engineering for it\'s time, and it being used as little as it was had everything to do with it\'s cost and design purpose (reach the Moon at all costs before the Russians) and nothing to do with any 'crappyness'. It performed brilliantly and did it\'s job as intended. The cancellation of Apollo and the sudden lack of a political reason to reach the Moon is what signed it\'s retirement papers - all the US needed after the Apollo program was a way to get satellites and men into LEO. Saturn V was way too expensive for that alone. They used the one remaining they had to launch the Skylab and that was it.

That doesn\'t mean that the Americans didn\'t have their problems, mostly in the early days of the program. It took the Russians beating them every time during the early days of space launches for the Americans to finally let Von Braun do his thing and turn a blind eye to his Nazi past. Before that, some of their navy rocket designs made for some pretty fireworks and not much else when it came to launching some actual payload into space. Meanwhile, the Russians were building Korolev\'s R7\'s like there\'s no tomorrow, and that rocket is still being used today, so I guess that does say something about their technical achievements of the day.

tldr: being biased towards any nation\'s rockets in general is flawed from the get go. The only correct way to look at rockets is; during what time period were they built, for what purpose, for what budget, and how did they perform. Everything else.. irrelevant.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

^ I just don\'t like the Saturn V. OK. Doesn\'t make it any better or any worse than how it performed. But if the N1 had of succeeded and development on it had started earlier, the space race would have well and truly become a race.

[Aynrayne]

Argument settled, eh? Well let\'s look at some actual facts:

Astronaut fatalities during spaceflight:

USA: 13

USSR: 4

Astronaut fatalities during training:

USA: 8

USSR/Russia: 3

Number of fatalities during the moonshot program:

USA: 3

USSR: 0

And I don\'t even like the Rooskies! ;P

Actually,

Confirmed Astronaut/Cosmonaut Fatalities during spaceflight:

US: 13

USSR: 0 (Up to 20 have been claimed, though never proven.)

Number of fatalities during the moonshot program

I don\'t think this category even deserves any interest as the only three killed in the American moonshot were in Apollo 1, which didn\'t even take off and the Russians never launched a manned lunar mission so they are pretty much disqualified.

Your figures on the fatalities during training are right though.

[Darrknox]

[NovaSilisko]

Actually,

Confirmed Astronaut/Cosmonaut Fatalities during spaceflight:

US: 13

USSR: 0 (Up to 20 have been claimed, though never proven.)

Number of fatalities during the moonshot program

I don\'t think this category even deserves any interest as the only three killed in the American moonshot were in Apollo 1, which didn\'t even take off and the Russians never launched a manned lunar mission so they are pretty much disqualified.

Your figures on the fatalities during training are right though.

...No soviet fatalities during spaceflight? What about Soyuz 1? What about Soyuz 11? Those are confirmed...

If you want to get technical, only the crew of Soyuz 11 was killed during spaceflight, Soyuz 1 was destroyed on impact with the ground after reentry.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

Actually,

Confirmed Astronaut/Cosmonaut Fatalities during spaceflight:

US: 14

USSR: 0 (Up to 20 have been claimed, though never proven.)

Number of fatalities during the moonshot program

I don\'t think this category even deserves any interest as the only three killed in the American moonshot were in Apollo 1, which didn\'t even take off and the Russians never launched a manned lunar mission so they are pretty much disqualified.

Your figures on the fatalities during training are right though.

Confirmed Astronaut/Cosmonaut Fatalities during spaceflight:

US: 13

USSR: 4 (Up to 20 have been claimed, though never proven.)

You forget Soyuz 11 which is the only actual space incident causing death (all of the other ones were bellow 100km) and was caused by axphixiation and Soyuz 1 which hit the ground at 40 ms^-1 because the first chute didn\'t work and the reserve chute got tangled in the first chute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11

EDIT: DAMN YOU NOVA SILISKO!!!

[RichieD76]

Well if those are the rules deduct the challenger explosion as that was at 48,000ft

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

Well if those are the rules deduct the challenger explosion as that was at 48,000ft

And the Colombia disaster which also happened bellow 100 km

[NovaSilisko]

So yes, only the soviets have had fatalities in space. But space-related fatalities have occurred on both sides.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

And both had tons of problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents

[GWBBQ]

I love both the US and Soviet/Russian space programs. I grew up with Shuttle launches. I always loved Shuttle launches. Heck, my earliest childhood memory is watching a shuttle launch (unfortunately, it was STS-51-L.) The US program from beginning to now has been a technological marvel. But I also have a soft spot for the elegant simplicity of the R7 rockets. US rockets use a complicated system of sensors, electronics, and explosives to separate boosters. The R7\'s boosters run out of fuel and then fall off because they\'re not attached - it doesn\'t get anymore foolproof than that. It\'s fascinating to look at the drastically different approaches to rocket technology and I think that anyone who can\'t look at both and appreciate them is short sighted.

[Johno]

I think people need to understand something about fatalities in space - they HAPPEN. And they happen when a program is pushing the state of the art[1]. Nobody wants to see brave people die in accidents, and of course everything should be done to prevent it. But when it\'s all said and done, sitting in a cabin on top of enough explosives to mimic a small nuclear bomb is never going to be safe.

It\'s for this reason that I don\'t like it when people use the number of fatal incidents as a measure of the [lack of] quality of the program. It\'s not. It\'s an unfortunate inevitability when people are doing what people have never done before.

[1]They are not necessarily CAUSED by pushing the boundaries (for example, Challenger was really caused by bureaucratic failures, ultimately). But they happen when we push the boundaries.

[Reflector]

http://www.jamesoberg.com/soyuz.html

I like how Wikipedia is a frequently used source of (mis)information. Boy I love those admin politics and edit wars over there.

(I\'ll let you guys check the Wikipedia pages on the missions listed there, bet you won\'t find some of those fun things like 'launch pad fatalities.')