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(Cold War) The world's best Soviet spacecraft "Energia Buran", the pinnacle of cosmonautics development
Translated using Google Translate by Russian Bear.
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The reason for the development of the Energia-Buran project, like many technical innovations of the Cold War era, was the desire of the leadership of the Soviet Union to maintain parity in the means of delivering nuclear weapons.
The Shuttle began to be developed in 1970. The American media rushed to cover this event as much as possible and provide details. This was justified by economic reasons. Let's not forget that everywhere in the world, defense budgets are filled from the pockets of taxpayers, and a reusable ship that is returned requires much less resources than a disposable rocket, from which nothing remains except a small lander.
However, Soviet scientists quickly carried out calculations and proved that economic calculations do not add up - it is just a screen. The main idea of the Shuttle was the possibility of its combat use - with its help, the United States could carry out nuclear bombing of any region of the USSR.
To keep up with potential adversaries, the Soviet Union launched its own space shuttle program in 1973.
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Rocket
It is not for nothing that the name of the Energia-Buran project consists of two words. These are the names of two separate components. “Buran” was the name of the space shuttle itself, and “Energia” was the name of the super-heavy launch vehicle that launched the entire complex into space.
The rocket became the most powerful of all created in the USSR. Its launch weight was 2400 tons, while it launched into orbit a shuttle whose own weight was 105 tons, including 30 tons of payload.
The accelerating block was made according to a two-stage package design - two pairs of additional ones are located on the sides of the main block. When they ran out of fuel, they fired back and returned to the ground.
During the history of its existence, the Energia rocket made only two flights - the first time it was used to launch a large mock-up, and the second time it was the Buran itself. In the future, it was not used simply because each launch was expensive (In connection with the collapse of the USSR), and there was simply no need to deliver such an amount of cargo into orbit (The end of the Cold War with the collapse of the USSR).
Shuttle
The development of the shuttle, which was a reusable component of the program, turned out to be even more complex than the launch vehicle. And although such work was new to Soviet aircraft designers, they turned out to be an excellent machine. Externally, the Buran turned out to be very similar to the American Shuttle, however, the filling made this device an order of magnitude better than its American counterpart: it could go into space and land automatically without a crew, and also launch into orbit 5 tons more useful mass. (there are still no analogues to this)
Any satellite that existed at that time was placed in a special cargo container of the shuttle, and the unique casing withstood ultra-high temperatures upon entry into the atmosphere.
But the main difference was still the automatic control system, an analogue of which has not yet been created. The computer was “taught” to fly by a team of six test pilots led by Hero of the Soviet Union, Igor Volk. All possible situations were entered into the algorithm, which was immediately useful. Returning from space, the shuttle approached the landing site across the runway, but was able to turn around on its own and land successfully.
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The An-225 is an ultra-high-capacity transport jet aircraft developed by the O. K. Antonov Design Bureau. It was the largest and most lifting aircraft in the history of world aviation and was built to transport the Buran shuttle Buran.
(The world's largest aircraft, the An-225 Mriya, was created primarily to transport Buran. Although there was another plane on which the shuttle was transported. The Americans also had these, but Mriya (Dream) still has no analogues.)
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The cosmodrome test site and the created platform for the Energia Buran shuttle.
In what ways was Buran superior to the American shuttles and what was left of it.
31 years ago, on November 15, 1988, the second launch of the heavy Energia rocket took place, which launched the Buran spaceplane into outer space.
The first and only flight of Buran is unique to this day. Indeed, in a fully automatic flight, it not only flew around the planet twice and landed independently, it also did so with a deviation of 1 meter from the calculated value.
The geniuses of Soviet cosmonautics did it!
Initially, the project was headed by Valentin Glushko. This man was at the origins of the Soviet missile program. Glushko also developed ballistic missiles for the needs of the military, and participated in the development of the first artificial Earth satellite, in short, his role in humanity’s breakthrough into space was hardly lower than that of Korolev himself. Now Glushko intended to create the world's best space complex. The Buran airframe was developed by specialists led by Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky, a veteran of the aviation industry rather than the space industry: he became famous for developing MiGs.
The need to create a Soviet reusable space system as a means of deterring a potential enemy was identified during analytical studies conducted by the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences and NPO Energia in the period 1971-1975. It was shown that the United States, by commissioning its reusable Space Shuttle system, would be able to gain a decisive military advantage in terms of launching a pre-emptive nuclear missile strike.
Whether this is true or not, reusable spacecraft were developed in the USSR before (see the Spiral project), and in some technologies ours were ahead of the Americans. But now the States have followed the path trodden by the Union and are launching warships similar to the Spiral now.
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But Buran, designed for 100 flights into space, was never launched again.
Despite the fact that the Buran is largely copied in appearance from its American counterpart, our engineers and designers, of course, had the goal of making it better than the US one, so the Soviet ship had a number of advantages:
1) The domestic device was capable of launching into orbit not only a ship, but also additional cargo weighing up to 100 tons. Our “shuttle” could take on board up to ten people (versus seven crew members for the shuttle) and was able to spend more time in orbit - about 30 days, while the longest shuttle flight was only 17.
2) Unlike the shuttles, the Buran was equipped with an emergency crew rescue system. At low altitudes, a catapult operates for the first two pilots; at a sufficient altitude, in the event of an emergency, the Buran was able to separate from the launch vehicle and make an emergency landing.
3) For the first time in rocket science, a diagnostic system was used on a spacecraft, covering all systems of the spacecraft, connecting backup sets of equipment or switching to a backup mode in case of possible malfunctions.
4) The basis of the automatic ship control system is a high-speed computing complex, represented by four interchangeable computers. The complex was able to instantly solve all problems within the framework of its functions and, first of all, link the current ballistic parameters of the ship with the flight program. The automatic control system of the Buran is so perfect that during future flights the ship’s crew in this system is considered only as a link that duplicates the automation. This was the fundamental difference between the Soviet shuttle and the American shuttles - our Buran could perform the entire flight in automatic unmanned mode. The landing of the American shuttles was carried out entirely by manual control with the engines not running.
6) For the Buran hull, a thermal protection system that has no analogues in the world was created, allowing for the reusable use of materials with an operating range from minus 130 to plus 1600 degrees Celsius. Developed by specialists from VIAM (the All-Union (now All-Russian) Institute of Aviation Materials), the thermal protection of the Buran consisted of individual elements - tiles of heat-shielding material made of high-purity quartz fibers with an external glassy coating, which were glued to the Buran body through a damping felt substrate, which, in in turn, it was glued to the tile using elastic glue. In fact, VIAM, within the framework of the Energia-Buran program, created 39 fundamentally new materials and 230 technologies, but the main thing was the creation of heat-protective materials that were superior in their characteristics to American ones.
(Five flight prototypes of the Buran spacecraft were planned to be built under the Soviet program.)
However, only three ships were fully built, and about a dozen mock-ups of varying degrees of development were also created for testing.
After the collapse of the USSR, funding was stopped. The country began to fall apart. The remains of this space program, “killed” by Gorbachev, are mothballed in hangars at Baikonur. This is the Tempest spaceplane and its full-scale model. Here in the photo there is even Energia-M, apparently completely ready for flight. To a flight that no one needs except stalkers. Who regularly visit Baikonur and abandoned hangars for spectacular photography.
(Film excerpt) Russian documentary film, it seems you can turn on subtitles in the settings:
Archive. Preparation and launch of MTKS "Energia-Buran":
English documentary:
Resource: https://ria.ru/20131115/977006669.html
"The Soviet Buran was superior to the american shuttles in every way"
The reusable Buran spacecraft was ahead of its time, according to an analytical report by experts from the All-Russian Research Institute of Aviation Materials (VIAM), prepared for the 25th anniversary of its launch.
MOSCOW, November 15 — RIA Novosti, Alexander Kovalev. The Soviet reusable Buran spacecraft was ahead of its time and surpassed the American Space Shuttle system in most respects, according to an analytical report by experts from the All-Russian Research Institute of Aviation Materials (VIAM), prepared for the 25th anniversary of its launch.
"Our Buran could stay in orbit twice as long as the American shuttle: 30 days versus 15, take on board 30 tons of cargo (the shuttle - 24 tons) and 10 crew members (7 astronauts). Preparation for launch at Baikonur took only 15 days (versus a month of pre-launch operations for the shuttle at Cape Canaveral). But the most important difference from the American system was that the Soviet ship was capable of flying and landing in automatic mode, which was brilliantly confirmed on November 15, 1988," the report notes.
In addition, the space shuttle complex, consisting of a rocket fuel tank and two solid-fuel boosters, could not be used to launch into orbit any other spacecraft except the shuttles, which, moreover, did not have the ability to land several times, since they could only land with their engines turned off.
The Soviet scheme using the super-heavy launch vehicle "Energia" was initially created as a universal one. It allowed launching any spacecraft and cargo weighing up to 100 tons into orbit, and the "Buran" ship could use its own control engines during descent and landing in automatic mode.
Our orbital aircraft was designed for 100 flights, the solid-fuel booster - for 20, the main engines - for 66 flights. The only disposable element in the Soviet system was the external fuel tank. After the first flight of "Buran", out of 38 thousand 800 unique heat-shielding tiles, only eight were lost. For comparison, after the first flight of the American "shuttle", out of 24 thousand 192 tiles and 3 thousand 254 flexible insulation mats, more than a hundred heat-shielding elements needed to be replaced. The Energia-Buran project, created by the USSR in response to the development of the American reusable space transport system, united 1,200 industrial enterprises. To create the ship, VIAM specialists alone developed 39 fundamentally new materials and 230 completely new technologies. The program lasted 18 years. The total cost was 16.5 billion Soviet rubles.
A quarter of a century without Buran
Konstantin Bogdanov, RIA Novosti observer: "Was Buran some kind of fantastic breakthrough buried under the rubble of the Soviet empire? Or, as some believe, was it a late representative of a dead-end branch of cosmonautics? To answer this question, we must remember that it was not so much Buran itself that was being developed, but the Energia-Buran system. Unlike the launch system of the American shuttle, the Buran carrier had an independent significance - and perhaps even more important."
https://ria.ru/20131115/977036405.html Continuation of the article, if you are interested, read and translate it yourself
Confrontation between the USSR and the USA
As D.R. Muratov notes in the article “History of the Energia-Buran Space Program and Prospects for the Development of Reusable Spacecraft,” the main reason for launching the program was not exclusively a research goal. On April 12, 1981, on a significant day for the USSR, the USA launched the Space Shuttle with a crew on board. The creation of Buran was caused by the need to respond to the USA on their program.
It was not only the Cold War and the desire to outdo each other that served as an impetus for this. The USSR felt a real threat from the American project and the first successes in its implementation. On March 23, 1983, US President R. Reagan signed the Strategic Defense Initiative research and development program. The Soviet military expressed concerns about the emerging possibilities of launching a nuclear strike from space and abducting Soviet spacecraft. One of the episodes that forced the USSR to launch the reusable space transport system Energia-Buran (MTKS Energia-Buran) into space as soon as possible was the "dive" of the American shuttle in 1985 to 80 km above Moscow.
Thus, the main goals of creating the Buran ship S.K. Petrov in the article "Orbital ship "Buran". On the 30th anniversary of the first flight" are military ("comprehensive counteraction to enemy measures to expand the use of outer space for military purposes", "conducting military-applied research and experiments to ensure the creation of large space systems") and peaceful ("launching into orbit, servicing them and returning to Earth spacecraft, astronauts and cargo", "solving target problems in the interests of the national economy and science").
