Soviet Space Shuttle Program

[chargerman69]

http://www.unilad.co.uk/crazy/urban-explorer-finds-lonely-remains-of-soviet-shuttle-program/

I like the looks of the shuttles,  (hanger fine) not a barn fine in this case

[ACUDANUT]

http://www.unilad.co.uk/crazy/urban-explorer-finds-lonely-remains-of-soviet-shuttle-program/

I like the looks of the shuttles,  (hanger fine) not a barn fine in this case

I see nothing fine about it. 

[XH29N0G]

Pretty wild.  Thanks for posting.

[polywideblock]

wow   

[JB400]

I wonder which was more expensive, our space shuttle program, or theirs considering they had to copy it instead of develop their own?

[Mopar Nut]

http://www.unilad.co.uk/crazy/urban-explorer-finds-lonely-remains-of-soviet-shuttle-program/

I like the looks of the shuttles,  (hanger fine) not a barn fine in this case

Very cool, thanks!

I wonder which was more expensive, our space shuttle program, or theirs considering they had to copy it instead of develop their own?

Just like the Chinese did on our new fighter jet F35.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-hackers-stole-f-35-data-2014-7

[tan top]

interesting stuff ,   

[sunfire69]

LOL they both steal almost all their technology from us.....the problem they run into is they don't tend to get all of it, so they have to fill in the gaps on their own.....and sometimes that doesn't go so well...say stealing the formula for making the heat tiles on the shuttle is a great step...but if you didn't get the process for gluing them on or how the glue is made and how it's used...and you have to guess..... ....and gorrilla glue ain't going to do it...
Plus their conscript style work force really doesn't care if that turbine blade is machined to a tolerance of +- .0001....+-.001 or so is good enough...
so their shuttle flies once or twice but they start to see high failure rates on stuff and have no idea how to fix it because ...well they haven't stole that process yet....plus sometimes we let them steal stuff.....with "mistakes" in it.....then when they use it.....

[Ponch ®]

.
Plus their conscript style work force really doesn't care if that turbine blade is machined to a tolerance of +- .0001....+-.001 or so is good enough...

maybe we just got lucky?

According to Gene Kranz in his book, Failure Is Not an Option, "When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.'"

[sunfire69]

LOL..true....but our lowest bidder and their lowest bidder...are miles apart....

[Troy]

I was talking to my brother-in-law one day about IT projects (he's a manager at a Fortune 100 company). They were paying an Indian company to write some software but were having all sort of problems getting it to work correctly. Turns out, the Indians had outsourced it to a cheaper Chinese company who had outsourced it to a cheaper Brazilian firm. The specifications - and all discussions about rewrites - were being translated 3 times! When your starting with a medium to low budget I'm not sure how many levels you can go down...

But back to this subject - looking at the pictures you could probably sell of the scrap metal for about what they had in the whole program. No sense in keeping it around for historical sake - especially after reading this:

spanning two decades – from 1974 to 1993 – and only featuring two orbital flights

Troy

[Mike DC]

  
I agree about the lack of historical significance of the Buran program.  It wasn't exactly Sputnik.  

It was conceived as a bigger program in the earlier stages.  Plenty of money was spent.  But they basically just xeroxed our shuttle orbiter and then parked it after a couple of flights when the USSR fell apart.



That was the Cold War.  The USSR was always competing with the US military/space tech just on principle.  

Not that we were acting much wiser at the time.  We would have rushed out to invent a nuclear-powered toilet if the CIA heard that the Soviets were building one.

[Mopar Nut]

 
Not that we were acting much wiser at the time.  We would have rushed out to invent a nuclear-powered toilet if the CIA heard that the Soviets were building one.

This reminds me of the US spending billions for a writing tool to work in space, Russia used a pencil.

[Ponch ®]

 
Not that we were acting much wiser at the time.  We would have rushed out to invent a nuclear-powered toilet if the CIA heard that the Soviets were building one.

This reminds me of the US spending billions for a writing tool to work in space, Russia used a pencil.

a good anecdote, albeit not entirely true:

http://io9.com/5838635/the-million-dollar-space-pen-hoax

[Chad L. Magee]

...say stealing the formula for making the heat tiles on the shuttle is a great step...

Aerogels used to be a closely held secret in the early days, but not anymore.  This technology has many useful applications outside of space travel.  It makes great thermal insulation for buildings, if you can afford it...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778810004329 (for abstract information on an article about it)

There is even a diamond form that was recently reported in the scientific literature.  An interesting property is that the surface shines just like a regular diamond does, even though the majority component of the structure is pure air.  It has the lowest density of a solid substance currently known, reported to be even lower than the graphene version made by Chinese researchers....

As for the US letting some of the flawed designs get purposely passed along to other countries, it was a good way to see how far along the foreign countries were in the field.  We had spies over there that let us know when they got to a particular step of a problem and what they were doing to try to resolve the issue.  Some of their solutions were quite surprising to our side as we did not always think alike in these things.  The cold war was a bluff game in many ways.... 

[Ponch ®]

Here's a pretty interesting on why although the Buran may have been a ripoff of the Shuttle, it may have actually been better (had the Soviets not run out of $ and let the program die).

http://flightclub.jalopnik.com/did-the-soviets-build-a-better-shuttle-than-we-did-1713379466