Thanks for the catches. I've edited to fix them. The footnote was in an earlier draft, but I eventually decided not to distract from the tragic events by inserting asides. The information it contained has been moved to the next post.
The Snow Flies: A History of the Soviet Space Shuttle
- Thread starter nixonshead
- Start date
Thanks for the catches. I've edited to fix them. The footnote was in an earlier draft, but I eventually decided not to distract from the tragic events by inserting asides. The information it contained has been moved to the next post.
Ouch! >_<
Yeah, IIRC the Energia Core Stage didn't have the spray-foam that the STS ET used, so this kind of ice build-up on it would happen. Which makes me think that an OTL Columbia can still happen, if NASA decides that the spray-foam as-is is up to the job. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if NASA is made to give their own fleet a good "checking over".
Obviously this is going to see work on Mir-2 halted for a time IMHO, but what of Soyuz? With the loss of Buran, will Soyuz still fly during the investigation? Or will they take another look at it, to see if there's anything they missed?
Yeah, IIRC the Energia Core Stage didn't have the spray-foam that the STS ET used, so this kind of ice build-up on it would happen. Which makes me think that an OTL Columbia can still happen, if NASA decides that the spray-foam as-is is up to the job. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if NASA is made to give their own fleet a good "checking over".
Obviously this is going to see work on Mir-2 halted for a time IMHO, but what of Soyuz? With the loss of Buran, will Soyuz still fly during the investigation? Or will they take another look at it, to see if there's anything they missed?
Hmm. TKS based systems could do things that Progress M2 can't?
Or is there some other reason why having a second cargo vehicle would be useful?
Ah putain de merde !!! This is so sad. So much for those fanboys who said that Buran was better than the U.S shuttle. It failed in a mostly similar way...
Well, shuttle-type systems don't respond well to poor maintenance. The US probably wouldn't have lost Columbia if they hadn't cut maintenance budgets to the bone. I suspect this is a major factor in the loss of Buran.
Which could have interesting political implications, depending on where the shit sticks after the accident investigation.
This is going to really kill space plane designs after an ATL-Columbia happens though.
fasquardon
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TheBatafour said:
I based the style upon NASA's Columbia timeline. Such a grim topic doesn't really need any narrative embelishments.
Guardian GI said:
Only one way to find out... Stay tuned!
Guardian GI said:
It could well be. I suspect the Kremlin ITTL's early '90s wouldn't mind so much in seeing the Baltic states leave, as long as it could be potrayed as a one-off and not an example for other Republics to follow suit. I imagine a period of supression, followed by some negotiated settlement in the early '90s, but I'm shying away from delving into the details ITTL as it's a topic that deserves a lot more knowledge and detailed analysis than I could bring to bear. You may however notice that I've made no mention of any cosmonauts from the Baltics.
Guardian GI said:
Nice try, but I've learnt my lesson about delving into economics!
In seriousness, I don't know much about the economic situation of Belarus, so I can't comment on that, but my first impression is you're probably broadly correct, though the fact that some big space companies like RKK Energia and Fili KKP remain in the private sector suggests state ownership of heavy industry isn't total. The Soviet investigation and NASA's response will be detailed in the next post. One thing to note though, the next US president won't enter office until January 2001, 22 months after the Buran disaster.
Bahamut-255 said:
Soyuz has almost nothing in common with Energia/Buran (different concept, design, manufacturer, launcher, ground support facilities, operations...), so it's highly likley there'll be a quick decision to continue with Soyuz - not least because stopping flights could mean temporarily abandoning Mir-2, which could lead to problems in reactivating it later. This shows the benefit of dissimilar redundancy in space access, something NASA IOTL has been pursuing via COTS and CCDEV.
Archibald said:Ah putain de merde !!! This is so sad. So much for those fanboys who said that Buran was better than the U.S shuttle. It failed in a mostly similar way...
I'm not sure it demonstrates the superiority of one system over another. ITTL both have experienced one major disaster, but from different causes. To Buran's benefit it can't experience a Challenger-style SRB problem because it has no SRBs (though as Michel Van previously noted, failures of the RD-170 used in its own boosters are hardly unknown), but on the other hand Buran's failure comes on only its 6th flight (albeit 11 years after the first), suggesting NASA's shuttle has the superior record. On balance, I don't think one system comes out as clearly superior to the other from a safety point of view - and Soyuz's record still beats the pants off both of them.
fasquardon said:
TKS and Progress M-2 were both considered IOTL at the time the 180GK version of Mir-2 was being planned. TKS could carry more cargo (around 2x as much based on the figures in astronautix), meaning fewer launches to support a given crew size. When the crew size is as large as 12, this adds up to quite a pretty sum. Most likely a decision would have been taken to develop either Progress M2 or TKS (as in fact has happened ITTL), not both - my use of "and" in the reply to Shevek was misleading in this respect, it should have been "or".
Oh God, it's Columbia 4 years before...
I think it is the end of the Buran...Ah putain de merde !!! This is so sad. So much for those fanboys who said that Buran was better than the U.S shuttle. It failed in a mostly similar way...
...and the worst part? Columbia is still going to happen, since no camera recorded the ice falling on the wing.
We are going to lose 7 more astronauts.
We are going to lose 7 more astronauts.
21 astronauts to OTLs 14, no one would dare touch a shuttle after this.
Insider
Banned
Excellent grasp of tragedy. I like how you show how insignificant the damage may seem to be, and how it results in catastrophic end. In space every flaw is deadly. No wonder that spacecraft that remains in service is either unmanned or manned by a tiny crew. Had they have sent Soyuz, losses would three instead of seven.
22 astronauts deaths is correct number, in total killed the US shuttle 17 people (14 astronauts 1986, 2003 and three engineers on ground in 1981)
it went so far in 2000s until Russian Space Agency took PTK/Federatsiya space capsule.
in 2005 the Khrunichev enterprise proposed a modular TKS spacecraft concept
reach from traditional TKS to minimal one with capsule and small service module, crew went from 2 to 6, payload up to 6,350 kg unmanned cargo, also 1,870 kg down in unmanned capsule.
more here http://www.russianspaceweb.com/tks_followon.html
so far i know they try to sell current version of TKS as Private space craft to investor.
The loss of Buran makes me very very sad.
I can still hope that with the decision to turn Burya into a spare parts hangar queen having been made anyway and I guess certainly not to be reversed, the Soviets will either abandon all Energia related tech completely...
....or, I can barely hope, in view of the lack of funds in the staggering USSR, that they might do as I think we should have done after Challenger, and re-think how to use the basic tech in a more efficient way. The flaw of STS as I see it was that it carried the SSMEs on the Orbiter, thus to use the system at all required an Orbiter launch every time. The Soviets already have decoupled the hydrogen engines to boost to orbit from the Orbiter, which is step 1 to an improved system. For revising STS, Americans would have to think about alternate methods of recovering the SSMEs, by moving them to the base of the fuel tank and devising a separate engine return system for the engines. But this is because the SSMEs are designed to be reused; they are too expensive to manufacture new ones for each launch and failing to recover them is too wasteful, so the option of discarding them means going back to the drawing board to devise cheaper alternatives. But the Soviets went with that option from the beginning, so unless they want to revisit reusability--hardly something they want to take on right now, I guess--this is no problem for them. Step 1 for the Yankees is step 0 for them; already accomplished.
I also think a Mark 2 approach to STS would replace the solid boosters with liquid ones, and these could I think be made reusable-again the Soviets were "ahead" on this path, and even initially planned for the Zenit boosters to be reused. I don't expect them to go back to that now, but they could if launch rates were to justify it.
Having decoupled the orbital engines from the Orbiter, it is now possible to go back to putting the payload on the centerline, on top of the fuel tank. I may underestimate the benefits of sidesaddle payloads in Energia and with STS derived systems. But I don't like sidesaddle very much. For one thing it messes up the symmetry of the system and impedes the potential ability to group variable numbers of boosters around the tank. That is not much of a benefit if designing different tanks for different arrangements is prohibitively expensive, as it seems it may be.
Anyway, putting the payload on the nose completely sidesteps the problem that killed Buran here and Columbia OTL. With one's spaceship well above the tank instead of below its top, no ice is going to fall from the tanks onto the payload, whatever it is.
With Energia reconfigured for in-line loads instead of sidesaddle, the way is open for new generations of manned spacecraft, to be put on the nose of an Energia instead of on its side. Unmanned loads are also just as easily accomplished of course.
The main reason Buran was designed exactly as it was was to replicate the gross aerodynamics of STS Orbiter, thanks to USAF trash talk about military missions threatening to the Soviet Union. Since the Russians could see quite readily that STS design would not permit anything like the huge revolution in higher launch rates at much lower costs per ton to orbit that was the ostensible premise of Shuttle, they regarded the alleged economic function of STS as so much verbal obfuscation of the actual purpose which they feared might be military missions the Air Force officers touted, and therefore resolved to make an exact duplicate in case Yankees knew something Soviet engineers had not been able to second-guess.
Now that they have had 5 successful flights and have hard data of their own of what Buran was capable of, they can be pretty sure that it was the Air Force officers, perhaps self-deluded by wishful thinking, who had been spoofing, and that STS was just a lemon and failure across the board, at least in the sense of accomplishing either economic or warlike missions. As a free-flying temporary space station in its own right, Shuttle had its virtues, but now Buran is gone, and the Soviets are in a bad way.
Not nearly as bad as NASA OTL after both Challenger and Columbia losses, because of course they retain Proton for heavy lift, still have Soyuz on line for manned missions, and have the option of using standard Energia for lifting very heavy loads into LEO, or conceivably for launching massive deep space probes or large geosynchronous payloads. (For domestic purposes standard equatorial geosynch satellites are of limited value to the USSR because of its high latitude, though clearly Soviet distant naval deployments can benefit from them. But of course instead they developed the Molniya system of highly elliptical 12 hour high inclination satellites that reach apogee at high northern latitudes by ground track, which have similar high energy launch requirements--in some ways better as the orbital major axis is smaller and high inclination, easy to achieve from Soviet launch sites, is needed). But of course their basic budget is much more restricted, and their prestige has taken a heavy blow. Not so heavy as it would have been if Americans had not also lost an entire crew and ship to a different kind of accident--especially since the Soviet system is less vulnerable to a Challenger type event.
Not perfectly invulnerable of course, but should a Zenit booster fail as spectacularly as Challenger's SRB did, shutdown, perhaps successful on the malfunctioning booster and continuing toward an emergency abort orbit on the remaining three, more likely of all 4, perhaps successful ejection of them early while the hydrogen main engines continue to work to remove the upper stack from the scene of the dangerous loose Zenits. Separation of Buran (if they still had it) from the stack is probably as problematic as for STS, but there is also the option of the crew ejecting from the whole thing--pretty hair-raising in the vicinity of a disintegrating Energia stack, but perhaps preferable to stoically assuming the system is invulnerable! All engines can be ordered to shut down which makes crew ejection marginally less insane, though the question remains if they can survive individually free-falling and parachuting to the ground. They are in space suits and the air is very thin, so perhaps they can.
If there is any sort of budget left (after all, if Energia based systems are scrapped that frees up a fair amount, and if retained they have a very capable booster almost ready for future launches, if they can address what killed Buran somehow) for new development, a clean sheet design of a new highly capable and perhaps reusable crewed spacecraft is now in order. Instead of refitting Burya, or building a new orbiter on the American model, they had best I think look ahead. Just what that might look like depends on a number of factors of course:
1) Budget. The cheapest option is to write off Energia and stick to Protons and Soyuzes. Maybe as OTL Zenit can serve as the foundation of yet other launchers. In thrust, Zenit is similar to the Saturn 1B, with a single engine in the ballpark of an F-1A, so something like ETS Saturn 1C is an option, especially if the Soviets have a handy analog to the J-2 engine. That is a direct competitor to Proton, using ker-lox and hydrogen. But they already have Proton, and hardly anything else in the world outclasses it in terms of payload to orbit. STS is competitive by that metric but obviously far less cost effective even factoring in the occasional Proton failure with loss of payload. Soyuz, as others have pointed out, is pretty reliable though stretched to capacity by now.
If they have more money and ambition, though, much can be salvaged from Energia.
The obvious thing to me is to revisit Energia-M. It is already designed for nose payloads, it already uses the Zenits--and half as many for launch too. It also continues to use the same hydrogen engine as full sized Energia. Its payload will outclass Proton and rival the very biggest alternatives in the world (the current biggest form of Titan IIRC). With a payload in the 30 ton class, it cannot launch a new Buran--but it most certainly could launch something that puts even TKS in the shade! En-M might not be technically "man rated" yet but that is a matter of tests and paperwork; being a slimmed down version of Energia itself, it should be quite straightforward. The cost of a launch will be considerably lower than an Energia launch, using half the boosters, one quarter the number of hydrogen engines, and a smaller, simplified tank they already have tooled up to build. (They may have dismantled that particular capability but they know how to restore it; in the Soviet economy, despite privatizations it should be easier, if funds are available at all, to route the workforce desired at will). They have the launch facilities, surely full-sized Energia facilities can be downsized to handle the smaller rocket. It looks like an obvious step to take--provided they do not conclude they have no funds for anything beyond continuing with 1960s legacy rockets.
Parallel to Buran, the Soviets OTL, and so presumably ITTL, had pursued a number of alternate approaches to going beyond Soyuz or otherwise using spaceplanes. One of these was the rather diversified MAKS options, which generally are reported as air-launched systems, in which something resembling a TAOS Orbiter design without the boosters (that is, a disposable tank and a spaceplane including reusable engines to take it into orbit) would be brought to high altitude by a heavy subsonic carrier airplane and released. However another option would be to simply station the MAKS orbiter, variously massed all up at 26 or 38 tons, on an Energia-M (or I would guess, several other paper candidate rockets). I would think that such a configuration would allow complete deletion of the orbital launch engines and external tank, in favor of using the mass margin either for flyback turbofan engines, or more payload. Payload, in a Shuttle style bay, would be up to 8.5 tons or so, or 4.5 tons down mass.
Redesign could focus on several options. I would think the Soviets should abandon the idea of using such a mini-Shuttle as a cargo carrier, and instead send up small loads on legacy rockets or big ones on Energia-M separately, and focus on making the MAKS orbiter a manned space taxi/habitat. The dilemma is that with mass savings from omitting the main engines and focusing the disposable volume on crew support, the crew sizes that 34 tons to orbit would permit might be embarrassingly large. Downsizing the design should be feasible but then Energia-M would be oversized--OK if all launches are mixed, with a smaller spaceplane stacked atop up-mass that the Orbiter can act as a tug to pull to its destination, or could be designed to free-fly itself.
The Russians had yet other spaceplane types up their sleeves, I believe, and of course by this point could steal the American HL-20 lifting body space taxi/lifeboat design--and after all in swiping it they are merely stealing back work Americans had to some extent picked up looking over Soviet shoulders when earlier versions of the form had been launched for tests of the planned Spiral small spaceplane. And in turn its design either paralleled or stole some American work in the 1960s including HL-10.
Or they could take Buran's loss as a sign that spaceplanes of any kind are ill advised, inefficient compared to capsules and yet apparently no safer!
Of course putting a spaceplane on the nose of the rocket instead of the side would protect it from the mishap that destroyed Buran, and give it superior escape options if confronted by something as awful as Challenger's failure too--designing in emergency escape boosters for something in the 30 ton range is harder than for Apollo CM's at 6 tons or a Soyuz t (counting the orbital module) well above 4 tons. I personally suggested many years ago in Eyes Turned Skyward that if a suitable escape rocket were to become an awkwardly large fraction of the total payload stack mass, it might be possible to design it so that once the critical point where very high acceleration was required for successful escape in early boost, first even a solid rocket could be stepped down--say it was made in eight parallel segments, initially triggered to all fire at once, but then when a phase is reached where a lower acceleration would be acceptable, half are switched to postpone firing until the first set is finished, thus halving acceleration while doubling burn duration, and halve it again so it is two sections at a time, followed by the next 3 pairs in succession. And then when the thrust of the regular OMS alone is sufficient to escape, fire the rocket in that state while leaving the payload still firmly attached to the main rocket--it would produce an excess of thrust on the payload, which would be taken up by clamps only engaged at this stage to lower the inertia burden of the rocket itself thus raising overall acceleration briefly during its burn, and partially thus compensating for its own mass; it would be released for disposal as it would in an escape scenario just before burning out. Some care would clearly have to be taken to avoid the exhaust of the rescue rocket from playing on the main booster of course! Such a rocket could be fitted on the belly of the MAKS orbiter or anything smaller. During a nominal launch its powerful thrust would be ballasted by the still large mass of the boost rocket so the acceleration surge would be modest.
With nose escape in some form an option, the system would be far safer than either OTL Shuttle or Buran. With the vital parts of payload pulled away from the main rocket crew survival would be much better assured than with ejection seats I would think; in any event staying with a larger craft until it has come down to moderate altitudes and airspeeds helps to assure that eventually ejecting would be survivable. Better though if the escape capsule is itself flight capable and can land more or less as usual. Especially for Soviet launches--they launch over thousands of miles of Soviet territory so early aborts would place them with many Soviet airstrips downrange.
A spaceplane smaller than Shuttle or Buran would be more feasible to enable to make landings at rough fields (a common design goal of even the highest performance Soviet designed aircraft since even today many major fields are poorly prepared) and even to stay intact enough for crew survival and safety after a ditch on water--USSR certainly has many lakes and inland seas, even in the steppe, and someday some Russian system might be operating out of Kourou after all, or not inconceivably Canaveral or some new base in East Africa, Vietnam, or even the Philippines!
Water ditch capability is not as crucial for the Russians as it is for Americans but developing it would make the survival options of the Orbiter of whatever design truly comprehensive, even in case of an emergency unplanned reentry into the atmosphere from orbit.
34 tons to orbit allows yet other options. It is just under twice the mass of the TKS as designed by Chelomei, which in turn was twice the mass of Soyuz. Again I'd think mission plans including a TKS on Energia-M would involve carrying another 17 tons as payload independent of the TKS vehicle--given TKS design it could also be regarded as an extension module, with the core TKS unit docked during launch to the extension module which could carry propellant and auxiliary engines as well as equipment or cargo.
Yet another approach would be to adapt Soyuz, TKS, or some clean-sheet system to reentering and recovering not only the small crew module but the entire craft, or most of it. I would retain the separable crew capsule and confine all people launched to it during both launches and landings, so it serves as a backup safety system--penultimate if the crew have ejection seats, which I think we could dispense with with a good capsule system. Also the point of a capsule is to minimize the necessary mass, which means both mass and volume are at a premium and the extra weight and bulk of the ejection seats might be a deal-breaker, as might be the risk of accidentally detonating one. Generally one would try to save the whole ship, and generally ride it down whole and reuse it all, or most of it, replacing engines as needed perhaps. But an emergency escape system might be sized only for the crew capsule; then its mass would be modest and the thrust from it not worth capturing during a normal boost.
There is a patent out there for a winged Apollo CSM design along these lines, but I'd think part of the point of doing this is not just to save the cost of disposing of the stuff in the Service Module but, as with Orbiter and Buran, and with Soyuz and TKS bearing in mind the extensions are disposable, to provide extra habitation and work space, something the Apollo based system did not make recoverable. As with Soyuz one might make that extra volume disposable, but I sure don't think it would work well with a reentering Soyuz-derived winged spaceplane to have this stuck on the nose during launch and operation; the nose is a bad place to put anything since we want it maximally secure and streamlined during entry. TKS design lends itself better to sticking some wings on it and layering the belly with more TPS. There are yet other options too, such as a biconic design, which gives excellent hypersonic lift/drag ratios allowing extensive control of entry, provided we have a good way of stabilizing and controlling the angle of attack--I believe these designs generally have a flap on the tail end as the Shuttle and Buran did. A biconic shape is not much good for lift at subsonic speeds of course, where it will fall like a brick, or a traditional capsule for that matter, so some kind of parachutes, or something more fancy like swing wings would be needed. Or blending between lifting body and biconic a la Kliper (typically--some Kliper designs omitted the winglets completely). I suspect even the fully winged editions of Kliper would have flown pretty poorly at subsonic landing speeds and required some combination of parachutes and landing retro-rockets anyway.
It seems intuitive to me that had Orbiter (and hence Buran) been designed on these lines, with the nose section being a Soyuz-style headlight shaped entry capsule fully capable of surviving one entry from orbital speeds (or for more safety factor, escape or higher, 12,000 m/sec or so), the crew of Columbia would have survived even if they began entry, as they and Buran's crew here did, ignorant of the extra risk (or, given full knowledge of the damage, certainty) of destruction on entry. As with the escape system during launch, the separation system would have both manual and automatic controls, and even if burn-through and subsequent cascading system failures and aerodynamic imbalances were to suddenly and without warning start tumbling the craft, the G-forces and other warning signs could be designed to trigger separation before the crew is fatally stressed, and I'd think that a dense entry capsule type vehicle would tend naturally to separate rapidly from a disintegrating main body. Then it would stabilize in a shield-down attitude naturally as well and automated controls could assist this effectively; even if the crew is injured and unconscious the body can then be automatically controlled to seek a survivable continuation of entry. The desired trajectories for relatively high lift bodies are different than those of low L/D capsules of course, but I would think an attainable survivable trajectory is always available after separation from one appropriate to the intact vessel.
Others suggest that no, the data from Columbia's demise suggest it would be too violent for a capsule separation to happen cleanly enough and in time--but I believe they are talking about the kludgy bathtub or boxlike capsules proposed as a retrofitted feature for STS Orbiters as designed OTL, not a simpler headlight or conical form comprising the nose.
Anyway it is not too late for the Soviets to consider the merits of such a design now.
I can still hope that with the decision to turn Burya into a spare parts hangar queen having been made anyway and I guess certainly not to be reversed, the Soviets will either abandon all Energia related tech completely...
....or, I can barely hope, in view of the lack of funds in the staggering USSR, that they might do as I think we should have done after Challenger, and re-think how to use the basic tech in a more efficient way. The flaw of STS as I see it was that it carried the SSMEs on the Orbiter, thus to use the system at all required an Orbiter launch every time. The Soviets already have decoupled the hydrogen engines to boost to orbit from the Orbiter, which is step 1 to an improved system. For revising STS, Americans would have to think about alternate methods of recovering the SSMEs, by moving them to the base of the fuel tank and devising a separate engine return system for the engines. But this is because the SSMEs are designed to be reused; they are too expensive to manufacture new ones for each launch and failing to recover them is too wasteful, so the option of discarding them means going back to the drawing board to devise cheaper alternatives. But the Soviets went with that option from the beginning, so unless they want to revisit reusability--hardly something they want to take on right now, I guess--this is no problem for them. Step 1 for the Yankees is step 0 for them; already accomplished.
I also think a Mark 2 approach to STS would replace the solid boosters with liquid ones, and these could I think be made reusable-again the Soviets were "ahead" on this path, and even initially planned for the Zenit boosters to be reused. I don't expect them to go back to that now, but they could if launch rates were to justify it.
Having decoupled the orbital engines from the Orbiter, it is now possible to go back to putting the payload on the centerline, on top of the fuel tank. I may underestimate the benefits of sidesaddle payloads in Energia and with STS derived systems. But I don't like sidesaddle very much. For one thing it messes up the symmetry of the system and impedes the potential ability to group variable numbers of boosters around the tank. That is not much of a benefit if designing different tanks for different arrangements is prohibitively expensive, as it seems it may be.
Anyway, putting the payload on the nose completely sidesteps the problem that killed Buran here and Columbia OTL. With one's spaceship well above the tank instead of below its top, no ice is going to fall from the tanks onto the payload, whatever it is.
With Energia reconfigured for in-line loads instead of sidesaddle, the way is open for new generations of manned spacecraft, to be put on the nose of an Energia instead of on its side. Unmanned loads are also just as easily accomplished of course.
The main reason Buran was designed exactly as it was was to replicate the gross aerodynamics of STS Orbiter, thanks to USAF trash talk about military missions threatening to the Soviet Union. Since the Russians could see quite readily that STS design would not permit anything like the huge revolution in higher launch rates at much lower costs per ton to orbit that was the ostensible premise of Shuttle, they regarded the alleged economic function of STS as so much verbal obfuscation of the actual purpose which they feared might be military missions the Air Force officers touted, and therefore resolved to make an exact duplicate in case Yankees knew something Soviet engineers had not been able to second-guess.
Now that they have had 5 successful flights and have hard data of their own of what Buran was capable of, they can be pretty sure that it was the Air Force officers, perhaps self-deluded by wishful thinking, who had been spoofing, and that STS was just a lemon and failure across the board, at least in the sense of accomplishing either economic or warlike missions. As a free-flying temporary space station in its own right, Shuttle had its virtues, but now Buran is gone, and the Soviets are in a bad way.
Not nearly as bad as NASA OTL after both Challenger and Columbia losses, because of course they retain Proton for heavy lift, still have Soyuz on line for manned missions, and have the option of using standard Energia for lifting very heavy loads into LEO, or conceivably for launching massive deep space probes or large geosynchronous payloads. (For domestic purposes standard equatorial geosynch satellites are of limited value to the USSR because of its high latitude, though clearly Soviet distant naval deployments can benefit from them. But of course instead they developed the Molniya system of highly elliptical 12 hour high inclination satellites that reach apogee at high northern latitudes by ground track, which have similar high energy launch requirements--in some ways better as the orbital major axis is smaller and high inclination, easy to achieve from Soviet launch sites, is needed). But of course their basic budget is much more restricted, and their prestige has taken a heavy blow. Not so heavy as it would have been if Americans had not also lost an entire crew and ship to a different kind of accident--especially since the Soviet system is less vulnerable to a Challenger type event.
Not perfectly invulnerable of course, but should a Zenit booster fail as spectacularly as Challenger's SRB did, shutdown, perhaps successful on the malfunctioning booster and continuing toward an emergency abort orbit on the remaining three, more likely of all 4, perhaps successful ejection of them early while the hydrogen main engines continue to work to remove the upper stack from the scene of the dangerous loose Zenits. Separation of Buran (if they still had it) from the stack is probably as problematic as for STS, but there is also the option of the crew ejecting from the whole thing--pretty hair-raising in the vicinity of a disintegrating Energia stack, but perhaps preferable to stoically assuming the system is invulnerable! All engines can be ordered to shut down which makes crew ejection marginally less insane, though the question remains if they can survive individually free-falling and parachuting to the ground. They are in space suits and the air is very thin, so perhaps they can.
If there is any sort of budget left (after all, if Energia based systems are scrapped that frees up a fair amount, and if retained they have a very capable booster almost ready for future launches, if they can address what killed Buran somehow) for new development, a clean sheet design of a new highly capable and perhaps reusable crewed spacecraft is now in order. Instead of refitting Burya, or building a new orbiter on the American model, they had best I think look ahead. Just what that might look like depends on a number of factors of course:
1) Budget. The cheapest option is to write off Energia and stick to Protons and Soyuzes. Maybe as OTL Zenit can serve as the foundation of yet other launchers. In thrust, Zenit is similar to the Saturn 1B, with a single engine in the ballpark of an F-1A, so something like ETS Saturn 1C is an option, especially if the Soviets have a handy analog to the J-2 engine. That is a direct competitor to Proton, using ker-lox and hydrogen. But they already have Proton, and hardly anything else in the world outclasses it in terms of payload to orbit. STS is competitive by that metric but obviously far less cost effective even factoring in the occasional Proton failure with loss of payload. Soyuz, as others have pointed out, is pretty reliable though stretched to capacity by now.
If they have more money and ambition, though, much can be salvaged from Energia.
The obvious thing to me is to revisit Energia-M. It is already designed for nose payloads, it already uses the Zenits--and half as many for launch too. It also continues to use the same hydrogen engine as full sized Energia. Its payload will outclass Proton and rival the very biggest alternatives in the world (the current biggest form of Titan IIRC). With a payload in the 30 ton class, it cannot launch a new Buran--but it most certainly could launch something that puts even TKS in the shade! En-M might not be technically "man rated" yet but that is a matter of tests and paperwork; being a slimmed down version of Energia itself, it should be quite straightforward. The cost of a launch will be considerably lower than an Energia launch, using half the boosters, one quarter the number of hydrogen engines, and a smaller, simplified tank they already have tooled up to build. (They may have dismantled that particular capability but they know how to restore it; in the Soviet economy, despite privatizations it should be easier, if funds are available at all, to route the workforce desired at will). They have the launch facilities, surely full-sized Energia facilities can be downsized to handle the smaller rocket. It looks like an obvious step to take--provided they do not conclude they have no funds for anything beyond continuing with 1960s legacy rockets.
Parallel to Buran, the Soviets OTL, and so presumably ITTL, had pursued a number of alternate approaches to going beyond Soyuz or otherwise using spaceplanes. One of these was the rather diversified MAKS options, which generally are reported as air-launched systems, in which something resembling a TAOS Orbiter design without the boosters (that is, a disposable tank and a spaceplane including reusable engines to take it into orbit) would be brought to high altitude by a heavy subsonic carrier airplane and released. However another option would be to simply station the MAKS orbiter, variously massed all up at 26 or 38 tons, on an Energia-M (or I would guess, several other paper candidate rockets). I would think that such a configuration would allow complete deletion of the orbital launch engines and external tank, in favor of using the mass margin either for flyback turbofan engines, or more payload. Payload, in a Shuttle style bay, would be up to 8.5 tons or so, or 4.5 tons down mass.
Redesign could focus on several options. I would think the Soviets should abandon the idea of using such a mini-Shuttle as a cargo carrier, and instead send up small loads on legacy rockets or big ones on Energia-M separately, and focus on making the MAKS orbiter a manned space taxi/habitat. The dilemma is that with mass savings from omitting the main engines and focusing the disposable volume on crew support, the crew sizes that 34 tons to orbit would permit might be embarrassingly large. Downsizing the design should be feasible but then Energia-M would be oversized--OK if all launches are mixed, with a smaller spaceplane stacked atop up-mass that the Orbiter can act as a tug to pull to its destination, or could be designed to free-fly itself.
The Russians had yet other spaceplane types up their sleeves, I believe, and of course by this point could steal the American HL-20 lifting body space taxi/lifeboat design--and after all in swiping it they are merely stealing back work Americans had to some extent picked up looking over Soviet shoulders when earlier versions of the form had been launched for tests of the planned Spiral small spaceplane. And in turn its design either paralleled or stole some American work in the 1960s including HL-10.
Or they could take Buran's loss as a sign that spaceplanes of any kind are ill advised, inefficient compared to capsules and yet apparently no safer!
Of course putting a spaceplane on the nose of the rocket instead of the side would protect it from the mishap that destroyed Buran, and give it superior escape options if confronted by something as awful as Challenger's failure too--designing in emergency escape boosters for something in the 30 ton range is harder than for Apollo CM's at 6 tons or a Soyuz t (counting the orbital module) well above 4 tons. I personally suggested many years ago in Eyes Turned Skyward that if a suitable escape rocket were to become an awkwardly large fraction of the total payload stack mass, it might be possible to design it so that once the critical point where very high acceleration was required for successful escape in early boost, first even a solid rocket could be stepped down--say it was made in eight parallel segments, initially triggered to all fire at once, but then when a phase is reached where a lower acceleration would be acceptable, half are switched to postpone firing until the first set is finished, thus halving acceleration while doubling burn duration, and halve it again so it is two sections at a time, followed by the next 3 pairs in succession. And then when the thrust of the regular OMS alone is sufficient to escape, fire the rocket in that state while leaving the payload still firmly attached to the main rocket--it would produce an excess of thrust on the payload, which would be taken up by clamps only engaged at this stage to lower the inertia burden of the rocket itself thus raising overall acceleration briefly during its burn, and partially thus compensating for its own mass; it would be released for disposal as it would in an escape scenario just before burning out. Some care would clearly have to be taken to avoid the exhaust of the rescue rocket from playing on the main booster of course! Such a rocket could be fitted on the belly of the MAKS orbiter or anything smaller. During a nominal launch its powerful thrust would be ballasted by the still large mass of the boost rocket so the acceleration surge would be modest.
With nose escape in some form an option, the system would be far safer than either OTL Shuttle or Buran. With the vital parts of payload pulled away from the main rocket crew survival would be much better assured than with ejection seats I would think; in any event staying with a larger craft until it has come down to moderate altitudes and airspeeds helps to assure that eventually ejecting would be survivable. Better though if the escape capsule is itself flight capable and can land more or less as usual. Especially for Soviet launches--they launch over thousands of miles of Soviet territory so early aborts would place them with many Soviet airstrips downrange.
A spaceplane smaller than Shuttle or Buran would be more feasible to enable to make landings at rough fields (a common design goal of even the highest performance Soviet designed aircraft since even today many major fields are poorly prepared) and even to stay intact enough for crew survival and safety after a ditch on water--USSR certainly has many lakes and inland seas, even in the steppe, and someday some Russian system might be operating out of Kourou after all, or not inconceivably Canaveral or some new base in East Africa, Vietnam, or even the Philippines!
Water ditch capability is not as crucial for the Russians as it is for Americans but developing it would make the survival options of the Orbiter of whatever design truly comprehensive, even in case of an emergency unplanned reentry into the atmosphere from orbit.
34 tons to orbit allows yet other options. It is just under twice the mass of the TKS as designed by Chelomei, which in turn was twice the mass of Soyuz. Again I'd think mission plans including a TKS on Energia-M would involve carrying another 17 tons as payload independent of the TKS vehicle--given TKS design it could also be regarded as an extension module, with the core TKS unit docked during launch to the extension module which could carry propellant and auxiliary engines as well as equipment or cargo.
Yet another approach would be to adapt Soyuz, TKS, or some clean-sheet system to reentering and recovering not only the small crew module but the entire craft, or most of it. I would retain the separable crew capsule and confine all people launched to it during both launches and landings, so it serves as a backup safety system--penultimate if the crew have ejection seats, which I think we could dispense with with a good capsule system. Also the point of a capsule is to minimize the necessary mass, which means both mass and volume are at a premium and the extra weight and bulk of the ejection seats might be a deal-breaker, as might be the risk of accidentally detonating one. Generally one would try to save the whole ship, and generally ride it down whole and reuse it all, or most of it, replacing engines as needed perhaps. But an emergency escape system might be sized only for the crew capsule; then its mass would be modest and the thrust from it not worth capturing during a normal boost.
There is a patent out there for a winged Apollo CSM design along these lines, but I'd think part of the point of doing this is not just to save the cost of disposing of the stuff in the Service Module but, as with Orbiter and Buran, and with Soyuz and TKS bearing in mind the extensions are disposable, to provide extra habitation and work space, something the Apollo based system did not make recoverable. As with Soyuz one might make that extra volume disposable, but I sure don't think it would work well with a reentering Soyuz-derived winged spaceplane to have this stuck on the nose during launch and operation; the nose is a bad place to put anything since we want it maximally secure and streamlined during entry. TKS design lends itself better to sticking some wings on it and layering the belly with more TPS. There are yet other options too, such as a biconic design, which gives excellent hypersonic lift/drag ratios allowing extensive control of entry, provided we have a good way of stabilizing and controlling the angle of attack--I believe these designs generally have a flap on the tail end as the Shuttle and Buran did. A biconic shape is not much good for lift at subsonic speeds of course, where it will fall like a brick, or a traditional capsule for that matter, so some kind of parachutes, or something more fancy like swing wings would be needed. Or blending between lifting body and biconic a la Kliper (typically--some Kliper designs omitted the winglets completely). I suspect even the fully winged editions of Kliper would have flown pretty poorly at subsonic landing speeds and required some combination of parachutes and landing retro-rockets anyway.
It seems intuitive to me that had Orbiter (and hence Buran) been designed on these lines, with the nose section being a Soyuz-style headlight shaped entry capsule fully capable of surviving one entry from orbital speeds (or for more safety factor, escape or higher, 12,000 m/sec or so), the crew of Columbia would have survived even if they began entry, as they and Buran's crew here did, ignorant of the extra risk (or, given full knowledge of the damage, certainty) of destruction on entry. As with the escape system during launch, the separation system would have both manual and automatic controls, and even if burn-through and subsequent cascading system failures and aerodynamic imbalances were to suddenly and without warning start tumbling the craft, the G-forces and other warning signs could be designed to trigger separation before the crew is fatally stressed, and I'd think that a dense entry capsule type vehicle would tend naturally to separate rapidly from a disintegrating main body. Then it would stabilize in a shield-down attitude naturally as well and automated controls could assist this effectively; even if the crew is injured and unconscious the body can then be automatically controlled to seek a survivable continuation of entry. The desired trajectories for relatively high lift bodies are different than those of low L/D capsules of course, but I would think an attainable survivable trajectory is always available after separation from one appropriate to the intact vessel.
Others suggest that no, the data from Columbia's demise suggest it would be too violent for a capsule separation to happen cleanly enough and in time--but I believe they are talking about the kludgy bathtub or boxlike capsules proposed as a retrofitted feature for STS Orbiters as designed OTL, not a simpler headlight or conical form comprising the nose.
Anyway it is not too late for the Soviets to consider the merits of such a design now.
I think that the Soviets are likely to have the money to spend on space and that faced with the Buran tragedy, the pressure will be on to change priorities and get some space propaganda victories.
Like the RD-57 you mean?
It was being designed for the N-1, but crops up in some of the proposals for upper stages for the Energia as well as the Deuteron rocket. I'm not sure if the USSR had a real capability to make RD-57s when those proposals were made (in the 80s), or if this was like American proposals to build things with F1 engines long after re-starting production of the F1 was deeply impractical.
The other option is to stick an RD-0120 engine on an upper stage. According to Silverbird, despite the lower ISP, the RD-0120 works really well for a Saturn IVB-style upper stage.
I think an Energia M could scale up quite nicely too - if you stacked 2 Energia M 1st stages on top of each-other and put an Energia EUS on top of that (assuming that Encyclopedia Astronautica has the right numbers for the EUS stage), then the Energia M could launch 76.7 tonnes to a 57 degree 185km*185km orbit (that's assuming a payload that needs a big fairing of 23 tonnes that is jettisoned at 500s into the launch).
If the Energia M could take more Zenit 1 boosters, I think the system could launch fairly impressive payloads - with a total of 4 Zenit 1 boosters, a similar system should be able to launch 107.7 tonnes into the same orbit and with 6 Zenit 1 boosters, it should be able to get 133.4 tonnes to the same orbit.
(On the other hand, I am sure I'm making some mistake with the numbers since they make me wonder why the Soviets bothered with a full-size Energia at all, which is why I was asking you about Silverbird earlier this week - if you or anyone else can see some way that I'm being overly optimistic, I'd love to know before I use this giant Energia M in a timeline.)
As I understand it, wasn't that basically what the LKS was? TKS systems stuck in an aerodynamic body so Chelomei could get some interest from the Soviet shuttle lobby?
fasquardon
Like the RD-57 you mean?
It was being designed for the N-1, but crops up in some of the proposals for upper stages for the Energia as well as the Deuteron rocket. I'm not sure if the USSR had a real capability to make RD-57s when those proposals were made (in the 80s), or if this was like American proposals to build things with F1 engines long after re-starting production of the F1 was deeply impractical.
The other option is to stick an RD-0120 engine on an upper stage. According to Silverbird, despite the lower ISP, the RD-0120 works really well for a Saturn IVB-style upper stage.
I think an Energia M could scale up quite nicely too - if you stacked 2 Energia M 1st stages on top of each-other and put an Energia EUS on top of that (assuming that Encyclopedia Astronautica has the right numbers for the EUS stage), then the Energia M could launch 76.7 tonnes to a 57 degree 185km*185km orbit (that's assuming a payload that needs a big fairing of 23 tonnes that is jettisoned at 500s into the launch).
If the Energia M could take more Zenit 1 boosters, I think the system could launch fairly impressive payloads - with a total of 4 Zenit 1 boosters, a similar system should be able to launch 107.7 tonnes into the same orbit and with 6 Zenit 1 boosters, it should be able to get 133.4 tonnes to the same orbit.
(On the other hand, I am sure I'm making some mistake with the numbers since they make me wonder why the Soviets bothered with a full-size Energia at all, which is why I was asking you about Silverbird earlier this week - if you or anyone else can see some way that I'm being overly optimistic, I'd love to know before I use this giant Energia M in a timeline.)
As I understand it, wasn't that basically what the LKS was? TKS systems stuck in an aerodynamic body so Chelomei could get some interest from the Soviet shuttle lobby?
fasquardon
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Thanks for the very detailed and considered comments. Unfortunately, I don't have time this morning to give them the considered reply they deserve, but I'll try to get back to them in the next few days. Hopefully though, some of your questions will be answered below...
Epilogue: The Legacy of Buran
The Buran Incident Investigation
The tragic loss of Buran and her crew in 1999 spelt the end of the Soviet shuttle programme. Already facing criticism over high costs and limited utility, the destruction of the only man-rated orbiter ruled out any near-term return to flight for the system. This grounding was soon confirmed to be permanent, with the Soviet Space Agency ruling out upgrading Burya or the other uncompleted orbiters to flightworthy status even before the cause of the accident was confirmed.
Even as the five Soviet victims of the disaster were being buried in the Kremlin wall, the investigation into the cause of the disaster was well underway. Given the high-profile nature of the disaster, the resulting accident investigation was conducted with a rigour and openness unusual in Soviet inquiries. In the light of the loss of two US citizens, NASA were invited to send a team to participate in the investigation, with the Americans given unprecedented access to Soviet records and facilities. This cooperation was reciprocated, with US resources and diplomacy being deployed to help recover wreckage from the orbiter, which was spread across remote locations in a number of north African nations.
When the investigation team published their final report in October 1999, it confirmed and ice impact on the thermal protection tiles at launch as the primary cause of the accident. Although the impact itself had not been observed, launch day footage did show large chunks of ice detaching from the Energia core, whilst instrument data recovered from the wreckage clearly showed the trouble starting at the ONI-II bay. From this information, investigators soon pruned their fault trees down to a scenario in which ice impact caused a breach in the thermal protection system close to the ONI-II hatch.
The report noted that damage from ice impacts had been identified as a risk as early as Buran’s maiden flight in 1988, but that the only mitigating actions taken had been to increase CCTV coverage at the pad to watch for ice build-up before launch. Dedicated ice inspection teams, which had long been standard for NASA shuttle launches, had been used for Burya’s 2K1 flight, but had then been dropped as the unpopular duty was considered unnecessary given the success of the initial launches. As time passed with no serious incident, the risk had become normalised in the minds of the mission directors, to the point where even the TV camera network was no longer maintained to a high standard.
Also coming in for criticism were a number of design issues that had contributed to the disaster. Foremost of these were the decision to arrange Buran’s belly thermal protection tiles in rows perpendicular to the airflow, rather than at an angle as on the US shuttle. This simplified installation and maintenance, but it made possible the formation of plasma arcs at the junction of tiles, without which the damaged ONI-II hatch may have been able to withstand re-entry. The inclusion of the hatch itself in the vital belly heat shield, which unlike penetrations for the landing gear would have to be opened before re-entry, was another area highlighted as an unnecessary risk. Also criticised was the use of unstable hydrazine in the VSU hydraulic power system, and the use of common propellant tanks for the main ODU engines and the RSU control thrusters.
Aside from these specific technical issues relating to the 1K4 disaster, the Report criticised the general state of the shuttle programme in no uncertain terms. Over the lean years of the early and mid-1990s, the shuttle’s supporting infrastructure had been allowed to degrade to a dangerous level. An in-depth review of the status of Pad 38 found several hundred potentially dangerous faults in the towers and their fueling systems, as well as at the MIK orbiter processing facilities, whilst the long periods between launches had led to a serious degradation in personnel skills. At least a dozen incidents were identified that could have led to a loss of mission on earlier flights.
In the wake of the report a number of high profile managers were arrested and sentenced to hard labour, whilst in the US, MirCorp quickly folded, becoming the subject of a Congressional hearing over their alleged “reckless” exposure of US citizens to unacceptable risks. All plans to fly future paying “space tourists” were cancelled indefinitely.
However, the NASA team felt that this punitive response failed to get to the underlying root causes, and was in fact part of the problem, contributing to an endemic culture of scapegoating within the Soviet space programme. This led to a situation in which virtually no-one (excepting the cosmonauts themselves) was prepared to take personal responsibility for their actions and how it affected overall mission success, in case they should later be penalised for problems that might arise. As a defensive mechanism, individual technicians and team leaders therefore performed only those tasks they had been specifically directed to undertake by higher authority. This American impression of a bureaucratic, box-ticking Soviet safety culture was to have ongoing repercussions on the possibilities for future joint US-Soviet space projects.
NASA Learns the Lessons
The Buran disaster was a wake-up call not only for the Soviets, but also for NASA. For several years there had be warnings from within the agency that the pressure to increase the pace of launches in order to get Alpha completed as quickly as possible was placing an unsustainable strain on the Agency and its workers. Fears that the painful lessons of Challenger were being forgotten had been largely dismissed by NASA management, but the failings uncovered by the Buran Incident Investigation shone a new light on NASA’s own practices. One area to receive particular attention was the prevailing attitude to TPS impacts.
As the BII Final Report had highlighted, NASA had long conducted dedicated anti-ice inspections before launch, and so a repeat of the ice strike that had doomed Buran was considered unlikely. However, pieces of insulating foam shaken loose from the shuttle’s External Tank had been observed impacting the orbiters on almost every shuttle launch to date. Although a number of engineers had flagged this as a potential risk to the integrity of the heat shield, there had never been a serious incident recorded, and so the risk had been classified as minimal. Now, with Buran offering a grim example of the consequences of TPS damage, the analyses and tests were repeated, and came to a worrying conclusion: in certain circumstances foam strikes could indeed cause enough damage to lead to a loss-of-mission during re-entry.
This was just one of a number of issues highlighted in a wide-ranging NASA report on shuttle safety that was published in March 2000. NASA immediately took action to mitigate the most pressing issues, including new methods for inspecting and fixing the thermal protection system on-orbit, as well as advancing existing plans to replace the shuttle’s hydrazine-powered APUs with a safer electrically powered system [1]. They also expanded the schedule for completion of Alpha in order to reduce the number of missions per year. Under the new plan, the Initial International Crew Capability, with all major European and Japanese component in place, would be achieved by early 2002. The Common Core/Habitation module (a virtual copy of the “Destiny” Common Core/Lab with dedicated crew support facilities) would be now launched in mid-2003, whilst the development of a US replacement for the Soyuz-ACRV lifeboats would be accelerated, allowing the expansion of the permanent crew from three to six to take place in 2004.
However, a decision on the most important issue - the long-postponed development of a safer successor to the shuttle - was held off until the arrival of a new NASA Administrator under a new President in 2001.
Moving On from the Disaster
Despite the terrible grief felt throughout the Soviet space programme at the loss of their comrades, to a large extent most of VKA’s ongoing projects remained unaffected. The huge expense of the shuttle system meant that it had already been largely decoupled from the ongoing Mir-2 programme, and the reliable Soyuz and Zenit rockets continued to send crews and cargo to the station despite the loss of Buran. Plans to complete the assembly of Mir-2 were slowed as schedules were reassessed and funds were re-prioitised to long-delayed ground infrastructure upgrades, but despite this the launch via Zenit of ESA’s Magellan module went ahead as planned in April 2000. Later the same year a modified Progress M2 spacecraft delivered the second airlock module, SO-2 “Poisk”, to the station, with the first lab module, “Nauka”, delivered in May 2001. It was at this point however that the loss of the shuttle’s heavy lift capability made itself felt.
To expand Mir-2 further, the station would need more power. This was originally planned to be provided by a second truss section, NEP-2, mounting two large “solar dynamic” parabolic dishes that would focus sunlight to heat a working fluid and drive a turbine, offering improved power-to-weight performance compared with photovoltaic arrays. This large, complex system was intended to be delivered by Buran just as NEP-1 had been, and although it had been designed with the possibility of splitting it between several Zenit launches, the implications of actually having to do this were giving programme engineers and managers severe headaches. However, it was soon realised that there was another possibility: Energia.
Energia’s Last Hurrah
The Energia carrier rocket for the next planned Buran mission, vehicle 8L, had already been 90% completed at the time of the loss of Buran. Although the assembly lines for new Energia cores were being shut down by 2000, the teams and material needed to complete the 8L core were still in place at Baikonur, allowing the final vehicle to be assembled at relatively little cost. A proposal was quickly put together at RKK Energia to use this core as the basis for an unmanned, cargo-only version of the booster. Initially this was planned to be the long-discussed Energia-M variant, but it was quickly decided to instead simply use larger Energia-T configuration. Although massively over-sized to deliver NEP-2 to orbit, Energia-T would require virtually no modifications to the 8L vehicle.
To place NEP-2 into orbit and guide it to a docking with the space station it would be necessary to provide a space tug. NEP-2 was far too massive to be carried by a Progress M2 service module, and so Soviet engineers turned back to the solution they had used for the very first Energia launch in 1987: Chelomie’s venerable TKS. The last of the 77K modules originally built for Mir, 77KSI, was dusted off at Fili KKP and in early 2001 renovations began to turn it into an autonomous space tug.
Energia-T2 (the initial launch having been retrospectively designated as T1) was finally rolled out to Pad 38 in May 2003. This final lift-off on 8th May completed a perfect record of eight successful launches out of eight for Glushko’s giant rocket, in stark contrast to the record of the N-1 launcher that it had been designed to replace. Unlike the case in 1987, this time the TKS-derived space tug operated correctly, no doubt helped by its more traditional placement at the bottom of the payload stack rather than at the top, facing downwards. 77KSI successfully inserted NEP-2 into a low parking orbit before initiating an orbital trajectory that would see it rendezvous with Mir-2 two days later.
The first docking attempt on 10th May was aborted due to a spurious accelerometer reading. This was later found to be an instrumentation fault, but mission controllers were taking no chances. NEP-2 by far the heaviest payload ever to attempt an automatic docking as the active partner, and with its many modules and appendages Mir-2 presented a complex target. However, the second attempt on 11th May was successful, with NEP-2 easing in to soft-dock at Yedinstvo’s axial docking port. Two days later, its job completed, 77KSI detached from NEP-2 and was commanded to a destructive re-entry, whilst at the station cosmonauts Usachev and Malenchenko, together with ESA guest cosmonaut Léopold Eyharts, used the European Robotic Arm to move NEP-2 to its final location opposite NEP-1 on Yedinstvo’s Y+ mid-point docking port. Within a month the new module’s solar furnace would begin supplying power to the station, finally providing the resources needed to support the completion of the station.
Looking to the Future
As of 2005, with Space Station Alpha fully assembled and Mir-2 nearing completion, thoughts are turning to the next step in humanity’s exploration of space. With the Soviet economy booming on the back of high oil prices and the US and Western Europe enjoying a period of sustained growth, there appears to be a rare convergence of political ambition and financial means.
For the US, the most significant development has been the decision by the Bush administration to refocus NASA’s efforts to rely more upon the commercial sector. In 2002 NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe announced that, following the deployment of the Horizon ACRVs to Alpha [2], NASA would aim to transfer logistical support for the station to the private sector by 2010, using unmanned vehicles launched via the new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles and other commercial rockets, including the European Ariane and Soviet Zenit.[3] With cargo launches thus outsourced, the aging and expensive Space Shuttle would finally be retired, with its role in launching American crews into space taken up by a new Crewed Space Vehicle. Although a derivative of Lockheed’s Horizon spaceplane is considered a front-runner, its selection is far from guaranteed as, in a departure from NASA’s usual procurement methods, the CSV uses an innovative spiral development programme. This sees fixed-cost milestones replacing the more traditional cost-plus approach, culminating in a fly-off of the two most promising designs in 2009. As well as supporting LEO crew rotations of up to seven astronauts, the CSV is also expected to replace Horizon in the role of Alpha’s lifeboat. More ambitiously, CSV is being designed to support missions further into space, carried aloft by a new Energia-class launcher, the so-called Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle (SDLV). Currently undergoing Phase-A studies, but planned to launch as soon as 2012, the SDLV will open up the possibility of a return to lunar orbit, to be potentially followed by lunar space stations and renewed landings by 2020, depending on future budget allocations.[4]
As has often been the case throughout the history of manned spaceflight, Soviet plans to a large extent mirror those in the US. Even before Buran’s first flight, the Soviets had been considering developing a large capsule-based crew vehicle to replace Soyuz. In the tumultuous economic circumstances of the late ‘80s and ‘90s these plans had been put on hold, but with the loss of Buran and the improved economic situation in the USSR they have been revisited. In 2003 the Soviet Space Agency confirmed plans to push forward with development of a modernised version of the Zarya reusable space capsule that had first been proposed in the late ‘80s. Launched by Zenit, Zarya would carry twice the crew of Soyuz and would be designed from the start to support future deep space missions.
In parallel to the Zarya decision, the Soviets were also considering the development of a new family of heavy lift rockets to finally replace Proton whilst matching the capabilities of the SDLV. Although the initial proposal from RKK Energia was to once again push for Energia-M, VKA felt that the expensive infrastructure needed to support the large hydrogen-oxygen core stage, as well as the lack of flexibility to scale down the design for smaller payloads, made this unattractive. Instead they announced in 2004 plans for a new Zenit-derived all-kerolox rocket system named “Don”.[5] By clustering one, three or five Zenit-style boosters with a kerolox upper stage, the Don system would be scalable, with the largest variant matching SDLV, being able lift up to 63 tonnes to Mir-2’s orbit.
Talks are already underway between NASA, VKA and ESA about the opportunities these new developments may open up. Ideas for an international lunar programme are being floated, including a jointly built Lunar Orbital Station, or even a surface Moonbase supported by US and Soviet landers. Further ahead, Mars beckons, with Soviet and American scientists investigating nuclear powered ion drives and in-situ resource utilisation technologies that might allow a manned expedition as soon as 2025. After more than thirty years stuck in low Earth orbit, humanity is once again turning outwards towards the manned exploration of deep space.
The Shuttle in Perspective
The Soviet space shuttle programme was created at the height of the Cold War as counter-move to a threat from the US shuttle that wasn’t fully understood and which never in fact existed. Militaristic fantasies of the Americans using their shuttle to bomb Moscow or pluck Soviet space stations from orbit drove the Communist leadership to order their own version to maintain the balance of power, but beyond this they had no real vision for how the shuttle would be used. Energia’s Chief Designer in the 1970s, Valentin Glushko, saw the shuttle as merely one more payload for his giant, Moon-aimed rocket; something to persuade the military to pick up the bill rather than being an objective in its own right. As well as the expense and technical complexity of the system, it is this status as a solution in search of a problem that helps to explain the long delays in getting Buran and Burya into space. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, it became even harder to justify the enormous costs needed to maintain a system that never managed to truly match its American rival in flight rates or usefulness, flying only six times in total. In the light of the Buran disaster it’s easy to castigate the programme as an unjustifiable and senseless waste of both money and human lives. And yet…
Despite all of their shortcomings, all of their costs and tragic consequences, these elegant spaceplanes had an undeniable romance to them. Even when times were hardest, as during the 1990 coup or the 1995 financial crash, surveys of Soviet public opinion repeatedly found large majorities in favour of keeping the shuttles flying. In their turn, Soviet space planners spared no effort to somehow find the resources needed to keep the shuttles flying, even at the cost of robbing Peter to pay Paul. With every launch, Buran and Burya proved that the Soviet Union was still a world-class power, justifying their people’s pride. The shuttles were not just spacecraft; they were national heroes, beacons of hope. Even today, if you visit Moscow’s Museum of Cosmonautics, you will find large crowds of adults and children flocking to see Burya up close, imagining themselves at the controls as fearless cosmonauts exploring the universe.
Buran is gone, but her dream lives on.
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[1] There were plans IOTL post-Columbia to replace shuttle’s hydrazine APUs with electrical units (called the Advanced Hydraulic Power System, AHPS), but the decision was apparently postponed until the planned retirement of the system made it moot. Here, with the APUs being a major contributing factor to Buran’s demise, and with a softer retirement date for the shuttle ITTL, NASA and its overseers in government place more emphasis on getting this upgrade done.
[2] Horizon a lifting body based upon OTL’s X-38. The decision to go ahead with a space station without long-term Soviet involvement meant that the US committed to developing their own lifeboat for Alpha in 1994. This programme used funds that IOTL were spent on the X-33 project, which does not exist ITTL.
[3] This is a combination of the OTL Orbital Space Plane and Crew Exploration Vehicle/Orion, tending more towards the former than the latter. The overall programme borrows a lot from OTL’s Vision for Space Exploration (especially the free-market friendly leveraging commercial space aspects that Griffin largely ditched IOTL to pursue “Apollo on steroids”), but with less emphasis on the Moon as a firm target. Without OTL’s Columbia disaster, there’s less of an impression that NASA needs radical redirection.
[4] Yes, this is basically Shuttle-C/NLS/Ares-V/DIRECT Jupiter/SLS. What, you think there’s any chance whatsoever that Congress is going to allow the shuttle to be retired without funding a replacement jobs programme? ASB! As with its various OTL incarnations, don’t put too much emphasis on the planned launch dates - to its government sponsors, its success as a programme is measured more in people employed (and votes received) than in missions flown.
[5] This is basically a version of the Sodruzhestvo rocket proposed IOTL, or indeed the recently announced Energia 5VR.
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So, the snow has fallen and the blizzard is over. As mentioned above, I intend to keep responding to comments, and may have another couple of renders up my sleeve, but the post above marks the end of the timeline itself. However, I have not discounted the possibility of writing a continuation or spin-off in the future. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve learnt a lot in researching for it. As ever, thanks are due to e of pi for his proof reading and general supportiveness, as well as his various commissions that continue to force me to push my boundaries and not rest on my Blender laurels
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for reading!
That was a beautiful ending! Bravo!
I'm slightly confused by your rendering of Alpha though. One, the robotic arm rail along the length of the truss is blocked by one of the US modules, and second, wouldn't the placement of Kibo interfere with shuttle docking at the "top" PMA? And wouldn't the currently unused PMA at the "bottom" of the IS be better relocated along the US core axis? Given the different layout of the station the shuttle docking sequence must be different as well.
I'm slightly confused by your rendering of Alpha though. One, the robotic arm rail along the length of the truss is blocked by one of the US modules, and second, wouldn't the placement of Kibo interfere with shuttle docking at the "top" PMA? And wouldn't the currently unused PMA at the "bottom" of the IS be better relocated along the US core axis? Given the different layout of the station the shuttle docking sequence must be different as well.
Alas, it is over... But, holy hell did I love this TL!
The Buran at the Cosmonautics Museum photo is beautiful, well... all the pictures of this story is beautiful!
And indeed, "her dream lives on".
LE EDIT:
Can someone on this forum create a TVTropes page of this TL? I think it deserve it.
The Buran at the Cosmonautics Museum photo is beautiful, well... all the pictures of this story is beautiful!
And indeed, "her dream lives on".
LE EDIT:
Can someone on this forum create a TVTropes page of this TL? I think it deserve it.
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A bittersweet end to a great alternate history. As much as I wanted to see Buran go on, and as much as this accident seemed so very avoidable, you did well in showing that in reality this spacecraft was due for something bad. Alpha and Mir-2 look quite intriguing, I'm glad to have found some new wallpaper Eager to see what's next from Nixonshead!
Eager to see what's next from Nixonshead!