A Soviet Reusable Space Vehicle Project in mid 60-s

I was looking up material for my post about the space-themed russian postal stamps, and ran across this link.

Too bad the program was terminated based on personal opinions of a general and a top communist party official. Typical for the totalitarian regime.

From what I read, it had a real chance of working.


[edit on 18-4-2005 by Aelita]

Didn’t the soviets build those Shuttle copy's or is this a different program?

Originally posted by WestPoint23
Didn’t the soviets build those Shuttle copy's or is this a different program?

It's a predecessor. It's launched from a mother ship, as opposed to the shuttle, so it's horizontal takeoff.

Originally posted by WestPoint23
Didn’t the soviets build those Shuttle copy's or is this a different program?

The Buran wasnt a direct copy, think of it as more of a similiar solution to a similiar problem. It had no main engines, enhanced heat shielding (it would theoretically have survived the problems Columbia had on reentry) and a much larger cargo bay. It may have looked similiar, but thats about it.

How do you know the strength of their heat tiles? Are you certain it would have taken that foam at those speeds.
And here are pictures of the Shuttle and the Buran.

Buran



Shuttle

It does look like he was right about the main engines and the size of the fuselage(and therefor carrying capacity) given the pictures so I could see giving him the heat tiles.

Ok, to fill in the two posts I made before the outage that have been lost -

Westpoint -
The strength of the tiles is not at question, the design of the Buran is. Columbia was hit on the leading edge of the wing, which damaged the tiles allowing heat to leak through and come into contact with the aluminium frame of the wing. This melted the forward strut, which weakened the wing allowing for the craft to yaw and become aerodynamically unstable, causing a tumbling motion and thus loss of the shuttle.

The Buran is designed with heat transfer conduits between the tiles and the airframe, which removes any heat from leakage and distributes it across the full underside of the craft. All Russian/Soviet reentry capable craft are designed like this precisely because they had experienced the problem of cracked or damaged heatshielding before. Theoretically, this design would have prevented the wings struts from weakening long enough for that phase to be past and the glide to begin.

The Buran had 10 years on the Shuttle, and a lot of good Soviet designers behind it who had dealt with these issues in the past.

Someone else wondered on the status of the Burans, heres the post I made for that -

Five production vehicles -
1.01 - Made first and last flight under complete autonomous control, destroyed when the hanger it was in collapsed
1.02 - second completed production vehicle, status unknown, somehwere in khazakstan

2.01 - Uncompleted, still at factory partially assembled
2.02 - Uncompleted, still at factory partially assembled
2.03 - Uncompleted, disassembled for parts

Eight test vehicles -
* OK-M (later OK-ML-1) - Static Test - Now at Baikonur Cosmodrome
* OK-GLI - Aero Test
* OK-KS - Static Electrical/Integration Test - Now at the Energia factory in Korolev
* OK-MT - Engineering Mock-up - Now at Baikonur Cosmodrome
* OK-??? - Static Test - Status unknown
* OK-TVI - Static Heat/Vacuum Testbed - Status unknown
* OK-??? - Static Test - Status unknown
* OK-TVA - Static Test - Now in Gorky Park, Moscow