Buran-Energia : The Soviet Space Shuttle 2.0 on a Moon Rocket

For many, the Soviet

space

shuttle

or Buran was just a copy of NASA's, it looked strikingly similar and was intended to do similar things, but beyond appearance the two were actually quite different, not just in the vehicles themselves. of the ferry but also in the form. They arrived in

space

. In many ways, the Buran could be seen as space

shuttle

2.0. To build big things in space, you need to have an affordable way to take off. As spectacular as America's Apollo-era

rocket

s were on camera, they weren't very efficient. The Titan IIIC cost about $4,500 in 1972 currency to deliver each kilogram of hardware to low-Earth orbit.

The Saturn 1b could lift a larger payload, but cost about $6,800 per kilogram. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $40,000 per kilogram in today's money or $40 million dollars per ton. NASA intended to solve this problem with a space truck, the STS or space transportation system, but it eventually became known as the Space Shuttle. Originally, the shuttle was designed to perform up to sixty missions per year to low Earth orbit at a cost of about only $453 per kilogram, less than one-tenth the cost of

rocket

launches at the time. This would allow NASA to build space stations or large modular spacecraft for manned missions to other planets, which was more worrying to the Soviets as they believed it would have a larger military role, such as capturing and returning satellites from orbit or deploying space weapons.

When the STS was announced in 1972, Soviet rocket engineers hardly worried about efficiency - they were still working on Sergey Korolev's giant N1 rocket. Korolev had died six years earlier and his lieutenant, Vasili Mishin, had taken his place. The N1 was still realizing the Soviet dream of landing cosmonauts on the

moon

, but after four failures in four test launches, the N1 program was suspended. In 1974, the Soviet leadership replaced the now-disgraced chief designer Vasily Mishin with rocket engineer Valentin Glushko, who set to work on an alternative lunar mission program using the smaller proton rocket. However, in early 1976, Glushko was instructed to develop a symmetrical response to the American shuttle.

More than 600 Soviet institutions were enlisted to work on the huge project: the new spacecraft will be called Buran, which translates into English as "snowstorm" or "blizzard." From the outside Buran looked like a copy of the NASA shuttle, which was not so surprising. The unconfidential plans have been in the public eye for years. This allowed the Soviets to adapt a proven airframe that saved engineers precious time and allowed them to improve the American design. Buran would allow the Soviets to make the jump to Shuttle 2.0 with greater payload capacity, flexibility and greater safety for the crew. The main difference between the American shuttle and the Buran was that the Buran had no engine, it did not have main engines attached like the American shuttle.

Instead, it will be attached to a giant, heavy-lift rocket. This meant that Buran not only had a larger payload of 30 tons for the US 24 shuttles, but it could also turn much faster and also eliminated the need for the solid rocket boosters that the US shuttle had used. These were partly a low cost set to get an extra boost and a political measure to keep ballistic missile manufacturers in the space program. As powerful as the thrusters were, they were not controllable once fired, and due to a sub-zero temperature launch, the O-rings on one booster failed, resulting in the loss of a space shuttle Challenger.

One of the biggest problems that slowed American shuttle launches was that the main engines had to be removed and overhauled after each mission; This was a major job that took months to complete. The Buran, on the other hand, only had propellants that it used to maneuver in orbit and that could make 66 flights without replacement. It was also going to use two turbojet engines, the same ones used on the Sukhoi 27 fighter. The original idea was that these would give it a much greater range if it could not land at the designated air base or it could make several landing attempts in our case if detected a problem.

It could also take off and fly like a normal plane from any air base. Originally these turbojets were to be placed at the base of the rear fin, then it was realized that two or were not enough, so two more were added below the first two, but difficulties in protecting them from the heat of re-entry along with the Additional fuel equipment and the weight they added caused delays and cost overruns, which meant they were not ready for the first flight and the Buran had to operate in glider mode without them. The American shuttle, on the other hand, could not use its main engines to land, so it would always be an unpowered glider and would therefore only have one chance to successfully land.

The Buran was also designed from the beginning to fly fully automatically and unmanned if necessary, if the crew was aboard the pilot and the co-pilot had ejection seats, something that had been abandoned in the US shuttle. But if Buran was the main headline, Glushko was also interested in the fine print. He was determined to keep the Soviet route to the

moon

open and with this in mind he tasked his design office with the task of building an independent rocket to launch Buran as a payload, this way the Soviet shuttle would be much closer to the targets of design of the original American STS. shuttle.

This new rocket called Energia weighed almost as much as the discarded one: 2,500 tons on the launch pad, compared to 2,750 tons for the N1. Energia had enough power to put four Burans into orbit with a 30-ton payload or launch up to 100 tons without the orbiter, even more than the 95 tons planned by the N1. Energia achieved its incredible power by preparing booster segments that separated from a central core during launch, with each booster carrying an RD 170, the world's most powerful rocket engine. Now many will say that the Saturn V F1 engines made by Rocketdyne were the most powerful.

Well, they were the most powerful single combustion chamber engines, but the RD-170 is still a single engine, but it used four chambers instead of one to solve the problem of combustion instability, a problem that gets worse as increases the size of the camera and can literally fly. separate engines. The Americans used deflectors on the rocket's nozzle, allowing them to keep the large single chamber, but at the expense of power because they took up space that would otherwise have been filled with more injection holes for fuel and liquid oxygen. The RD-170's four chambers delivered 7,900 kilonewtons of thrust in a vacuum, even more powerful than the F1's 7,700 kilonewtons.

Soviet engineers also achieved higher RD-170 chamber pressures than equivalent American engines, resulting in greater fuel efficiency from the ground. In 1986, after 10 years of development and testing, Energia was ready for launch, but as the rocket neared completion remained a problem, Buran was still years away from being ready. To test the new Soviet launcher, a reused TKS module was loaded with scientific experiments that included elements of the skiff CO2 laser weapon. The 80-tonne payload was given an ominous coat of black paint and named Polyus. When the Energia rocket took off for the first time on May 15, 1987, the huge rocket took off at an angle, fortunately 3 seconds after a guidance system corrected the trajectory and continued towards the sky as planned.

The first Energia launch was a success: the payload separated at its target altitude ready to carry out a brief orbital insertion; However, due to a sensor malfunction, Polyus spun further than anticipated before falling back into the Pacific Ocean. Still, Glushko's monstrous rocket had proven it could do what the N1 couldn't. The USSR now had a proven super heavy lift vehicle and the next task was to use Energia to launch Buran. On November 15, 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the pride of the Soviet space industry stood ready on a platform for the long-awaited inaugural launch.

The first test flight of the Buran was to be an unmanned mission operated entirely by its onboard computers at 8:00 local time. Energia raised its orbiter to an altitude of just over 250 kilometers, the Buran circled the Earth twice in just over three hours and then slowly re-entered the atmosphere there, its automatic systems detected that there were strong crosswinds. and therefore made a second approach to Biakonour airfield, even fighting against a strong crosswind, the Buran landed just 10 meters from the target mark on the runway. The images of Buran's maiden flight shocked and impressed the world that had not imagined that the USSR could build its own space shuttle, but there were already plans to go further with a second orbiter, the K2 Ptichka or "little bird", whose launch was planned for 1991.

A third K3 Baikal orbiter, named after the world's deepest lake in Siberia, would make the first crewed flight in 1994. An improved Energia rocket system was also planned, which would have been fully reusable and capable of launching a payload of 175 tons to the moon or beyond. The central core booster would use the Sangers 1933 antipodal plane method to jump the upper atmosphere and loop around the globe and return to the launch area. Additionally, the detachable boosters would drop and open their folding wings and could glide like an airplane back to an airfield. But sadly, both Buran and its massive rocket would never fly again in 1989.

The USSR was already beginning to fall apart when the Soviet Union dissolved, two years later, Buran and Energia gathered dust in long-term storage. In many ways, Buran and Energia were a solution to a problem that no longer existed and something the new Russia could no longer afford. As the new Russian space agency struggled to raise funds, Buran and Energia were put on display as a gigantic display to impress tourists and media visiting the Baikonur Cosmodrome. However, in 2001, poor maintenance caused water to leak through the roof of Building 112 and onto the spacecraft, 75 meters below. On May 12, 2002, a repair team went up to the roof after heavy rain at 9:20 in the morning, with a loud crash, the roof completely collapsed, completely destroying the K1 Buran and the Energia and also killing eight workers.

Although the enormous development costs of the Buran may seem like a tragic waste, Energia's technological legacy lives on. Variants of the RD-170 engine are currently used in the current family of Zenit Rockets. The first stage of the American Atlas V is powered by the RD-180, another adaptation of a notable design. After the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 and the grounding of all US Shuttles, it was questioned whether Buran could be brought back, but by then both the vehicles and equipment were in poor condition or had been used for other projects. In 2011, when the American shuttles were retired, the idea was brought up again as a cheaper way to get shuttle service rather than designing a new vehicle from scratch, but again it came to nothing and the dream of a Russian space shuttle continued. the same path as that of the United States.

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