I'm not overly familiar with the design of rocket engines, but it's not immediately apparent to me why a liquid propellant booster would be immune to a DDT style explosion in the case of a failed set of seals.
The Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster cannot be shut down once it has ignited. The Energia’s liquid propellent engine (RD-170) could be easily turned off and allow the crew to safely eject. There would not have been an explosion like the Challenger and the crew would very likely have survived if the Space Shuttle was designed like the Buran.
Completely different philosophies between the two countries. The Space Shuttle went with solid rockets because it was contracted to defense companies who built ICBMs which are solid rockets, and also because the US never mastered liquid rocket engines because they thought it was too technically challenging.
The point being that there are so many interesting avenues to explore about the American and Soviet space programs if you want to go the alt-history route but the show is too lazy to even do that.
Looking at the challenger flight timeline there was less than a second between verbal indication that something seemed wrong and the catastrophic failure of the orbiter and loss of downlink. Not a lot of time to realize what's wrong and shut the engines down.
I agree the Buran would be better positioned to respond to a similar type challenger fuel leakage problem, but I think saying loss of the crew and orbiter from a OX/fuel leakage is impossible is overstating the case.
What do you mean? Abort systems are usually automated, as was the case with Soyuz 18A in 1975 and Soyuz MS-10 in 2018, two of the handful of times when abort systems were used. The problem with the Space Shuttle boosters is that no such abort mechanism exists due to the design of the solid boosters, so when the Challenger incident happened, they were pretty much cooked.
Sure, nothing is perfect, but numbers don’t lie. Hundreds of Soyuz launches (literally never stopped even after the collapse of the USSR) and a much longer history of manned space launches than the Space Shuttle (which ended its service in 2011 and Americans continued to rely on Russian Soyuz to send astronauts to space until 2020 with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon), still zero fatalities during the handful of launch incidents.
We're talking about Buran not Soyuz. I'm not an engineer and I haven't poured through the technical documents, but if you're going to say Buran was in fact immune to the failure pathway that challenger experienced you've got to go beyond saying "liquid propellant engines can be shut off" and actually show that the mechanisms for an automated shutoff were in place and would have been triggered before catastrophic failure was inevitable. Some of Challengers main engines shut off automatically, but that wouldn't have solved the problem and would likely have been too late even if it did address the issue. Would Burans systems save it if there were an external fuel/ox reaction outside of where it was supposed to be? I have no idea. Maybe.
That's the sort of inside baseball that I'm not going to fault writers for engaging in, for all the other faults I've got with that show.
Once again, Soviet boosters did not have segments and O-rings because they were not solid fuel rockets, the O-ring fault that caused the Challenger explosion could not have happened on the Energia. Period.
Could it have encountered other problems? Sure, but years and years of Soviet and Russian Soyuz flights using liquid propellent rockets have shown that they are exceedingly safe and when there were launch incidents, automated systems were in place to abort the mission and ensure the safety of the crew. As I said, numbers don’t lie.
The Space Shuttle was fundamentally flawed in design and NASA was aware of the defects before the Challenger incident, but chose to keep quiet about it. And as I have mentioned, the worst part is that the solid rocket boosters could not shut down even when the system detects critical failure.
Once again, Soviet boosters did not have segments and O-rings because they were not solid fuel rockets, the O-ring fault that caused the Challenger explosion could not have happened on the Energia. Period.
I'm not saying the O-ring fault could have happened on the actual Energia, I'm saying a failure due to mixture of OX/liquid propellant on the actual Energia outside of the ignition chamber could have occurred. I don't even know if the Energia in the alt history show is liquid fueled. Apparently the STS expys are nuclear powered.
Once again, not having seen the specific episode in question, I don't know if they blamed it on o-rings on a liquid fueled rocket erroneously, and even if they had, I can't fault someone without an engineering, or at least scientific background for making that mistake in the process of making their hackish television show.
I've got no arguments about the superiority of Soviet space tech; when my parents were telling me about For All Mankind where it's an alt-history where the soviets won the space race, I straight up said to them the Soviets did actually win the space race. I guess I'm just pushing back on this implication that I read into your comment that the transfers of American disasters to the Soviets is some ideologically motivated dig at the Soviet space program. Which is why I brought up their willingness to transfer Soviet disasters to the Americans. It just seems like went the easy route of flipping things on their head for narrative convenience. Hence the Soviet moon landing.
I am sorry if I have come across as trying to argue, be assured that I wasn’t.
I am also not saying that the Soviet space program was “sooo much better than the Americans”. I was trying to make the point that to make an alt-history show, you cannot just reverse the achievements/failures of the US and the USSR for an alt-history show. That’s just being lazy. Both sides had fundamentally different philosophies in approaching the space program, and as such they will have different successes and challenges along the way that simply cannot be transposed from our real world history.
For example, if the Soviets had landed on the moon first, it must mean that the N-1 rocket had worked. The N-1 worked differently than the Apollo’s Saturn rocket. The Saturn was powered by a few very powerful but less efficient F-1 gas generator engines. The Soviet N-1 was powered by 30 small but highly efficient closed cycle staged combustion engines. The N-1 had a lot of trouble (in the real world) because the computer systems at the time were not able to cope with the complex operations of controlling several dozens of engines simultaneously.
The Americans thought closed cycle liquid propellent engines were too difficult and they gave up very early in the race. The Soviets, on the other hand, even after the failure of the moon landing, continued to work on and master the construction of these very efficient and powerful engines. After the collapse of the USSR, the NASA bought wholesale a lot of these engines (RD-180s) for cheap and used them on the Atlas rockets, because they were so much better than the American rocket engines.
Today, SpaceX’s Starship follows the same concept as the N-1, using 33 small Raptor engines to power its rocket. This is actually a vindication of the Soviet rocket engine approach. The Americans are only starting to catch up with what the Soviets did decades ago.
So, if the USSR had won the moon landing, it would only further bolster the success of its rocket engine designs, not regressing to do what the US did with solid rocket boosters.
In the context of the show (I looked up a bit of the details), the Soviets copied the entirety of the Space Shuttle design, down to the O-ring fault of the solid boosters, which is absurd considering that:
The USSR did not have a strong industrial base for solid fuel rockets, because they already had a much better, way more efficient liquid propellent engines for that, so they could not have “downgraded” their own version of the Space Shuttle to go for a worse system, just like in the real world
The US chose the solid rocket boosters because they wanted to contract the construction out to private defense companies (Thiokol) which made the ICBMs for the American government (also solid rockets, so it’s something that the company can manufacture)
The US did not have a strong foundation for closed cycle liquid propellent rocket engines, as I said they gave up long ago, so the solid rocket boosters made sense, but was also critically flawed in its design that did end up killing the crew of the Challenger
Since the Soviet rockets had a fundamentally different design, this could not have happened to them.
The Soviets would have encountered a different set of challenges instead, which is what an alt-history show should strive to explore
I'm not overly familiar with the design of rocket engines, but it's not immediately apparent to me why a liquid propellant booster would be immune to a DDT style explosion in the case of a failed set of seals.
The Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster cannot be shut down once it has ignited. The Energia’s liquid propellent engine (RD-170) could be easily turned off and allow the crew to safely eject. There would not have been an explosion like the Challenger and the crew would very likely have survived if the Space Shuttle was designed like the Buran.
Completely different philosophies between the two countries. The Space Shuttle went with solid rockets because it was contracted to defense companies who built ICBMs which are solid rockets, and also because the US never mastered liquid rocket engines because they thought it was too technically challenging.
The point being that there are so many interesting avenues to explore about the American and Soviet space programs if you want to go the alt-history route but the show is too lazy to even do that.
mfing rocket historians on this site
Looking at the challenger flight timeline there was less than a second between verbal indication that something seemed wrong and the catastrophic failure of the orbiter and loss of downlink. Not a lot of time to realize what's wrong and shut the engines down.
I agree the Buran would be better positioned to respond to a similar type challenger fuel leakage problem, but I think saying loss of the crew and orbiter from a OX/fuel leakage is impossible is overstating the case.
What do you mean? Abort systems are usually automated, as was the case with Soyuz 18A in 1975 and Soyuz MS-10 in 2018, two of the handful of times when abort systems were used. The problem with the Space Shuttle boosters is that no such abort mechanism exists due to the design of the solid boosters, so when the Challenger incident happened, they were pretty much cooked.
Sure, nothing is perfect, but numbers don’t lie. Hundreds of Soyuz launches (literally never stopped even after the collapse of the USSR) and a much longer history of manned space launches than the Space Shuttle (which ended its service in 2011 and Americans continued to rely on Russian Soyuz to send astronauts to space until 2020 with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon), still zero fatalities during the handful of launch incidents.
We're talking about Buran not Soyuz. I'm not an engineer and I haven't poured through the technical documents, but if you're going to say Buran was in fact immune to the failure pathway that challenger experienced you've got to go beyond saying "liquid propellant engines can be shut off" and actually show that the mechanisms for an automated shutoff were in place and would have been triggered before catastrophic failure was inevitable. Some of Challengers main engines shut off automatically, but that wouldn't have solved the problem and would likely have been too late even if it did address the issue. Would Burans systems save it if there were an external fuel/ox reaction outside of where it was supposed to be? I have no idea. Maybe.
That's the sort of inside baseball that I'm not going to fault writers for engaging in, for all the other faults I've got with that show.
Once again, Soviet boosters did not have segments and O-rings because they were not solid fuel rockets, the O-ring fault that caused the Challenger explosion could not have happened on the Energia. Period.
Could it have encountered other problems? Sure, but years and years of Soviet and Russian Soyuz flights using liquid propellent rockets have shown that they are exceedingly safe and when there were launch incidents, automated systems were in place to abort the mission and ensure the safety of the crew. As I said, numbers don’t lie.
The Space Shuttle was fundamentally flawed in design and NASA was aware of the defects before the Challenger incident, but chose to keep quiet about it. And as I have mentioned, the worst part is that the solid rocket boosters could not shut down even when the system detects critical failure.
I'm not saying the O-ring fault could have happened on the actual Energia, I'm saying a failure due to mixture of OX/liquid propellant on the actual Energia outside of the ignition chamber could have occurred. I don't even know if the Energia in the alt history show is liquid fueled. Apparently the STS expys are nuclear powered.
Once again, not having seen the specific episode in question, I don't know if they blamed it on o-rings on a liquid fueled rocket erroneously, and even if they had, I can't fault someone without an engineering, or at least scientific background for making that mistake in the process of making their hackish television show.
I've got no arguments about the superiority of Soviet space tech; when my parents were telling me about For All Mankind where it's an alt-history where the soviets won the space race, I straight up said to them the Soviets did actually win the space race. I guess I'm just pushing back on this implication that I read into your comment that the transfers of American disasters to the Soviets is some ideologically motivated dig at the Soviet space program. Which is why I brought up their willingness to transfer Soviet disasters to the Americans. It just seems like went the easy route of flipping things on their head for narrative convenience. Hence the Soviet moon landing.
I am sorry if I have come across as trying to argue, be assured that I wasn’t.
I am also not saying that the Soviet space program was “sooo much better than the Americans”. I was trying to make the point that to make an alt-history show, you cannot just reverse the achievements/failures of the US and the USSR for an alt-history show. That’s just being lazy. Both sides had fundamentally different philosophies in approaching the space program, and as such they will have different successes and challenges along the way that simply cannot be transposed from our real world history.
For example, if the Soviets had landed on the moon first, it must mean that the N-1 rocket had worked. The N-1 worked differently than the Apollo’s Saturn rocket. The Saturn was powered by a few very powerful but less efficient F-1 gas generator engines. The Soviet N-1 was powered by 30 small but highly efficient closed cycle staged combustion engines. The N-1 had a lot of trouble (in the real world) because the computer systems at the time were not able to cope with the complex operations of controlling several dozens of engines simultaneously.
The Americans thought closed cycle liquid propellent engines were too difficult and they gave up very early in the race. The Soviets, on the other hand, even after the failure of the moon landing, continued to work on and master the construction of these very efficient and powerful engines. After the collapse of the USSR, the NASA bought wholesale a lot of these engines (RD-180s) for cheap and used them on the Atlas rockets, because they were so much better than the American rocket engines.
Today, SpaceX’s Starship follows the same concept as the N-1, using 33 small Raptor engines to power its rocket. This is actually a vindication of the Soviet rocket engine approach. The Americans are only starting to catch up with what the Soviets did decades ago.
So, if the USSR had won the moon landing, it would only further bolster the success of its rocket engine designs, not regressing to do what the US did with solid rocket boosters.
In the context of the show (I looked up a bit of the details), the Soviets copied the entirety of the Space Shuttle design, down to the O-ring fault of the solid boosters, which is absurd considering that:
Hope this clarifies my points here.