- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmygrad.ml
Today is the 35th anniversary of Buran's first and only orbital flight. RIP.
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lol. Is this a For All Mankind Season 4 advertising tie-in?
I stopped watching when I saw a big wing shuttle in lunar orbit. Just wrong on so many levels.
Nah you gotta keep watching
spoiler
Popular Korea gets the first person to Mars
That is pretty cool. I just really hate both the Shuttle program and "hard" SF that didn't do its research, which is the only way anyone could have thought a big wing Shuttle in lunar orbit made sense.
A) The Shuttle, even in the original hopeful STS plans, was never intended to go beyond LEO, and is a terrible platform for doing so because of all the dead weight. Absolutely terrible payload to mass. In the original STS plan, which also had no SRBs and which had a reusable external fuel tank, the Shuttle would dock at Space Station Freedom and then transfer crew and supplies to a NERVA lunar shuttle with no atmospheric dead weight and a vastly better vacuum Isp to get to lunar orbit.
B) The Shuttle only got those big wings because Nixon cut the program so much that NASA had to go beg for more funds from the Air Force, which demanded the huge wings so it could have enough cross range capability to do a bazinga star wars ass satellite stealing once around mission.
The Space Shuttle concept sucked and the scientists behind the Buran agreed, but it's kinda funny they still made a better space shuttle than the US Space Shuttle
Very true, but at least all space planes look cool regardless of their practicality.
Yeah those time-lapses of it doing that flip thing to check it's heatshield were so cool
Haha understandable! Soviet engineers really had so many different design proposals for their spaceplane but ultimately just decided to mostly copy Shuttle. Alas!
They seemed to figure out how to make a big space station in space with Mir. Now if only they figured out how to keep it sanitary (issues began with the Soviets, but to be fair it got worse after the Soviets fell).
