Wow. Did this ever just turn to hot garbage.
Never watched it but I heard in season 2 they made the Buran simply a straight copy of the Space Shuttle, and gave it the exact same accident as the Challenger, which would have been impossible because the Soviets didn’t use solid rocket boosters with the Buran-Energia launch system. They already had (in the real world) way more advanced liquid propellent rockets (RD-170) for that.
This is pure disrespect for actual history and really just a lack of creativity when you can’t come up with a better plotline and instead just transposed an actual American space shuttle disaster to the Soviets which you as a show writer should know is technically impossible if you even have a brief understanding of the Soviet space program.
It's pretty clear the writers have no understanding of any of the space hardware they depict in the show
I haven't watched this hot garbage, but in their defense, they did basically transfer the Nedelin Catastrophe to the US and yeet Gene Kranz into LEO.
That’s kinda what I’m saying. There are so many interesting “what ifs” if you dig into the history of American and Soviet space programs (in my opinion, the most basic research you should do if you want to make a show like this), but the showrunners took the lazy route like swapping real world events between the countries, without regards for the unique differences and characteristics of the space programs between the two ideologically opposing countries.
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
Hope this clarifies my points here.
Is that the one where the ussr does everything the us really did and are just weirdly hostile to make the american protags look good?
It's the show where no one ever gets over personal stuff or experiences emotional growth even after like 40 years.
Yeah I stopped watching when I saw a shuttle in lunar orbit. Just wrong and ignorant of history, physics, and engineering all at once.
Yes, and even if you could make it go further, by not dropping the EFT and refueling it in orbit somehow, it would still be a stupid fucking idea to push around all that useless wing and heat tile mass in space.
That's why the original plan for the STS before Nixon cut it to the bone was for the shuttle to dock at a low earth orbit station where crew and supplies would transfer to a completely different vehicle, a nuclear engine wingless lightweight vehicle never intended to enter an atmosphere, which would take them to a station in lunar orbit, where they would transfer again to a dedicated lander vehicle.
Also, the Shuttle was supposed to have smaller wings, a fully reusable EFT, and no solid boosters. The recognizable Shuttle profile we see in For All Mankind was directly a consequence of the cuts to the Shuttle program because NASA had to go to the DoD for funding to complete the project at all, and the Air Force demanded enough wing area to glide back to US territory after a single polar orbit in order to snatch Soviet satellites out of space, as well as a much larger cargo space than NASA had originally designed for.
And the SRBs were a grift giveaway to one Congressman who had the SRB manufacturer in his district. They should never have been part of a human-rated launch system.
So seeing the familiar Shuttle design in the For All Mankind timeline is already incoherent, but seeing that familiar design in lunar orbit is completely ridiculous.
Dream Chaser is what the shuttle should have been all along, and if our government hadn't gutted its own ability to do things in the 1970s and 80s we could have replaced the Shuttle in the 90s or 00s with something like it.
Can we have Spaceplane?
We have Spaceplane at home.
The North American DC-3 is what the shuttle should have been all along. Fully reusable, no solid boosters, reasonable size wings.
And most importantly, intended to be only one part of a larger space infrastructure so it's not a bus to nowhere.
Yeah that's the most realistic one, although I want to live in the universe where we got the VentureStar.
Earth SSTOs are bazinga bullshit tbh. Even skyhooks are more plausible.
External fuel tank, the big red bottle of rocket fuel the shuttle is strapped to
If for some reason you want truly unhinged orbital/lunar physics watch the first episode of The Silent Sea lmao
Why is movie/tv SF always inventing alternative climate crises instead of just using the real one? Mysterious water shortage in this, mysterious crop failure in Interstellar. It's weird, there's a perfectly dramatic actual climate crisis if they want a climate crisis.
Also weird that they invented a whole different space agency for the RoK, SAA instead of KARI.
No dropped boosters to get to orbit, the whole stack is still together in lunar orbit, burning prograde for some reason. Then they disconnect the shuttle module from the stack while the stack engines are still burning and the shuttle, with engines off, suddenly falls towards the moon where they land with no engines doing pull up on the stick airplane style. The shuttle depressurizes and the depressurization keeps blowing wind from nowhere on and on for like a full minute.
I am begging SF writers to play KSP.
as someone who played KSP RSS heavy modded for years just reading your summary made my brain bleed.
i had that show on my "list" of shit to check out one day except i wasn't sure how shit it did the politics but yeah not anymore
Okay, so the vehicle looks like a Bezos cock rocket with three of the boosters from an R7 and a Space Shuttle strapped to the sides of it. The shuttle is loaded with crew horizontally on the launchpad then pulled up and integrated onto the stack moments before ignition. The cabin of the shuttle is laid out like an airplane with two rows of seats and an aisle down the middle. When the engines ignite, the ones on the main rocket and the boosters light up but not the ones on the shuttle, which actually never light up between launch and crash landing on the moon. It takes them a few seconds of going straight up to get to orbit with the boosters and everything still attached. Then the captain is shown floating weightlessly down the cabin aisle while the engines are still burning, which they do continuously until they reach lunar orbit. The struts connecting the shuttle to the stack start to fail as they burn prograde to "enter a landing orbit" so they disconnect them. This causes the shuttle to start falling quickly directly down toward the lunar surface and they try to start the shuttle's engines but it won't start so the pilot uses the RCS to come in for a nose first plane style landing because their vector somehow rotated 90 degrees again and they're speeding horizontally across the surface as they fall. They finally skid to a stop with the shuttle upside down balanced halfway over the side of a huge cliff that looks like it was formed by erosion.
sorry for the late reply but yeah that's almost as bad as (everything space related) in the movie Armeggedon.
also the space shuttle just sucks in general i want nuclear thermal propelled space tugs with big gold foil cryotanks filled with LH2
i'm an efficient space tug paired with propellant depot supremacist ever since i read Living off the Land in Space and saw how well it worked in KSP
I'm already an efficient nuclear space tug supremacist and a shuttle hater and that book sounds interesting.
Reminds me of someone lauding blade runner 2049 for not “being political” because snow.
Oh man... I have just started season 4 and I was already massively pissed off with the way they had portrayed the Soviets in season 2 and season 3. God damn... I guess Apple made them reign it in.
When your anti-communist propaganda is so ridiculous you're ordered to tone it down because your superiors are afraid people might get curious, investigate, and find out you're just making shit up.
It's a big part of how I got here. I started realizing that the stuff I was told was so bad and evil about the USSR was happening in the US all the time and it started to break down the walls. Or, like, watching Red Dawn and sympathizing with the 18 year old dipshit Soviet conscripts who just wanted to take some pictures in the rockies, or the Cuban soldier who was like "This is bullshit". Why did that Cuban soldier think the counter-insurgency tactics the Soviets were using was wrong? What actually happened in the Cuban Revolution? Why would they have a sympathetic Cuban character in this ridiculous anti-communist screed? Maybe I should go look it up...
I fell off early in season 3 and now I’m thinking that was for the best. Season 2’s portrayal of the Soviets already pissed me off
I haven't watched today's episode yet, but yeah it's not been great. They got my hopes up with the strike and then bleagh.
I thought the show was watchable slop for the first couple seasons but the more they felt the need to depict/include Russian characters the worse it got. I know The Americans wasn't perfect but it seems like a master class of balance and characterization by comparison.
I feel like the pilot episode sets the tone for how the show portrays the Russians.
It didn’t show the Soviets as the good guys, but it also showed that they were genuinely spooked by Reagan (“the Americans had elected a mad man as their president”) and reacting to what the Americans might do to them.
the Russian stuff in The Americans is (mostly) considerably less cringe - it feels like they at least made an effort to give all the principal Russian characters some interiority and not just be cold operators or whatever, and iirc they worked with Russian translators and a decent number of Russian actors to make their dialogue relatively credible. the show was created by an ex-CIA guy who now writes books like this which should tell you a lot about the politics of the show (in short "both sides bad but also both sides rational"). in general it's wittier and better written than FAM by a lot mainly cause it can't coast on cool space shit. also, wigs.
So glad I avoided it. Tickling the chin of space cadets who blame things like LBJ's great society for the fact we're not mining asteroids and living on Mars or whatever was never going to end well.
Fight me but the only justification to send people into space is body horror research on otherwise talented astronauts. I know people say "do both lol" and just blame the MiC but the time of researchers and engineers is a limited resource and "spin-offs" could have been achieved through basic research.
