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Russia Revives Buran Space Shuttle
Anonymous Coward writes "New Scientist has posted an article about Russia reviving their Space Shuttle program. Its a neat story, and gives a few comparative stats between NASA's shuttles and the Buran shuttle; e.g. Buran has a 100 ton payload, nearly 5 times as much as the NASA shuttles!" And be prepared: space tourism may soon reach the almost-commonplace stage.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 9936
With that out of the way...one of the main problems with NASA's space shuttle seems to be the near-infinite amount of testing and precautions they take, thus skyrocketing the cost per flight. It'll be interesting to see what Russia, which puts a more value on results than safety-at-any-cost, does.
Others have made the point that the US Space Shuttle has horrendous maintainence costs: here's why
At the end of every Shuttle mission, the main engines are pulled and shipped to California. There, they are disassembled, rebuilt to specifications, and tested for 80% of their design life. Not exactly "reusable." This on top of the fact that every one of thousands of heat shield tiles needs to be inspected, and the damaged ones replaced.
I saw some report where they calculated that it would be cheaper to build one-use solid rocket boosters (the white rockets on the side of the brown fuel tank) rather than keep retrieving and reusing the current ones.... have to find that link.
The point is, it's often cheaper and safer to build something that only has to be used once. Having said that, I'll defend reusable vehicles for certain missions. The increase in capabilities is sometimes worth the added cost.
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Vpered na Mars!
In an era of rapidly expanding space-based enterprises, the Russians have an incredible opportunity. The New Scientist article hints at the potential market for Buran's capabilities. There are, however, several important questions with difficult answered.
This program has been mothballed since 1990 and unfunded since 1992. How well have all the millions of components been maintained? For example, are there decaying O-Rings that are just waiting to fail? The majority of the turn-around time for the US Space shuttle is post-flight inspection, maintenance, and pre-flight inspection. Which components have weakened in the last decade and will they be found before a catastrophic failure.
In the 11 years since Buran was "put into the barn" how much technical skill has been lost? Without dragging this into an off-topic debate about military spending, the US Navy must purchase a new nuclear submarine every year or so simple to maintain the technical expertise of the thousands of specially trained engineers, welders, machinists, and other highly specialized technicians who build subs. Does Russia have the skills to support this program once the stockpiled rocket parts and fuel tanks are gone?
The Russians are perfectly poised to pull this off. There is already activity at the Baikonur Cosmodrome paying for the all the necessary infrastructure improvements (not to mention providing great advertising. Russian Engineer to international client-- "Hey, have you seen OUR shuttle?") Russia is also smart enough to see the potential in space tourism. Right or wrong, Denis Tito has issued in a new chapter in manned space flight; a chapter that NASA is prohibited from acknowledging currently.
Any AeroSpaceEngineers out there know how much demand there is for a launcher that can haul up 200 "tonnes" at a time (minus the weight of Buran itself of course)? Certainly, if Buran gets off the ground there will quickly be a demand as companies build larger satellites that require the special capabilites of a shuttle rather than a conventional unmanned booster. I wonder what the cost per unit weight will be and how it will compare to current lift systems.
The world is changing around us so fast that sometimes it's hard to see 10 days into the future, let alone 10 years. That doesn't mean we shouldn't look into the future. Quite the opposite is true-- it means we need to look that much harder! If all goes well, Buran may be the vehicle to catapult us all into space. (Pardon the pun.)