Soviet Shuttle Buran Found In a Junk Heap

gruenz noted the somewhat sad photo slideshow showing what appears to be the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran, lying in a Moscow suburb junk heap. Of course I don't read Russian, so it might also be a carnival ride rusting.

Comments

Re:They should be thankful

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

...ended up tethering the U.S. to low earth orbit for decades instead of moving on like we should have to a permanent moon settlement and Mars.

I'll take the Hubble Space Telescope and the myriad of other LEO scientific/communication satellites over your pie-in-the-sky Buck Rogers fantasies any day of the week.

Re:well

[JoshuaZ]

If we had done the same and gone back to the Apollo program, 14 people would still be alive.

Right, because no one died in the Apollo 1 fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 . And because no one almost died on Apollo 13. And because no Soviets died in craft similar to the Apollo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11 .

If we had stayed with Apollo type craft there would have almost certainly been more fatalities. Space travel is very dangerous. This isn't going to change anytime soon and wouldn't be different if we had used Apollo-like vehicles. Indeed, I'd tentatively guess that the reduced expense of such vehicles might mean many more launches and thus likely even more fatalities.

Re:They should be thankful

[countertrolling]

Yeah, space is too complicated. Total waste of time and effort. If it can't be built in your garage by one guy, it's not worth building, right? Especially if it takes over a week... Talk about your lust for instant gratification...

Pure masturbation all this space exploration stuff. We have everything we need right here. Why would anybody want to leave? And there's certainly no reason to believe that the whole process could possibly be mechanized in the future, reducing human effort (thus costs) to near zero. Nope, let's just sit here on our duffs, munching on Doritos, and feed the poor... to the gods of war