Music by:
Springtide - Fall Asleep Under the Millions of stars (Instrumental)
The Freak Fandango Orchestra - Requim For a Fish
Gillicuddy - Thinking of You
Freemusicarchive.com
The space shuttle wasn't like anything before it, it was the first reusable
spacecraft and it promised to make travel into space affordable, safe, almost
routine. And so by the 1970's America abandoned expendable rockets, which could
only be used once, and went all in on space shuttles, Building the Columbia, the
Challenger, the discovery, the Atlantis the Braun and the Endeavour. Wait a
minute, this is not one of the space shuttles.
In 1988, the world learned that the Soviet Union also had a space shuttle.
They had been secretly developing it for well over a decade, and it had cost them
billions. But maybe you've never heard of it, and that wouldn't be too surprising,
because the Soviet Space Shuttle only ever launched once. But it's not because
it was flawed. Actually its first launch was a huge success and in a lot of ways
it was actually more capable and robust than the American space shuttle. But
after its first launch, the Soviet shuttle seems to have just disappeared.
And to understand why, you need to go back to the late 1960's. That's when the
Soviets would have learned that the Americans were planning to replace their
conventional rockets with a new reusable spacecraft. But at first the Soviets
wouldn't have been concerned. After all, they had done their own research into
reusable spacecraft and space planes. And the Soviets were pretty busy with other
space projects. They were still in the race to put a man on the moon, they had
ambitious plans for a space station, even a potential moon base. But by 1975 the
mood had changed, the Soviets had grown paranoid that the American space shuttle
might also be used as a space weapon. Soviet research institutes studied the
shuttle program and what they found was that the publicly stated goals of the
program, well, just didn't line up with what the
Americans were actually building. For one, the shuttle promised to make getting
into space cheaper. But the Soviets could clearly see that the shuttle's launch
costs were actually going to be higher than the Rockets it was supposed to
replace. And the shuttle program promised an incredible 60 launches a year, giving
the Americans the ability to get a lot of material into orbit - ten times more
than they had been previously able to. And yet there was nothing in NASA's
plans that called for so many launches. The space shuttle'ss commercial and
scientific goals were starting to look like a smokescreen for what was likely a
military program. The Soviets suspected that the shuttle could be used to launch
something like, say, a laser weapon into orbit, test it, then bring it back down to
earth for further development. With a shuttle type craft, the Americans
could militarize space a lot quicker than the Soviets. The shuttle could even
be used to capture a Soviet spy satellite and bring it back down to
earth for study. And to compound Soviet fears, they discovered that the Americans
were quietly building a second launch site for the shuttle at Vandenberg Air
Force Base in California. And here's the thing with Vandenberg, launch the shuttle
from there and by its first orbit it's over all the major population centers of
the Soviet Union. So the shuttle could in theory deliver a nuclear first-strike
faster than any Soviet nuclear delivery system. The Soviet military pushed hard
for the Soviet Union to start developing its own space
shuttle, but few involved in the Soviet space program actually wanted a shuttle
type craft. But four years after the Americans began working on the space
shuttle, the Kremlin quietly gave the go-ahead to
start developing a Soviet counterpart The Soviet Union's space shuttle would
be called Buran and its research and development would be kept a closely
guarded secret for years. When the Americans first launched the Space
Shuttle on April 12 1981, which awkwardly enough was the 20th anniversary of the
Soviets launching the first man into space, the Soviet media was scathing. They
blasted the Americans for putting in military craft into space and they
reminded viewers that the Soviet Union's space program was for the betterment of
science and humanity. Very few Soviet citizens would have
known that their own government was secretly developing a similar shuttle.
There's no way around it the Buran looked a lot like the American Space
Shuttle, and it's got nothing to do with aerodynamic or thermodynamic laws. The
goal had been to build something that could match the military potential of
the Space Shuttle and with a lot of information about the American Space
Shuttle freely available and unclassified, it's not hard to imagine
what happened next. But here's the thing, the Soviets already knew a thing or two
about getting into space, so they didn't just copy the shuttle, they might have
designed a better Space Shuttle First there's a big difference in how
the Space Shuttle and the Buran actually get into space. The Space Shuttle's
orbiter uses integrated reusable main engines which are fueled by an external
tank. But because the main engines were not powerful enough to put the Shuttle
into orbit, it also needed the help of two expendable solid rocket boosters. But
the Buran didn't have integrated engines, all of its lifting power was provided by
a separate super-heavy rocket called Energia.
It consisted of a core stage and four boosters. Unlike the Space Shuttle, which
was a single system, the Buran orbiter and it's lifting Rockets were actually
two separate systems. While the Shuttle with its integrated engines was more
reusable, in practice it required intensive maintenance between launches,
which offset a lot of its advantage, but once in space
the Shuttle's integrated engines no longer serve the purpose. So for most of
the Shuttle's mission, it was forced to haul around thousands of pounds of
dead weight. This meant that the Buran could carry slightly more payload than
the Space Shuttle, but more importantly the Soviet system had a massive
advantage: flexibility. The Energia rocket could launch by itself without
the Buran attached, and that meant it could carry other things into space.
Without the Buran, the Energia rocket could launch an astounding 100 tons.
That's three Space Shuttles worth of lifting power. The Space Shuttle's first
stage uses solid rocket boosters. The Energia's are liquid fueled. The thing with
solid rocket boosters is, once they're started, there's simply no way to shut
them off. The Energia's liquid-fueled rockets could be throttled up down or
even shut off completely in an emergency. And in an emergency, the Buran had
ejection seats for the entire crew, which could function while on the launch pad or
all the way up to 20 miles. Only the first two shuttles had ejection
seats and only for two crew members. Later shuttles had no ejection seats at
all. From the outset the Buran was also capable of fully automated flight,
meaning it could be launched, put into orbit, and returned back to earth without
any crew on board. Automated flight couldhave been used for rescue missions
and an empty Buran could be sent up to rescue the crew of a space station or
another stranded orbiter. The Buran's first launch was on November of 1988.
The western media was impressed. Especially by it's fully automatic landing
system. On that autumn day in 1988 the future of Soviet space flight - at least from
an outsider's perspective - looked promising. The media speculated that the Buran
would be used to build space stations, or maybe to assemble a spacecraft for a
manned mission to Mars. Of course none of that ever happened the Buran was only
launched once. In the late 1980's the Soviet Union began to collapse, and with
it funding for the Buran was limited, and eventually cut off entirely. Tough
questions started rolling in about the program. Soviet engineers had done a fine
job, but the entire program was starting to look absurdly expensive. Like the
American Space Shuttle, the Buran was costly and inefficient, but unlike the
Americans the Russians still had other ways to get into space. A soyuz rocket
could launch payload into orbit six times cheaper than a Braun. But if the
Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, well, we might imagine Borans being used to
assemble orbital space stations, or spacecraft for missions to other planets.
Or maybe not. The Soviets had been so paranoid about the military potential of
the American Shuttle they wanted their own matching system. But that goal
quickly became pretty much the only goal. In the final days of the Soviet Union,
when it was clear that the American shuttle had no meaningful military
potential, the Soviet military no longer wanted anything to do with the Buran, and
the Soviet space community was left with a spacecraft that was expensive, complex,
and largely without a real purpose
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