- Hendrickx, Bart and Bert Vis.
Energiya-Buran.
Chichester, UK: Springer Praxis, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-387-69848-9.
-
This authoritative history chronicles one of the most bizarre episodes
of the Cold War. When the U.S. Space Shuttle program was launched in 1972,
the Soviets, unlike the majority of journalists and space advocates in the
West who were bamboozled by NASA's propaganda, couldn't make any sense
of the economic justification for the program. They worked the numbers, and
they just didn't work—the flight rates, cost per mission, and most
of the other numbers were obviously not achievable. So, did the Soviets
chuckle at this latest folly of the capitalist, imperialist aggressors and
continue on their own time-proven path of mass-produced low-technology
expendable boosters? Well, of course not! They figured that even if their
wisest double-domed analysts were unable to discern the justification for
the massive expenditures NASA had budgeted for the Shuttle, there must
be some covert military reason for its existence to which they hadn't
yet twigged, and hence they couldn't tolerate a shuttle gap
and consequently had to build their own, however pointless it looked on the surface.
And that's precisely what they did, as this book so thoroughly documents,
with a detailed history, hundreds of pictures, and technical information which
has only recently become available. Reasonable people can argue about the
extent to which the Soviet shuttle was a copy of the American (and since
the U.S. program started years before and placed much of its design data
into the public domain, any wise designer would be foolish not to profit by
using it), but what is not disputed is that (unlike the
U.S. Shuttle) Energiya was a general purpose heavy-lift launcher which had
the orbiter Buran as only one of its possible payloads and was one of the most
magnificent engineering projects of the space programs of any nation,
involving massive research and development, manufacturing, testing,
integrated mission simulation, crew training, and flight testing
programs.
Indeed, Energiya-Buran was in many ways a better-conceived program for space
access than the U.S. Shuttle program: it integrated a heavy payload cargo launcher
with the shuttle program, never envisioned replacing less costly expendable boosters
with the shuttle, and forecast a development program which would encompass
full reusability of boosters and core stages and both unmanned cargo and manned
crew changeout missions to Soviet space stations.
The program came to a simultaneously triumphant and tragic end: the Energiya
booster and the Energiya-Buran shuttle system performed flawless missions
(the first Energiya launch failed to put its payload into orbit, but this was
due to a software error in the payload: the launcher performed nominally from
ignition through payload separation).
In the one and only flight of Buran (launch and landing video, other launch views) the orbiter was placed into its intended orbit and
landed on the cosmodrome runway at precisely the expected time.
And then, in the best tradition not only of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but of
the British Labour Party of the 1970s, this singular success was rewarded by
cancellation of the entire program. As an engineer, I have almost unlimited admiration
for my ex-Soviet and Russian colleagues who did such masterful work and who
will doubtless advance technology in the future to the benefit of us all.
We should celebrate the achievement of those who created this magnificent space
transportation system, while encouraging those inspired by it to open the
high frontier to all of those who exulted in its success.
January 2009 