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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Reading List: Energiya-Buran

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.

Posted at January 13, 2009 03:38