Everytime I witness the relics of the "Space Age" it takes me a few days to shake the feeling that we might be living in a new "Dark Age".
Where the scientific & technical accomplishments of the past seem implausible---contrasted against the modern era challenge of trying to make a reliable & resilient API service---were it not for the documented evidence of their occurrence and these relics left behind to marvel at.
There were people toiling in the golden era of the Space Race doing menial things of no lasting value as well. The idea that some people have of the best minds of our generation being wasted just focusing on ads and APIs and worthless things is silly.
It's like some people pretend that no one is working on space ships, sustainable energy, electric cars, extending the human lifespan, genetic engineering, quantum computing, memristors, real-time communications platforms to remove national boundaries, etc, all of the stuff that is actually changing the world and is actually happening right now.
We're not in a dark age. If anything we're in the brightest age we've ever been in. So much cool shit is happening, so much groundbreaking and future-shaping research is occurring, and the very nature of what it means to be human is evolving faster now than it has in thousands of years... and the coolest thing about it is, so much is happening that people are able to forget about it. People are able to set aside the idea that they're holding the entire world in their hand, wirelessly, with chips as powerful as the most powerful desktops running silently, obeying their every command as they connect to the World Wide Web and complain to everyone around the globe that we must surely be in a dark age because we don't have government-sponsored space shuttles anymore.
And that communication may very well be bounced off a satellite placed into orbit by a private company with a launch that is so commonplace that it's not even announced on TV anymore. Dark age indeed.
Infrastructure requires a continual investment, which means that at any given time you can always point at something that is, quite literally, crumbling away. That's just the nature of the modern era - that we rely on such projects for far longer than the original engineers could've imagined speaks to both their and our ingenuity.
Is there truth in the idea that repairs take longer? Sure. Sometimes it's due to incompetence and lack of funding. Other times it's for the same reason that software takes a lot more effort to maintain/refactor than it took to write in the first place. There's a lot of momentum you have to undo if you want to make an old thing new again.
> Infrastructure requires a continual investment, which means that at any given time you can always point at something that is, quite literally, crumbling away.
I don't really see your point. It is easy to point to something that is crumbling in e.g. California because many of the investments were made in past decades. In Northern Europe e.g. overhead power lines are increasingly rare in urban settings. It isn't really investment in maintenance, but in upgrades.
Science has progressed rapidly in the last couple of decades. These days we are to a large extent limited by other factors, like organizing. For instance if you had a barrier separated self-driving lane on certain highways you could already have self-driving. Of course self-driving already exists in things like trains, there just isn't a lot of incentive to implement that. Having self-driving train carriages departing every minute is entirely possible with today's technology.
So to address the top comment I do think people are wasting their time, even those working on more qualified problems. Because without the larger support and investments it is like trying to bake a cake without eggs.
(I guess trying to bake cakes without eggs on a large scale could actually have a lot of merit, but you get the idea).
I dont know... Japan, Korea and Taiwan can build roads and public transit far better than they do it at home in Boston... And for a fraction of the cost.
> The creation of the modern internet is also a modern infrastructure marvel
And you’d be surprised how rickety it is (a bit by design... a bit because there are still plenty of SPF... a bit because nobody bothers or is able to coordinate maintenance of core infra such as BGP)
Which has been a complaint in many many cases going back decades. Should more be spent? Probably. It’s slso an area with a near infinite appetite for dollars (and associated disruption).
Ehm this is only the case in the USA, simply because Americans hate taxes and/or the common good. Visit Europe and you will notice there's another way.
Well after the Morandi bridge in Genova went down we suddenly started noticing that it wasn’t the only crumbling one in Italy alone.
Even the Allmighty Germans had a look at their, and were a bit horrified at what they found. (To their credit, it seems they immediately planned a wad of money for extraordinary refurbs)
There is money but we have severe problem with having too few engineers in public service. Much money can't be spent as there is no one who can craft tender offers or check if the stuff is built to spec.
In USA the taxes go towards paying the goverment debts to the Rotschilds (I.e. the FED), each generation will have to pay more and more and the real wealth generated by the system goes to the pockets of the the few rich families.
> The idea that some people have of the best minds of our generation being wasted just focusing on ads and APIs and worthless things is silly.
It is silly, but still true, and not only because there is "no money for big science"
The amount of research being done went up 20 fold since the golden age, but there were nothing close to repeating the monumental feats of 20th century like the Green Revolution, 5 successful complete disease eradication programs, complete public education coverage, panpopulational vaccination programmes, and on and on...
Those ads represent something though. They represent a product someone built. An ad, is a manifested from the creation of a thing. Ads are the result of someone creating value— the ads themselves may not be intrinsically valuable, but they represent something that is. We have more ads because we have more stuff to sell. Lamenting ads is lamenting the very things we have produced. Ads are a symptom of a successful economy. Not much advertising happening in North Korea, not much value being created there either.
Advertisements are pretty much messages trying to convince people to see something in a certain way. Surely North Korea has plenty of that since it is essentially their entire society. And the stronger the message the less substance. A lot of things advertised are either common goods like "buy this pizza instead of that one" or luxury goods like "you should pay more for this because you deserve it". Not a lot of advertisements for e.g. affordable housing or something else that could be very beneficial for society.
Consumption by itself does not add value to society. It's arguably harmful. Corporate profits do not directly add value to society. Once again, they are arguably harmful (excess productivity being siphoned off, etc).
Ads drive unnecessary consumption. Do you think our society would be better, or worse, if soft drinks had never been advertised? Or how about cigarettes?
Many negative things are symptoms of our successes. For instance, there wouldn't be drunk drivers if cars had never been invented, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have cars!
I'd argue that those feats were easier to accomplish than what we're trying today. We got the low hanging fruit out of the way, and now we're trying for the big game. Eradicating polio was just fighting one monster. It's amazing we won, don't get me wrong. But fighting cancer is a hydra. Once we make progress in one place, another pops up, then another.
For developed nations, there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. We can basically cure (or treat so well that it's the same as a cure) almost any disease that threatens to cut a life short. For many of the ones we can't cure yet, we have built amazing technology around as a stopgap. Spoons that stabilize themselves so Parkinson's sufferers can eat normally aren't cheap or easy to build, certainly not something that could have been done in the 20s or even the 60s.
For developing nations, progress is still moving swiftly. They're now benefiting from treatments and vaccines that are taken for granted in the developed world, so their quality of life is increasing dramatically. Tons of effort is going into curing illnesses specific to their problems, like Bill Gates with malaria, condoms, and toilets, or Jimmy Carter with the guinea worm. And it's working.
We've chosen to fight harder battles because the easy fights are already won. Don't mistake that for a lack of progress.
Being tracked to resolution of about a meter anywhere on the planet by 3rd parties collecting the data for marketing - pretty, ummm, something...
Being able to have my conversations remotely listened to by pretty much any nation state with a few million to spend with zero-day-phone-"forensics"-vendor-de-jour - pretty, ummm, something...
Something of a pipedream, but they promise the speed of DRAM with the retention and density of Flash memory. They've been predicted for years but never quite made it.
There's apparently an ongoing controversy in EE literature about the best way to understand these devices (which also seems to imply a controversy about whether or not they'll be particularly commercially useful in the future).
There's been a lot of HN discussion about different articles that predict a huge commercial importance for memristors—or that say that they're not very useful or not very interesting!
If you are interested in memristors, look also into an earlier form of similar nature, called "memistors", as well the hardware ANNs developed called "ADALINE" and "MADALINE".
Dig around (wikipedia is a good start) - you can find enough information on how to build a memistor and play with it yourself.
I look at it through the lens of what they had available to them in terms of adjacent technology and capability compared to the present day.
For example, when I stand in front of an SR-71 Blackbird and consider that it was created w/ slide rules & Friden mechanical calculators. When sophisticated automated design and analysis tools like FEA and CFD were still far, far away. It conjures a narrative for me, true or not, that they seemed to do so much with so little, and by contrast we seem to do so little with so much. Which results in a crude emotional response that is some hybrid of awe & despair.
I think the newish perception that risk is unacceptable plays a part. I'm glad to see the "safety above exploration" mindset giving way a bit. Accidents are going to happen. Pioneers in dangerous endeavors understand this. It's good to see society remembering it as well.
Whose risk? If we're talking risk of astronauts and test pilots, certainly--they know the dangers and they've decided it's worth it.
My worry is that people who think "move fast and break things" is a good business strategy are now starting to move into transport, medicine, and other fields where the lives of random citizens are on the line.
Anyone's risk, even if there's no risk at all. Post on Reddit about how you replaced your own water heater and people will wag their finger at you for not having a licensed plumber do it all (as if the plumber would stop by the next day to check for leaks). People get off on trying to score virtue points virtue signaling about risk (not just on the internet, in real life too).
The Christmas tree (or do I have to call it a holiday tree because the "risk" of offending someone is too great) across the room from me might spontaneously catch fire. It probably won't happen so I don't care, that won't stop some anonymous stranger on the internet telling me I should use modern LED lights because they run cooler.
I understand not playing fast and loose with people's lives but the likelihood and magnitude of a possible bad outcome required to stall things has been getting smaller and smaller over the years and it makes getting anything and everything done more time consuming and costly. Before you could just put up a Christmas tree in the office if everyone wanted to, now you have to figure out if anyone could hypothetically be offended. Before you could just build a road or a bridge and deal with the environmental impact as it happens, now you have to do a study and account for the whereabouts of every drop of rainwater that will fall on whatever you're building before you even break ground.
There is a risk of a potential bad outcome inherit to everything. Somehow society has perverted itself into thinking that risk is a binary and all risk is bad and not work it.
"If we're talking risk of astronauts and test pilots, certainly--they know the dangers and they've decided it's worth it."
Sensationalist journalism coupled with ability of the Internet to amplify the worst. If an astronaut died back then, maybe a few tabloids could have screamed in horror, while every other media would have depicted the tragedy as what it was: a highly trained professional who lost his life while doing something amazing but very dangerous whose risks he was well aware of. Today a tragic event like that one would produce such a level of trash that its effects could undermine political campaigns or have perfectly healthy businesses go belly up. It's just too risky.
Things like the Blackbird seem really amazing but whats out there now is even more amazing. It's crazy they were able to do all of that back then with just hand tools. But now you could design the same thing sooner, cheaper, and make the thing perform much better. Computers have really advanced what we can make. Just the software from 10 years ago seems crude to what you can do now. Not everything needs to be a big black stealth plane to appreciate technological progress.
IMHO - because it wasn't built with a goal or a reason. The amazing tech builds of the 60s were each made to fill a need or meet a goal. The F-35, how many goals it that supposed to meet? Easily more than 10. And it isn't great at any of them, in its quest to be OK for all of them...
In case you aren't joking, it isn't at all. A highly functional bureaucracy allows a state to leverage scale in a way that less sophisticated governments just can't do. Infrastructure, military, R&D, and trade are all things that are hugely dependent upon a functioning bureaucratic state and crumble in the face of a non-functioning state.
And before that people complained about the various services having too many different projects dedicated to their own missions.
The F-35 seems to my non-expert eye to have been poorly conceived but creating a more versatile aircraft instead of a bunch of more specialized ones is not inherently a stupid idea.
When it comes to the military, top gun wins. A specialized gun will top a non-specialized one in a given combat situation, all else being equal. Of course, the F-35 will be a great general purpose weapon against far less advanced targets, but if they are pitted against their Russian and Chinese counterparts, I don't believe they will fare all that great.
Unfortunately the movie is based on real events. If you haven't read it, I recommend "Boyd - The future pilot who changed the art of war". It's entertaining and valuable and full of stories like this we something simple and practical though feature creep was turned into a mess.
Of course the design of the APC in your clip is only the opening of the disaster. Once it got to testing before the actual acquisition things got even more ridiculous to the point that I think people should have clearly been prosecuted for reason. But as Boyd said: You can either do something or be someone.
They were throwing a lot of money at aerospace back in those days. Space race, Cold War, actual hot wars fought with US and Soviet equipment and expertise. The moon landing was a huge project too.
I wonder how much of that also has to do with the cold war having lead to wasteful prestige and/or brute force projects. We really badly needed the SR-71. Space projects were often more about prestige and doing better than the enemy than scientific or economic value creation.
The SR-71 was classified for a while before the public became aware of it. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the tech that is still classified seems impossibly futuristic.
Of course, they've been gutted of electronics and engines, but still, anybody can walk right up to one with calipers and a tape measure... Good luck affording that much titanium though. It's a PITA to form and weld, too.
Far too often people fail to see the world for what it is. The use of space is expanding so much and that if anything people are tuning out accomplishments because they are not eventful anymore.
For some the end of the shuttle program was a downer but it was probably the single best thing to have happened to NASA in decades. the Shuttle program if anything held NASA back. The investment alone made it near impossible to not use it and the cost of using it doomed money for other development.
Now we have Space X with a record number of launches, China going to the dark side of the moon, and even more private corporations reaching for space. We still have cooperation with Russia not withstanding all the political strife caused by their leadership. The EU has had great missions recently and even India is moving forward.
Profit is the foundation of truly sustainable human activity. Christopher Columbus was in it for the money, too. Government can only spend what profit creates, so even government programs like NASA ultimately are feeding from the trough of profit.
Yep. For example, the cost per kg of putting something into space using the Falcon Heavy is about 40 times cheaper (per kg) than using a Space Shuttle was.
There are incredible scientific advancements happening right now, using state of the art technologies. A few examples around me daily: brain machine interfaces, CRISPR and gene editing, protein engineering, etc.
If you feel like you're working on something menial, do what you can to point your arrow in a direction you find meaningful. Often times, fields like biology desperately need people with technical skills that want to work hard on important problems.
I think the bigger question is metaphysical: Why are we not inspired by space travel anymore? Even dystopian scifi is no longer popular. Elves and medieval magic are the main sellers.
In literature, maybe (and mostly because of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings) but space travel themes are still big in tv, film and video games.
Of course, in real life, space travel got boring. We couldn't afford the lunar colonies or spinning orbital platforms or missions to Mars we all thought we would see in a few years. It was only in Star Trek and Star Wars that space offered endless variety and new frontiers, but reality offered nothing but dust, and the billions of dollars we were spending flying people to go stand on the dust started to seem like a wasted effort.
I'm concerned about the possibility of a "Dark age", but not because of the people toiling in the API mines; rather that voters fed by conspiracy theorists and anti-science lobbyists will turn away from enlightenment and towards violence.
And yet my 18 year old son has never known a different world. The easy availability of information is just how it always was to him. He can't really conceive of how hard it was to find out something. We've around 4000 books in our home, covering all manner of topics - what would have been a small town library in times past. But still Google is easier and faster. We live in amazing times, and we don't even notice.
Thousands of books at my home too, some dating to the mid 19th century. The immersion of books still can't be bested by handheld devices. Also despite the Internet, the local library has remained quite popular, and ironically, among the young students. Taking notes from a big textbook on a table is still easier on the hands and eyes than scrolling and squinting through the same text on a 5-inch screen.
To turn it around a bit, consider the things that you had growing up that your parent didn't have. Depending on your age - microwaves, television, computers (not the internet, but having these devices that do work for us), telephones.
I was with you there until the last bit. The internet does not contain anything remotely like "all knowledge in human history". The closest thing to that would be all books and printed matter plus all audio and visual recordings. The internet does not contain all of that, not even a tiny fraction of all that. It probably will in the future, but it's going to be a while.
A substantial fraction of books have been digitized, even if not publicly available.
Perhaps a more interesting question would be that of all significant/important knowledge in human history. Some information is more important than other; the name of a childless bachelor who lived in a small town 200 years ago is still knowledge, but it isn't helpful for very much.
On the other hand, that generation spent their best minds in what essentially was a pissing contest over how many times could one could pulverize their adversaries over. Not a great investment either...
Got us some selfies from the Moon though. Pretty neat
>Isn't that trespassing on military property? I would shit myself, the risk is too high to be detained and accused of spying.
in Russia it isn't blind straight application of Femida. Instead it is always personal - you can be accused of spying or given a private tour, especially if you have a bottle of good cognac and a high quality cold smoked salmon to share :)
> in Russia it isn't blind straight application of Femida. Instead it is always personal - you can be accused of spying or given a private tour, especially if you have a bottle of good cognac and a high quality cold smoked salmon to share :)
That's the better way right there. We need more of that attitude in the U.S.
You're replying to a description of corruption. You have that already. Wealthy corporations write your laws and the corporate elite are immune to prosecution.
everything has its price, and as an immigrant to US from Russia, i'm not sure that i would recommend for that attitude/approach to be applied here, at least not in full force, may be if just a bit/sometimes :)
Yeah, my point was not to run the entire society that way. We have too much of that on the big issues. Rather, it's OK to have it on a small scale where it's basically harmless, like paying off some cop with a little vodka when you get caught trespassing on some private land because you want to see some old space shuttles. And not OK when you steal billions with some fake mortgage repackaging that you sell to investors.
The U.S. has gone too far on the small stuff, and completely misses the big stuff. Posted something crass on Twitter 10 years ago? That's it, you're fired! We should consider jailing you! Amassed hundreds of millions of dollars while earning a government salary? No problem, nothing to see here.
We pretty much do. If you have enough money, there is no such thing as legal trouble. It was just a misunderstanding (once the check clears, of course).
In the article, they say that "they're not even owned any longer by the Russian government.". So maybe it's just garden variety trespassing on private property?
another important difference -- while the US Space Shuttle was manned, the Buran flew an unmanned mission. It launched, orbited the Earth several times, and landed just a few feet from the X on the runway under automated control. A rather impressive achievement.
If not for the fact that the US&USSR were working like mad to find a way to destroy one-another, the cold war + space race was great for advancement of science.
> If not for the fact that the US&USSR were working like mad to find a way to destroy one-another, the cold war + space race was great for advancement of science.
Armed conflict or the threat of it has been the driver for a big percentage of the advancements in science, ever since Archimedes. Some posit that one of the main reasons Europe became the seat of scientific advancement after about the 15th century was because of the frequent wars between its many nations. Certainly nuclear technology and the physics underlying it were advanced rapidly because of WWII, just as space tech blossomed with all the money thrown at it during the Cold War.
Now the war has gone mostly underground and involves advances in surveillance, psychological control of entire populations, and AI. Not a shot fired, with worse results for everyone compared to the Cold War since there's no scenario where the victor relinquishes control of its population. Further, most of the control is held by essentially unaccountable private firms rather than (at least somewhat) accountable governments. But please feel free to continue to believe it's just about serving ads and selling shit to an audience, while making everyone's life more convenient with self-driving cars and the like. Perhaps I'm just a nutter.
The concept of a robotic shuttle was picked up again over a decade later with the Boeing X-37B. Being able to retrieve satellites and material from orbit has many applications in espionage and space research.
Tangential topic. I had the opportunity to visit the Speyer technik museum a few years back, and it was an amazing place. Among other things including the Buran, , it has an Jumbo 747 on some steel poles so that it looks like it is landing.
There is also a sister museum in Sinsheim which is also amazing.
The similarity between these and NASA's shuttle is stronger than I remember. Does anyone know if the more distinctive features like the shape in which the heat tiles are applied, and the leading edge of the edge of the wing are simply because one copied the other? Or are they inherent design decisions you'd almost always arrive at if you tried to design an orbiter / plane-type craft?
They're not that similar. Buran has no launch engine; it's lifted entirely by the booster group. Buran's heat tiles are a better design than NASA's; they're not as fragile. Buran was capable of unmanned operation; the only flight, which was successful, was unmanned. Buran also was going to have a turbojet in the tail to help with landing; NASA's shuttle landed as a glider.
The wings are almost identical, which is why it looks like a copy.
When Buran was being designed NASA still hadn't too much visible troubles with Shuttle. Buran creators worked from their strong abilities and their understanding of dangers and possible requirements.
There has been a request from the soviet government to make it as similar as possible to the Space Shuttle programme. There were some compromises made due to different reasons, like available engine types and location of the launchpad, but mostly it's an exact copy. There's a nice article in Russian that explains the history of this project https://habr.com/post/412271/
Not only Buran was riding atop of self-capable Energiya and therefore didn't carry big engines. Buran was unmanned-first, which required quite a bit of ingenuity back in 1980-s. It had bigger payload than the Shuttle.
One of better features of Buran was nontoxic propellants onboard. Buran's RCS were oxygen-kerosene, and LOX was stored onboard - liquid - for a month-long flight duration. That's something which Shuttle and today's SpaceX designs still lack; after Shuttle landing first order of importance is to get rid of remains of very toxic onboard propellants. Same for Dragon.
from the article I think its a little simpler than that, they just wanted to be able to copy or 'clone' the capabilities of the US.
> The USSR wanted a clone with the same ability: "The decision to build Buran was a response to the perceived military threat posed by the space shuttle. If the Americans hadn't developed the shuttle, the Russians wouldn't have developed Buran. To them it was just another part of the arms race," said Hendrickx.
It's crazy that the government never decided to put these into a museum or sell them to an American museum. I think any of the several air and space museum's in America would be absolutely thrilled to purchase one of these and show it off.
They look similar, but under the hood are very different machines. For instance, buran was pilot-optional. It could fly without crew. It also didnt have main engines like shuttle, making refit much simpler.
Pilot-optional was only a minor difference. The biggest difference was that Shuttles had their own propulsion system and could flew themselves using an external fuel tank and a pair of boosters, while Buran was a totally "passive" space capsule that required a heavy rocket to fly - way too excessive for close Earth orbits. The reason was that USSR was years behind USA in cryogenic hydrogen-oxygen propulsion systems and simply could not create a compact and powerful enough engine that could be mounted on Buran.
Basically, the whole Energia-Buran program was a good example of pointless wasting of enormous amount money and resources in USSR with no clear purpose just so that program managers and chief engineers could get state orders, privileges and money bonuses (the former two were worth more than any money in USSR). And that is why the program was closed - it was way too much even for USSR where they burned billions for military and space programs without counting.
> The reason was that USSR was years behind USA in cryogenic hydrogen-oxygen propulsion systems and simply could not create a compact and powerful enough engine that could be mounted on Buran.
Years are not that much. RD-0120 is a close cousin capabilities-wise to SSME. The size is also similar. No, Buran was separate from Energiya for other reasons - Glushko was eyeing a rocket useable for flights to the Moon and kept design decisions with that possible goal in mind.
> Basically, the whole Energia-Buran program was a good example of pointless wasting of enormous amount money and resources in USSR with no clear purpose just so that program managers and chief engineers could get state orders, privileges and money bonuses (the former two were worth more than any money in USSR).
That's a popular point of view. However, big as it is, Energiya-Buran project is still rather minor comparing to the whole size of the USSR state budget. The program also had side effect of developing technologies and advancing science. Many of results of that work survived and were used. I'd agree regarding lack of clear purpose, but disagree about having it as clear disadvantage. Sum of technologies has proven to have enabling effect - both in case of Energiya-Buran and in case of earlier space-related projects (e.g. project Suntan in USA).
I’m curious why you’d construct a “pilot optional” spacecraft, presumably adding in stuff (which amounts to weight) to support a crew that will not even be present.
Shuttle flew on autopilot. The crew was largely there to supervise, at least in terms of the flying up and back down to landing. Automated systems actually flew the craft. The pilot was the emergency backup plan. So Buran wasn't all that much of a leap.
Shuttle's crew did the things the autopilot could not, all the docking, all the satellite grabbing, and certainly all the science. Buran's one flight was just an up-and-back proof of concept. So a crew wasn't needed.
Without a crew, the pilots' only job would have been to save themselves in various emergency scenarios should the systems fail. Take the pilots out and you don't have to train/study/prepare for those scenarios, at least not before the first flight. By removing the pilots, Russia reduced early program costs. It was a form of technical debt. They would eventually have to prep for humans, but at least they could get the craft flying first.
The point I was making was that you need lots of support equipment for humans, which must be hard to fit into a spacecraft and pay to launch even if you know you’re not going to need it.
It gives you more flexibility. You can fly with a crew when needed and without when not. You could also fly with a crew but no pilot.
It’s been speculated that if the damage to Columbia had been realized quickly, a rescue mission could have been launched and the crew returned safely on Atlantis. This would mean the destruction of Columbia even if it turned out the damage wasn’t that bad, because it couldn’t return without a crew. This is one random almost-real example of where this capability could be useful.
One obvious example is test flights. If a crewed craft can fly autonomously then it can be tested without risking those fragile, hard-to-copy meatbags. There will be an example of this next month when SpaceX launches the first test flight of the Dragon 2. Most if not all other manned spacecraft were tested this way too, aside from the Shuttle.
I understand that, but it seems to me that spacecraft are generally placed where you’re likely to not see flexibility because adding it is extremely expensive.
I don’t think adding autonomy is all that expensive. You need almost all of the stuff anyway, since no pilot can fly a spacecraft by the seat of their pants. As I mentioned in an edit (which you may not have seen when you wrote this), the Shuttle was unique or nearly so in not being crew-optional.
I was thinking of this from the other way around, of adding piloting capabilities to an autonomous mission; you now need to adding a bunch of specialized equipment to keep the meatbags inside the spacecraft happy. I’m not sure which way the Soviet shuttle was designed: primarily human-piloted, with optional autonomy added as an afterthought, or meant to be pilotless but with people were added later. It’s the latter case I was concerned about, but I realize now that you’re talking about the former.
I don’t think anyone has designed a pure cargo craft and then tacked on crew capability. The requirements for a crew are so big (you need a substantial pressurized volume, life support, the ability to renter and land, etc.) that I don’t think it would be practical.
What a find! I wonder if this location (and the accompanying abandoned property on the real estate) could be purchased for cheap, fixed up a bit, and turned into a museum or tourist destination.
It's in "Baikonur", a 100km circle of real estate in Kazakhstan that is leased by Russia for its space program.
The site is not abandoned, but definitely has abandoned pieces of infrastructure.
Getting caught in Baikonur is no joke, it's typically the FSB that respond. With that said, typically if you're not in active infrastructure, you'll "just" get booted out of Baikonur (or Russia, depending on their mood..)
Fun fact: another Buran sat in an abandoned lot in an Inner Sydney (Australia) suburb for many years.
> Fun fact: another Buran sat in an abandoned lot in an Inner Sydney (Australia) suburb for many years.
That wasn't an actual Buran, it was a test vehicle used to test the handling of the aircraft for gliding and landing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK-GLI
Great clarification. From what I understood the OK-GLI was still refered to (colloquially and officially) as a Buran, but absolutely, the buran that ended up in Australia is not the same as the one in the Baikonur hanger.
You can't be booted from Russia while you're in Kazakhstan (different countries). Also, FSB can't boot you from Kazakhstan either, that's why they handle trespassers to a local police and AFAIK they also can't.
You need ROSCOSMOS permission, and a double entry Russian visa (you typically fly to Russia (one entry).. fly to Baikonur, and then fly back to Russia.
From what I understand, the tour is quite near, and you can stay in the famous Sputnik hotel. You can also time.it right to be on site for a launch.
In terms of seeing the Buran/s, you cannot officially visit. You essentiallywalk on a straight line across the desert avoiding detection to get to the hangar. It's entirely a different type of adventure in itself.
yes, must love CNN and their 'objective news' for making it seem like an abandoned ghost town,
despite the fact that NASA launches from there because we gutted our own space program.
but don't worry, elon will fix everything.
if he can only get past the endless stream of 'boring questions' first..
>must love CNN and their 'objective news' for making it seem like an abandoned ghost town, despite the fact that NASA launches from there because we gutted our own space program.
Don't just fabricate nonsense. 5th sentence in the article:
"It's an active spaceport about 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow, still used today to send and retrieve astronauts from the International Space Station."
Suggesting it may have been safer than the shuttle and referring to the accidents is a bit absurd. Shuttle fleet logged 135 missions and 1322 days total flight time. Cool story otherwise!
Both Challenger and Columbia disasters were at least studied informally by RKK Energia personnel with some sound arguments how those couldn't lead to similar disasters for Buran.
Seeing this kind of abandoned equipment really fuels the imagination.
What if it was actually aliens, or some secret cabal planning to use it for rogue space wars, and just renting the space from the soviets? Maybe a leader like Khan Noonien Singh and his followers actually launched themselves on a sleeper ship undetected, with plans to return in 20 more years and defeat us all? What did that last person leaving think on his way out, tuning off the lights, knowing he wouldn't be back tomorrow?
I agree. I tear up when I see these things in their current state. Despite being built to essentially destroy my country, space exploration technologies are incredible achievements for all humans. It's the only way this species can survive. Whether it's our doing or not, the Earth won't last forever.
I can only imagine how proud their creators must have been, putting all their hopes and labor into them. It's a shame to see them in such a forgotten state.
Where the scientific & technical accomplishments of the past seem implausible---contrasted against the modern era challenge of trying to make a reliable & resilient API service---were it not for the documented evidence of their occurrence and these relics left behind to marvel at.