Buran & Energia: Deep Dive into Soviet Space Shuttle History (and Space Lasers)
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- I was always fascinated by Buran. Last year I had the chance to see it in person, at least a version of it. I decided to make this deep dive to preserve parts of space history in a hopefully entertaining form.
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I just love soviet space history, and I'm glad that you made video about Buran.
Space history content is a welcome change of pace, awesome video!
Thanks! Unfortunately the RUclips algorithm disagrees 😅
My favorite museums! You better have at least one day for each of them.
I'll go to one of them this August, have you already bin to them?
Yes! I was able to take a thorough tour through the Technik Museum Speyer, but I haven't been able to do Sinsheim yet. That's on my list for this year. Gotta see that Concorde :)
@@MarvinHuber_PlanetCoaster I have been in Sinsheim and Speyer museums in 2017. One day for each one. And it wasn't enough! ) Wish I could go there again with my friends.
I have been looking forward to this video. Great job!
It came down to using radians as your angle to avoid an extra step in your math. Instead of rotating thru Pi radians (180 deg) in its plane of rotation, it was commanded to rotate thru 2Pi radians. A complete circle. As it was mounted propulsion side forward on the main velocity vector, it executed a brake instead of a boost. Gorby didn't want to fly it - at all, however he was a new chairman of the party and didn't have complete authority to overcome the inertia of the program. I heard my first rumblings of sabotage two years after the failure and they persisted all the way to the end of the USSR and afterwards. Depending on how the GNC code was written, it could very well have simply been the addition of a single line of 2 * Pi in the rotation angle instead of a Pi. It's easy to imagine such sabotage getting by technicians not expecting sabotage. Such a thing as 2 * Pi is a term that shows up everywhere in the equations of motion for orbital and ballistic flight. It's something your eyes are used to seeing all the time.
Interesting! Can you point me to a source for this information?
I wondered about sabotage, and your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks!
To Pi or not to Pi...
This probably should've been an hour or multi-part series. There's a lot to cover about this program, and the why of it.
1. You didn't mention that originally much of the Buran orbiter's aerodynamics and engineering came from espionage, which probably saved the Soviets billions and years of development. The details of this are a fascinating Cold War spy story, and how the USA detected and eventually turned it on the Soviets is worthy of Tom Clancy.
2. You also didn't mention that, like STS, Buran did not have any launch escape. It was too much like its American cousin. The layout of the crew compartment was so close that some of the crew would've had to stay behind, trapped in the mid-deck, while only three or four of them on the flight deck would eject out on seats. Like NASA, the Soviets looked at an LES that could pull the entire orbiter off the stack, using solid rockets on the aft fuselage, but again, the same problems reared their ugly head and it had to be abandoned.
3. An-225 and the OK-GLI Buran. The reason that OK-GLI didn't fly on an aircraft like Enterprise, is simply because the Soviets did not have an aircraft in mass production like a 747 and so it was given its own engines to fly with. When Burans were transported from factory to the launch site, it had to be delivered only partially built and then assembled there. A Bison (M4 Molt) bomber was modified to handle this task.
4. The Shuttle could also fly itself, but unlike Buran, it was never fully tested out and some features, like the landing gear and later parachutes, could only be deployed by the pilot and commander. Several times Shuttle contractors offered kits, then the Space Station Freedom program wanted to fully test the auto pilot capability of the Shuttle, however, according to sources, the Astronaut Office didn't like the idea of astronauts being rendered potentially superfluous, and then missions could be flown unmanned and therefore fewer flight opportunities. One really interesting concept Boeing put forward in the late 1990s was that they wanted to buy orbiter Columbia from NASA to fly as a private Shuttle. Naturally, they had some ideas that would make it very obvious NASA wasn't operating the Shuttle in the most efficient way, and it got nixed. Among the improvements was fully automating Columbia, so missions wouldn't risk crews all the time, and fueling up a Centaur-like hydrolox upper stage with leftover ET propellants.
5. For the 1990 Space Exploration Program of the Bush Sr. era, NASA wanted to have Shuttle-C for use in launching Freedom and then for Moon and Mars missions. But that also went by the budget wayside. It would've given the U.S. a heavy lift capability comparable to Energia by just simply replacing the orbiter with a cargo and engine module.
6. After the end of the Soviet Union and the Buran-Energia program, the APAS-86 docking system meant for Buran to dock to Mir and Mir-2, was repurposed for STS. The Zenit strap on booster for Energia and their engines saw life as Zenit and variants of the RD-170 became the RD-180 and RD-191 that saw use on Atlas 5 and Antares.
This comment is much more of a deep dive then the video itself and you should be very proud of that.
The video is essentially spouting Soviet propaganda and does nothing to mention that every problem that is encountered on the NASA STS was also encountered by the soviets and honestly there just isn’t enough evidence to conclude that Buran would’ve been a better system.
For example: as initially proposed, both STS and Buran would’ve been 100% reusable. NASA ran into cost overruns and funding issues that prevented it from being so and honestly, the Buran would’ve run into the same problem because the Buran program was cancelled after a successful test flight. So not only was there not enough money to develop Buran further, but there was no money to develop self landing boosters.
Another example for those who still want to believe that Buran would’ve been a better shuttle. As designed and flown, the STS was capable of recovering, refurbishing, and reusing all engines (including SRBs, there were parts flown on the final space shuttle mission that flew on STS-1) while as flown, Buran could not reuse any Main engines.
11:51 "Yep, instead of getting into orbit, it deorbited itself."
this has got to be peak 'soviet union engineering accident' moment right now
Or...it could be 'prikaz' (an order). Given the complicated situation at the time, it would be a convenient end for POLYUS.
Great video. I love this format.
Now I gotta make this in ksp! Learnt so much about the history of Buran, Thanks!
True although the space shuttle is normally called refurbishable and not reusable as it has to have loads of maintenance every flight including engine being completely taken apart
I'd say that's more reusable than chucking them away every flight.
@12pentaborane yeah but cost more than a normal rocket
Thank you for the adequate and respectful story about Buran
I think it's worth mentioning that the Energia was developed with reusability in mind from the very start. The four liquid zenit boosters would land back on the kazak steppe using a mixture of parachutes, landing legs and retro rockets in a rather orthodox flight plan which had several parachutes lower it's velocity after staging, then have the parachute anchor point move from the top of the booster to the middle of the booster while landing legs and retro rockets would be used for the soft landing. It's why the RD-170 was certified for 10 reflights. The dark gray compartments on the booster's top and bottom are where the landing hardware was stored. Sadly during Energia's two (and only) flight the landing hardware in these compartment were replaced with various telemetry instrument needed for the test flights. The third flight would have tested this capability for the first time if it ever flew.
The book "Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle" goes quite a lot into detail about this. You can find a pdf of it online.
Energia was not developed with reusability in mind. Boosters wouldn't land. It all was PLANNED to be done in the future. But plans are not real until they done.
@@andrewdrednaught
I literally explained exactly how it was developed with reusability in mind and you completely ignored it. Next time Andrew, try to actually read the entire comment.
@@VG_164 word "developed" means there already was a bunch of hardware doing exactly that. There were none.
What most of the Buran info shows us - ideas, proposals and, sometimes, plans. But nothing that's already made.
@@andrewdrednaught Yes they were. Energia 2L, the third Energia, was first going to use this, it was already fully assembled by the time of the initial post flight checkup of the Buran took place at the end of 1989. It didn't get to launch in the spring of 1990 because there were simply no money left at that point. The only reason why it didn't use this in its only two flights was because the landing hardware had to be replaced with instrumentation for the test flights. That is why they had the massive gray compartments on the boosters specificially there for storing the landing gear.
Boris I. Gubanov (First Deputy of General Designer of Energia) talks about this in his book. The hardware was already built. Energia was developed from the very start with reuse in mind. They just never got to launch it in this configuration because they money had ran out by 1990, the intended payload for Energia 2L (GK-199) was poorly developed rush job similar to Polyus and Russia failed to sell it as a launch vehicle post the USSR collapse because there existed no commercials payloads for such a rocket.
@@VG_164 no there weren't.
Again memoirs (or any other books) means little towards being a proof. A video of a flying thing (boosters) will suffice.
And even if I give soviet space program any benefits of the doubt, so I count some mockups as proof of progress - I want to see videos of those too.
Ultimately it's means nothing because it never materialized as an operational system. Demo versions never counts.
Plus, if we judge this thing on basis of just ideas it's only fair that we give Shuttle system props for all kinds of proposals and ideas too. Maybe US aerospace industry had some fancy mockups too...
One huge advantage of the Buran/Energia over NASA Space Shuttle was the use of liquid fueled boosters instead of solid fuel ones.
That meant the Buran could have aborted flight at any given moment during ascent, unlike the Shuttle that was at the complete mercy of its boosters untill they run out of fuel.
In a Challenger-like scenario, even if NASA ground control had a huge blinking message "Danger! Something it wrong with the boosters, they will destroy themselves and the vehicle!" appear on their screens as soon as the Shuttle took off they could've done absolutely nothing to stop the inevitable.
With Energia instead (provided they had some sensor or system warning them of impending doom) they could have throttle the engines up, down, turned them off nicely, kill the fuel lines, etc. Then, after slowing a bit down, the Buran could have separated from the entire stack and glided back to Earth safely.
Both had one thing in common, though: they abandoned any viable escape systems, for the sake of cost and increased payload (save for initially having ejection seats for two in STS - which was more like a joke)...
Energia could have survived a shutdown of one or two of the liquid boosters, but ascent aborts wouldn't have been any more survivable than shuttle. The aerodynamics would be prohibitive until very high altitude and separation from Energia wouldn't have been any easier than shuttle sep from the ET.
Buran had one advantage. It was "just one of the payloads" for Energya, which could fly and launch other things. It had slightly better LEO performance, because it didn't carry heavy engines.
PS: Buran returned to Earth in FIRST FLIGHT. 1:09 - he seemed to have forgotten that nugget in Starship....
SCOTT MANLEY SPOTTED 8:34
Years ago I found a video of guys who snuck into that hanger where they were keeping Buran and shot video of it.
Hey I was recommended this video out of the blue and really enjoyed it! Great work! You’ve earned my subscription ❤
Cheers from St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Hey, your pronunciation was actually understandable!
Thanks! I really tried haha
Cool stuff! I also made a recreation of Energia II, it's quite fun to make
I never got to it to make it, but I really want to do so at one point.
@@ShadowZone That'd be awesome!
absolutely LOVE this pair thank you so much 😍 the Energia-Buran is such a great combo and the Energia itself was such a cool rocket!
The Uragan was such a lovely concept of reusable rocket...
Shame that these programs died with the fall of the Soviet Union 😭
4:13 wow 😳... Are you actually able to speak it or did you only learn the name pronunciation of this Buran type?
Anyway watching this makes me want to recreate this pairing on KSP for the third time 😂
(maybe this time with procedural tanks, for a more realistic recreation, who knows 🤔)
P.S. rip last Energia 😮💨
Inefficient way to launch satellites.
Then just use energia itself
But very efficient way to retrieve them.
As for launching more efficiently, that's why the system was designed so that the Energia could fly on its own without the Buran
Why?
Why do so many people in the west romanticize Soviet/Russian air and space stuff.
If we knew more or had real specs it becomes less interesting.
Heavy, less precise, it’s amazing the Soviet were able to carry out even 1 flight of the copied Shuttle.
Partly because it's amazing they were able to do it at all. They were working with something like 1/10th the GDP the USA had. (I recall that figure every time someone tries to claim freedom is better for science & technology.)
Their 'age of genius' pretty much ended the day Korolev finally succumbed to his gulag ailings...
was this video a singh that CCCP (super secret stable rocket) is making a comeback?
Not exactly. A lot of the script was already done a couple of years ago when the series was active. I had planned to do a space station episode and then Buran/Energia ad sort of the swan song to the Soviet space program.
With the war in Ukraine going on it didn't feel right to resurrect the concept including "comrade Zonov" and play a funny Russian in a fur hat. Especially when Russia's current president has a delusional dream of resurrecting the Soviet union and fires missiles on civilian targets.
@@ShadowZone ok I was hoping but i do understand your reasoning bdw thanks for the siries I did presentation on topic of soviet Space program And CCCP realy helped me with reaserch becouse I didn't have to search through Wikipedia to find all of the info
@@ShadowZone it's sad to see another propaganda victim. Goodbye.
@@LairOfLairWhat?
@@LairOfLair Looked in a mirror, did you?
I am quite confused how the Energia was balanced, since it has the payload on one side, but its side boosters are biased towards the other side
I feel like it’s not entirely fair to say “the space shuttle couldn’t land on its own.” The reentry was entirely autonomous, up until final approach where yes the astronauts did take control, but the guidance computer was telling them where to point it. They only had the astronauts take control of it in case something in the software went wrong. If anything, the astronauts were the back-up
VERY CLOSE but not entirely correct. The Orbiter could do everything including bring itself in except ONE very important part. In order to save space and weight there were no motors on the landing gear OR landing gear doors. They were entirely gravity feed/activated. They didn't give the computers the ability to unlock the doors and only gravity could pull the doors and gear down. This was done not only for space and weight but also to completely eliminate the chances of the computers unlocking the doors during flight except right before landing or not at all if it failed to send the open command. If the doors were unlocked in space or to early then during reentry the doors would open to early and gear come down to soon and it would most likely destroy the Orbiter. None of this was over site or mis-designed it was all for practical and very real direct reasons.
The space shutles are no reusable. They were refurbishable. big difference.
The difference is huge. It comparing, let say after every time that you use your car you will have to fully disassemble the car and replace nearly everything and call that reusable.
No, you wouldn't call that reusable because we expect a resusable transporter would need a quick check, maybe some fuel, and be off again.
Ksp 2 just got cancelled.but, ITS NOT A SCAM RIGHT?
Sorry to pop this thread up with an (almost) uncompletelly related question, but, Shadow... any comments on the KSP2 developement news? Apparently Take 2 is firing 70 workers in Seattle (KSP2 has 70 developers, Intercept Games is in Seattle) and lots of former KSP2 workers started asking for jobs on LinkedIn. Seems that the game has been axed. The community is really scared, please, reassure us with good news...
the soviet space shuttle actually looks a little cooler than the US's
I’d say the orbiter looks cooler but the big orange tank is iconic
Yeah... Buran was so perfect that it NEVER reached operational maturity. Buran was so perfect that it could boast a dizzying number of orbital flights, numbering ONE. And that was a shortened test flight, without a crew, because it was never equipped with life support devices for the human. 🤣
But let's be patient, maybe the program will be revitalized in the context of the Russian program to conquer Mars. Maybe even in 200 years? After all, it is such a perfect design...
Oof! I'm sorry, ShadowZone, but the moving background got a bit too much for me around the 12-minute mark. I loved the first part though; I knew little about Energia before this.
Can you clarify what you mean by "moving background"? Do you mean the video running on the monitor behind me?
Would still images be preferable to you in general or was it this specific clip at 12min that annoyed you?
@@ShadowZone Yes, I do mean the video on the monitor behind you. Um... I think it's that specific clip. I wasn't looking at it, but I got the impression of a large swaying motion which repeated several times before I started to feel bad. It was very much like being on a ship rolling badly. Thanks for asking. :)
@@eekee6034 Thanks for the feedback! That clip was from one of the Energia launches with shaky camera. That might have been the problem. I'll keep it in mind for future videos to make sure the background-videos are not wonky.
I always appreciate it when my viewers tell me things I can do better. Truly valuable. Again, thank you!
Thank you for this piece
I got say as someone whos just came back to ksp, the amount of US Space Shuttle and specially and Apollo stuff in ksp YT content is just TIRING jezz..
And fuck gorbatchov
"Gliding gracefully" you mean falling back to earth in a brick with stubby wings! Love those museums!
Not necessarily, there are birds with stubby wings which are very good gliders. The petrels include some birds which rarely land, even sleeping in flight. I think the Shuttle's problem may be that its control surfaces were too close to its center of mass, giving them little leverage. By not carrying its launch engines with it, Buran may have been better balanced.
cold war wald have been so much cooler if there were space lasers involved
Make a Salyut 3 video!!
We all need to take the enthusiasm and hyperbole for Buran with a box of salt. Buran had no human-rated environmental systems on its' one successful test flight and never flew again nor ever with any cosmonauts aboard. By comparison the five U.S. Shuttles flew a total of 135 crewed missions over 30 years. Yes, two ships and 14 astronauts were tragically lost from a solid rocket problem on liftoff and one on reentry due to heat shield and fueselage damage. But the reality of the Shuttle's fight records speak fir themselves.
0:11 I don't even know how someone got chromatic aberration that bad on a camera lens.
buran was more copy or used in James Bond
US shuttle is a sad copy of the USSR shuttle poor in point US shuttle was a fail aka how many lossed and killed operators
Buran was in many wars an improvement on the Shuttle, and it's a crying shame that it was left in the dustbin of history, not because of anything inherently wrong with it, but because it was just too expensive to keep alive when the USSR finally collapsed in on itself. In some ways, it's fitting, though. Buran was ultimately the product of Cold War paranoia- the USSR decided that they needed a counterpart to the STS because they feared its use as a weapon, a mentality that only the "Everyone's half-mad with fear because of the constant looming threat of nuclear annihilation" times of the Cold War could produce. In a way, it fits that a product of Cold War madness died with the Cold War itself.
(Now we only need to fear nuclear annihilation if some unhinged egomaniac gets access to the big red button. Sure would suck if that happened. At least three times. In the last ten years.)
Nonetheless, it's deeply tragic that nothing came of the Buran program. As a refinement and improvement upon the Shuttle it could've been the next step in spaceflight. We found a different way forward, of course, and the Falcons are genuinely impressive bit of kit, but I still have enormous doubts about Starship ever delivering on what it's promised in an efficient manner.
If nothing else, a spaceplane with a giant cargo bay would be real handy for cleaning up all the space junk we've left up there.
Seeing the Buran (or at least a test article for it) up-close is now being added to the list of reasons I want to visit Germany.
And may the Mriya, last remnant of this ill-fated program, fly again one day. Slava Ukraini.
It really wasn't an improvement, trust me. Energia was pretty good but their version of the Orbiter was not. It most likely would have failed fairly spectacularly and not lived up to its hype. That original one also most likely never would have flown again even if the Soviet Union didn't break up. The first launch it actually sustained some solid structural damage that was due to the CIA planting false information about the Orbiter for the Russians to steal. They didn't discover the false info until after it was built and flown and sustained damage. They had also already started building additional air frames also using bad intel and those too would have needed correcting. Also they stole all the initial plans and that really saved them a billion or two rubles and 5-10 years of flight design and testing (and they still got it wrong).
rip an-225 :(
A completely useless vehicle from the start. SS was at least in concept reusable, this is just a gigantic inefficient space capsule. A marvel of engineering to achieve nothing
In concept, yes STS was reusable. In reality, it was more refurbishable than reusable. Personally, I believe the Soviet engineers realized the tech just wasn't there yet and designed Buran/Energia with that in mind. The RD-0120 engines on the Energia core were roughly equivalent to the SSME, just VASTLY simplified to make them cheaper. I don't think it's quite fair to say that it achieved nothing because it wasn't reusable - it achieved nothing because the Soviet Union fell apart and then the Russian Federation didn't have the money to keep it going. Also, it did achieve SOMETHING in that it helped bankrupt the Soviets, so there's that... There's also the fact that the Atlas V, Antares, Zenit, and a few other rockets use engines derived from the RD-170s on the Energia's boosters. It's a complicated legacy for sure, but it didn't achieve nothing
Yes, totaly useless, its engines were never used again, especily not in the states 🤡
More than anything else the SST was a huge pork barrel project to prop up votes. Had Congress / Spy agencies stayed our of NASA's way, we'd of likely has a much safer and reliable craft. Instead, NASA was forced to use solid boosters to support the missle defense industries. Which worked out wonderfully for a manned craft with a launching system that couldn't be aborted.
Try harder stpd amijew🤡🇺🇲
@@LarsSobieskithe boosters were made to be reused, or at least refurbished. Idk about full reuse, but they were meant to be recoverable later on down the line, that's what most of the random bits on the outside are: recovery hardware. Another point for Energia I guess.
Good video, some details left out but realy good "short history" of Buran. Hats down to engeeneers 🫡