That said, their stuff is tough. You can repair a MiG-21 in a decent auto shop, and if you have access to the standard maintenance parts, their military trucks should last forever. I had a twin lens reflex camera made at the Leningrad Optical Works that you could drive a tank over and the square-cut focusing gears wouldn’t be out of place in a transmission.
One of the big problems was the Soviet system was based on a troika – the Party, the KGB, and the military. The space program was mainly the military. The KGB had no real interest beyond surveillance satellites, and the Party interest wasn’t constant.
The failure of agriculture, thanks in large part to Khrushchev, caused a strain on hard currency during the project. The KGB wouldn’t vote for it, and then the military split over funding needed for nuclear research. When the price of oil started to drop, a main source of hard currency, something had to go.
The design bureaus definitely hated each other, and some of it was personal by their heads. I’m fairly certain that a lot of information that Janes received on Soviet aerospace was based on damaging leaks from the competing bureaus. What we would consider common equipment like radios and avionics was not shared.
The before and afters on the Kosmodrome they lost are a scary set of pictures, as bad as the nuclear waste disposal site on the east side of the Urals.
]]>As for their “space shuttle”, it was more of a re-entry vehicle, and as noted, there was no real reason for its existence. Soyuz works fine as a vehicle to put men in orbit at a much lower cost.
Ironically, the failure of the Soviet moon program can be laid to the fact that, for unprofitable ventures, Communism is more efficient than capitalism. The Communist NASA, granted a government monopoly upon space flight, kicked the free-market Soviets’ ass. The Soviets had no centralized space program. They had competing “bureaus” — think aerospace companies like Lockheed, Boeing, etc. — that refused to cooperate with each other but instead competed. You would think that competition would result in the best design winning. Instead, competition resulted in a dilution of resources so that no one program for sending the Soviets to the Moon had the total resources needed to get there. It took almost 1% of U.S. GDP in 1966 to get the Saturn V built. The creaky Soviet economy did not have the resources for several different equivalents to the Saturn V at once (something which would have stressed even the more robust U.S. economy), and thus the Soviet moon program failed.
]]>Energia is a powerful system, but I wouldn’t want to be in the same state if there’s a failure at launch. I think Florida might miss Cape Canaveral.
On your general point, ‘Tux, all of the compromises to get an “International” space station have compromised the basic systems. The Shuttle replacement should have been started a decade ago and there should be more escape capacity on the station itself. The Soviet Buran shuttle was too much like our own, a fault of the bureaucracy not their designers, and had the same weaknesses. We need a “boxcar” to take that stuff up, without all of the people. You could design it to utilize the shuttle external fuel tank and boosters, but automate the flight systems and designed it to be used as part of the station after being emptied.
Build it in low earth orbit then push it out to a more stable position and outside the “junk belt”.
Hell, they could have done the ultimate “This Old House” and rehabbed the Mir and moved it to the area of the ISS as an escape pod, rather than letting it fry. I know, money and priorities. Space lacks both.
]]>i’m a taxpayer, and a frugal person by nature, but honestly, i’d be willing to spring for a couple extra laptops [with batteries!], a roll or two of duct tape, and even some visqueen. oh what the heck, throw in something for them to breathe too.
i’ve put in a few years as safety officer in a mildly dangerous line of work, and have seen graphic demonstrations of what happens when you put good safety policies into place and then only pay lip service to them. we used to joke that the only way you get some of the project managers to spend enough money on safety was to trot out the line “do you know how much it costs if we kill somebody?”
nasa’s a big-dollar organization. i guess they figure they can blow up a handful of folks here and there without feeling the pinch.
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