• How A Gold Bullet Almost Destroyed A Space Shuttle [Scott Manley]
    7 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6rJpDPxYGU&t=5s Holy shit, what a close call. Always always have more safety margin and redundancies than you need.
Shuttle was needlessly dangerous from mission 1
srb/et concept was flawed from the design stage. numerous abort blackouts with even more disguised as survivable (rtls comes to mind). its a miracle and a testament to engineering that the shuttle didn't kill more people.
I think I saw a video from Manley discussing the Buran and several of its advantages over the shuttle, although obviously it was more-or-less a direct copy. It's amazing that the Soyuz is still far safer than the shuttle despite being extremely old by this point. I believe the Soyuz was designed in the '50s based on an ICBM, but it's actually a pretty good worker. Oh, also... "STS-93 was the first mission commanded by a woman - Eileen Collins, and also carried the heaviest payload of any shuttle launch." Didn't do too much for women drivers though.
https://forum.facepunch.com/f/videos/btkng/How-A-Gold-Bullet-Almost-Destroyed-A-Space-Shuttle-Scott-Manley/1/
the soviet shuttle has eroniously been called a reverse engineered or copy of the shuttle, the soviet engineers were certainly aware of shuttle but the shape and systems of buran were more consequences of the limitations of technology, but the buran would have been a much more capable spacecraft since its OM engines were aligned along the center of thrust and because it could carry much more thanks to all the rocket parts being on energia. the really brutally sad part about the SLS is that they're taking those nice reusable sme's from shuttle and tossing them away every time, which is like buying a lamborghini and throwing it in a scrapper every time you get groceries.
I didn't think it was reverse-engineered, but it was largely based on the Shuttle, AFAIK. As soon as the Soviets heard that America was keen to use the shuttle for militarising space, they were keen to build their own. I believe it was successfully launched on a test run once and performed well. Yeah, the engine configuration on the Buran was much more reasonable. I understand that the shuttle needed to place the RS-25s like that to counteract the leverage forces, but surely they could have designed a better solution than what they came up with... I agree with you on SLS. Every launch that isn't SpaceX I watch now is sad because I think of all the waste.
the SLS is monumental waste because the RS25 engines were dictated over an upgraded RS10 which itself was a stripped down derivative of the RS25. The RS25s are not meant to be disposable, that was the whole damn point of shuttle, you could put these wildly expensive engines on and reuse them over and over again and when they went to SLS because they were dictated to use certain supply lines they had to have the higher thrust of the RS25 to make it work which means you're throwing out wildly expensive reusable engines with each launch. I'm ok with disposable rockets, not everything can be made reusable, even space-x can't get the 2nd stage back without a lot of redesign, but the rs25s should never have been considered disposable because of the immense cost of those engines vs any other engine out there.
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