Which country uses space shuttles? What is the difference between Buran and Shuttle?

I was inspired to write this article by numerous discussions in forums and even articles in serious magazines, in which I came across the following position:

“The United States is actively developing missile defense (5th generation fighters, combat robots, etc.). Guard! They’re not fools, they know how to count money and won’t do nonsense???”

Fools are not fools, but they have always had a lot of fraud, stupidity and “drinking the dough” - you just have to take a closer look at the US megaprojects.

They are constantly trying to create a miracle weapon or such a miracle technology that will put all enemies/competitors to shame for a long time and make them tremble at the unimaginable technological power of America. They make spectacular presentations, pour out amazing data, and create a huge wave in the media.

Everything always ends in a trivial way - with a successful swindle of taxpayers represented by Congress, a huge money grab and a disastrous result.

For example, here is the history of the program Space Shuttle - one of the typical American chimera chases.

Here, at all stages, from problem statement to operation, NASA management made a series of gross mistakes/frauds, which ultimately led to the creation of a fantastically ineffective Shuttle, the early closure of the program and buried the development of a national orbital station.

How it all began:

In the late 60s, even before the moon landing, the United States decided to cut back (and then close) the Apollo program. Production capacity began to decline rapidly, and hundreds of thousands of workers and employees were subject to dismissal. The enormous costs of the Vietnam War and the space/military race with the USSR had undermined the US budget and one of the worst economic downturns in its history was looming.

NASA funding was cut more and more every year and the future of American manned space exploration was in jeopardy. There were growing voices of critics in Congress who said that NASA was senselessly wasting taxpayers' money at a time when the most important social items in the country's budget were underfunded. On the other hand, the entire free world watched with bated breath every gesture of the beacons of democracy and waited for the spectacular cosmic defeat of the totalitarian Russian barbarians

At the same time, it was clear that the USSR was not going to give up competition in space and that even a successful landing on the Moon could not be a reason to rest on its laurels.

There was an urgent need to decide what to do next. For this, under the auspices of the Presidential Administration, a special working group of scientists was created, which began developing further development plans in American space technology.

Then it was already obvious that the USSR followed the path of developing the technology of orbital stations (OS), while participation in the lunar race was actively denied by Soviet officialdom.

Thus, in 1968, Soyuz-4 and Soyuz-5 were docked in orbit and a transition was made through open space from one ship to another. During the transition, the astronauts practiced performing installation work in space, and the entire project was advertised as “the world’s first experimental orbital station.” The entire world press was filled with admiring responses. Some people rated the Soyuz docking even higher than the Apollo 8 flyby of the Moon.

Such a great response inspired the leadership of the USSR, and in 1969 a flight of three Soyuz aircraft was launched at once. Two had to dock, and the third would fly around, making a spectacular report. That is, the game was clearly intended to be played for the public. But the plan did not work out, the automation failed and it was not possible to dock. Nevertheless, valuable experience was gained in mutual maneuvering in orbit, a unique experiment on welding/brazing in a vacuum was conducted, and the interaction of ground services with ships in orbit was worked out. So the group flight was declared generally successful, and after the cosmonauts landed, at a rally, Brezhnev officially declared that “orbital stations are the main route in astronautics.”

What could America oppose? In fact, the project to create its own OS began in the United States long before these events, but it hardly moved, since all possible resources were aimed at ensuring a speedy landing on the Moon. Immediately after A11 finally visited the Moon, the question of building an OS arose at NASA in full force.

Then NASA decided to build an OS from the existing developments as quickly as possible Skylab (in duplicate), canceled two of the last lunar landings, freeing up Saturn 5 rockets to launch these stations into orbit. In what haste they built Skylab and what nonsense it turned out to be is a separate story.

At the very least, they temporarily covered the “hole” in this competition. But in any case, the Skylab program was obviously a dead end, since the launch vehicles necessary for its development were long out of production, and it was necessary to fly on the leftovers.

What did they offer?

Then the “Space Activities Planning Group” proposed in the coming years (after the Skylab flight) to create a huge orbital station, with a crew of dozens of people and a reusable space shuttle, carrying cargo and people to the station and back. The main emphasis was placed on the fact that the planned shuttle would be so cheap to operate and reliable that human space flights would become almost as routine and safe as civil airliner flights.

(that’s when the Russians will put their kerosene disposable rockets to rest)

NASA's original project for building the shuttle was quite rational:

They proposed making a space transportation system consisting of two winged fully reusable stages: “Booster” (“Accelerator”) and “Orbiter”.

It looked like this: one large “plane” carries another, smaller one on its back. Payload was limited to 11 tons (this is important!). The main purpose of the shuttle was to serve the future orbital station. It is a large OS that could create a sufficiently large cargo flow into orbit and, most importantly, from it.

The size of the Booster was supposed to be comparable to the size of a Boeing 747 (about 80 meters long), and the size of the Orbiter was like a Boeing 707 (about 40 meters). Both stages were supposed to be equipped with the best oxygen-hydrogen engines. After takeoff, the Booster, having accelerated the Orbiter, would separate halfway and return/plane itself to base.

The cost of launching such a shuttle would be about 10 million dollars (in prices of those years), subject to fairly frequent flights, 40-60 times a year. (for comparison, the cost of launching the lunar Saturn 5 was then $200 million)

Naturally, the idea of ​​​​creating such a cheap and easy-to-use orbital transport was liked by the Congress/Administration. Let the economy be at its limit, the blacks are destroying cities, but we’ll push ourselves once again, do a super thing, but then we’ll get stuck!

All this is wonderful, but for the creation of the super shuttle alone, NASA wanted a minimum of 9 billion dollars, and the government agreed to allocate only 5, and even then only on the condition of active participation in financing the military. And for a large station they refused to give money at all, reasonably considering that it had already been allocated billions for the program of 2 Skylab stations (which had yet to fly) - quite enough at that time.

But NASA took the bait and eventually gave birth to this option:

Firstly, such a long lateral maneuver required powerful wings, which increased the weight of the shuttle. In addition, the Orbiter shuttle now lacked internal fuel tanks to carry 30 tons of cargo into orbit. We had to attach a huge external tank to it. Naturally, this tank had to be made disposable (it is very difficult to lower such a thin-walled, fragile structure from orbit intact). In addition, the problem arose of creating powerful hydrogen engines capable of lifting this entire colossus. NASA realistically assessed the possibilities in this regard and lowered the requirements for maximum thrust for the main engines, attaching two huge solid propellant boosters (SFC) on the sides to help them. It turned out that the hydrogen “Booster” completely disappeared from the configuration, degenerating into oversized door rockets from the “Katyusha”.

Thus the Shuttle project was finally formed in its modern form. With the “help” of the military and under the guise of reducing the cost and speeding up development, the Nasovites mutilated the original project beyond recognition. However, it was successfully approved in 1972 and accepted for implementation.

Looking ahead, let's say that even on this misery they still spent far from 5 billion, as they promised. The development of the Shuttle by 1980 cost them 10 billion (in 1977 prices) or about 7 billion in 1971 prices. Note that the idea of ​​​​creating a station has been postponed for an indefinite period and therefore new tasks were invented for the new Shuttle project.

Namely, the purpose of the Shuttle was replanned along the way for the supposedly ultra-cheap launch of commercial and military satellites - everything in a row, from light to super-heavy, as well as the return of satellites from orbit.

There really was a bad problem here. At that time, they simply didn’t make enough satellites to justify the frequent launches of a huge rocket. But our brave scientists were not at a loss! They hired a private contractor, the Mathematics company, which very far-sightedly predicted simply enormous needs for launches in the near future. Hundreds! Thousands of launches! (Who would doubt that)

In principle, already at this stage, at the stage of the project approved in 1972, it was clear that the Shuttle would never become a cheap means of launching into orbit, even if everything went like clockwork. Miracles don’t happen - you can’t pull a load three times heavier into orbit, spending the same 10-15 million dollars calculated for original a much lighter and more advanced system. Not to mention that all cost calculations were given for fully reusable a device that the Shuttle could no longer achieve by definition.

And the idea itself - putting a 100-ton shuttle with people into orbit each time, only to deliver at best a dozen or two tons of payload into space - strongly smacks of absurdity.

However, surprisingly, all the numbers and promises that were the original ones for the original project were automatically declared for the castrated version!

Although the loss of almost all the advantages of relatively disposable missiles was obvious. For example, the cost of rescuing from the ocean, restoring, transporting and assembling solid fuel boosters alone turned out to be not much less than the cost of manufacturing new ones.

By the way, the Thiokol Chemical company won a competition for the development of solid fuel accelerators, underestimating the actual cost of transportation costs by three times. Another small example of the tons of cheating and drank budget that accompanied the development Space Shuttle.

The promised safety also turned out to be a complete mess: the solid fuel boosters cannot be stopped after being ignited and they cannot be shot either, while the crew is deprived of any means of escape at launch. But who cares? NASA was so keen on mastering the budget that without hesitation it announced to Congress that the TTU had achieved 100% reliability. That is, their accident can never happen in principle.

How they looked into the water...

What happened in the end

But trouble came - open the gates, everything turned out to be even more fun when it came to actual development and operation.

Let me remind you:

According to the developers' plans, the Shuttle was to become a reusable, ultra-reliable and safe transport system, with a record low cost of putting cargo and people into orbit. The frequency of flights was supposed to be increased to 50 per year.

But it was smooth on paper...

The plate below clearly shows how “successful” the Shuttle turned out to be

All prices are quoted in 1971 dollars:

Thus, what happened was exactly the opposite

Not reusable

Insufficiently reliable and extremely dangerous in case of an accident

With a record high cost of reaching orbit.

Not reusable - because after the Shuttle flight the external tank is lost, many critical elements of the system become unusable or require expensive restoration. Namely:

Restoring solid propellant boosters costs almost half the cost of manufacturing new ones, plus transportation, plus maintaining the infrastructure to catch them in the ocean.

After every landing major renovation the main engines are passing through, and worse, their service life turned out to be so low that they had to make an additional 50 main engines for the 5 shuttles!

The chassis is completely replaceable;

The heat-protective coating of the airframe requires a long recovery after each flight. (question - what is truly reusable in the system then? Space Shuttle ? only the shuttle body remains)

It turned out that before each launch, the “reusable” Orbiter needs a long, expensive restoration that lasts for months. Plus the launches themselves are constantly and for a long time postponed due to numerous problems. Sometimes you even have to remove components from one shuttle in order to launch another as quickly as possible. All this deprives MTKS of the ability to launch frequently (something that could somehow reduce the cost of operation).

Further, as already mentioned, during its development, NASA assured Congress that the reliability of the TTU can be conditionally considered 1. Therefore, no rescue systems were provided at the launch and they saved a lot on this. For which the Challenger crew paid.

The disaster itself occurred through the fault of NASA management, which, on the one hand, tried to increase the frequency of launches to the maximum at any cost (in order to reduce costs and put on a good face in a bad game), and on the other hand, ignored the operational requirements for technical specifications, which did not allow launches at sub-zero temperatures. temperatures. And that ill-fated launch had already been postponed many times and further waiting disrupted the entire flight schedule. Therefore, they did not care about the temperature conditions, they gave the go-ahead for the launch and the frozen intersection gasket in the TTU, having lost its elasticity, burned out, the escaped torch burned through the external tank and .... Bang!

After the Challenger disaster, the structure had to be strengthened and made heavier, which is why the required carrying capacity was never achieved. As a result, the Shuttle puts into orbit a payload only slightly larger than our Proton.

In addition, this disaster, in addition to a two-year delay in flights, ultimately led to the disruption of that very long-awaited Freedom OS program, on the development of which, by the way, 10 billion dollars were ultimately spent! Due to the reduced actual carrying capacity, the Freedom developers were unable to fit the station modules into the cargo compartment.

As for the Columbia disaster, the problems with damage to the TZP at launch were known from the very beginning, but they were ignored in the same way. Although the danger was obvious! And it still persists, since this problem has not yet received a fundamental solution.

As a result, today the Shuttles have not flown even 30% of the planned flights and the program will be closed by 2010, otherwise the probability of another disaster is unacceptably high!

In any online discussion of SpaceX, a person always appears who declares that, using the example of the Shuttle, everything is already clear with this reusability of yours. And now, after a recent wave of discussions successful landing first stage of Falcon on a barge, I decided to write a post with brief description the hopes and aspirations of the American manned space program of the 60s, how these dreams were later shattered by harsh reality, and why, because of all this, the Shuttle had no chance of becoming cost-effective. Picture to attract attention: the last flight of the Shuttle Endeavor:

Lots of plans

In the first half of the sixties, after Kennedy promised to land on the moon before the end of the decade, budgetary funds began to rain on NASA. This, of course, caused a certain dizziness with success there. Not counting the ongoing work on Apollo and " practical application Apollo Program" (Apollo Applications Program), work was carried out on the following promising projects:

- Space stations. According to the plans, there were to be three of them: one in low reference orbit near the Earth (LEO), one in geostationary, one in lunar orbit. The crew of each would be twelve people (in the future it was planned to build even larger stations, with a crew of fifty to one hundred people), the diameter of the main module was nine meters. Each crew member was allocated a separate room with a bed, table, chair, TV, and a bunch of closets for personal belongings. There were two bathrooms (plus the commander had a personal toilet in his cabin), a kitchen with an oven, dishwasher and dining tables with chairs, separate seating area with board games, first aid station with operating table. It was assumed that the central module of this station would be launched by the super-heavy carrier Saturn-5, and to supply it it would be necessary to fly ten flights of the hypothetical heavy carrier annually. It would not be an exaggeration to say that compared to these stations, the current ISS looks like a kennel.

Moon base. Here is an example of a NASA project from the late sixties. As far as I understand, it was intended to be unified with the space station modules.

Nuclear shuttle. A ship designed to move cargo from LEO to a geostationary station or to lunar orbit, with a nuclear rocket engine (NRE). Hydrogen would be used as the working fluid. The shuttle could also serve as an accelerating block for a Martian spacecraft. The project, by the way, was very interesting and would be useful in today’s conditions, and as a result, we have advanced quite far with the nuclear engine. It's a shame it didn't work out. You can read more about it.

Space tug. Intended to move cargo from a space shuttle to a nuclear shuttle, or from a nuclear shuttle to the required orbit or to the lunar surface. A greater degree of unification was proposed when performing various tasks.

Space shuttle. A reusable spacecraft designed to lift cargo from the Earth's surface to LEO. The illustration shows a space tug carrying cargo from it to a nuclear shuttle. Actually, this is what mutated over time into the Space Shuttle.

Mars spacecraft. Shown here with two nuclear shuttles serving as upper stages. Intended for a flight to Mars in the early eighties, with a two-month stay of the expedition on the surface.

If anyone is interested, it is written in more detail about all this, with illustrations (English)

Space shuttle

As we see above, the space shuttle was just one part of the planned Cyclopean space infrastructure. In combination with a nuclear shuttle and tug based in space, it was supposed to ensure the delivery of cargo from the earth's surface to any point in space, up to the lunar orbit.

Before this, all space rockets (RSRs) were disposable. Spacecraft were also disposable, with the rarest exception in the field of manned spacecraft - Mercury with serial numbers 2, 8, 14 and also the second Gemini flew twice. Due to the gigantic planned volumes of payload launches into orbit, NASA management formulated the task: to create a reusable system, when both the launch vehicle and the spacecraft return after the flight and are used repeatedly. Such a system would cost much more to develop than conventional rocket launchers, but due to lower operating costs it would quickly pay for itself at the level of planned cargo traffic.

The idea of ​​​​creating a reusable rocket plane took hold of the minds of most people - in the mid-sixties there were many reasons to think that creating such a system was not too difficult a task. Even though the Dyna-Soar space rocket project was canceled by McNamara in 1963, this did not happen because the program was technically impossible, but simply because there were no tasks for the spacecraft - the Mercury and the then-created Gemini. coped with the delivery of astronauts to low-Earth orbit, but the X-20 could not launch a significant payload or remain in orbit for a long time. But the experimental rocket plane X-15 showed excellent performance during operation. During 199 flights, it tested going beyond the Karman line (i.e., beyond the conventional boundary of space), hypersonic reentry into the atmosphere, and control in vacuum and weightlessness.

Naturally, the proposed space shuttle would require a much more powerful reusable engine and more advanced thermal protection, but these problems did not seem insurmountable. The RL-10 liquid rocket engine (LPRE) had by that time shown excellent reusability on the stand: in one of the tests, this rocket engine was successfully launched more than fifty times in a row, and worked for a total of two and a half hours. The proposed shuttle rocket engine, the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), as well as the RL-10, was supposed to be created using oxygen-hydrogen fuel pair, but to increase its efficiency by increasing the pressure in the combustion chamber and introducing a closed cycle scheme with afterburning of the fuel generator gas.

No special problems were expected with thermal protection either. Firstly, work was already underway on a new type of thermal protection based on silicon dioxide fibers (this is what the tiles of the Shuttle and Buran that were later created were made of). As a backup option, ablative panels remained, which could be changed after each flight for relatively little money. And secondly, to reduce the thermal load, it was planned to make the apparatus’s entry into the atmosphere according to the “blunt body” principle - i.e. using the shape of the aircraft, first create a front of a shock wave that would cover a large area of ​​heated gas. Thus, the kinetic energy of the ship intensively heats the surrounding air, reducing the heating of the aircraft.

In the second half of the sixties, several aerospace corporations presented their vision of the future rocket plane.

Lockheed's Star Clipper was a spaceplane with a load-bearing body - fortunately, by that time, aircraft with a load-bearing body were already well developed: ASSET, HL-10, PRIME, M2-F1/M2-F2, X-24A/X-24B (by the way, the Dreamchaser currently being created is also a spaceplane with a load-bearing body). True, the Star Clipper was not completely reusable; fuel tanks with a diameter of four meters at the edges of the aircraft were jettisoned during takeoff.

The McDonnell Douglas project also had drop tanks and a load-bearing hull. The highlight of the project were the wings extending from the body, which were supposed to improve the takeoff and landing characteristics of the spaceplane:

General Dynamics put forward the concept of the "Triamian twin". The device in the middle was a spaceplane, the two devices on the sides served as the first stage. It was planned that the unification of the first stage and the ship would help save money during development.

The rocket plane itself was supposed to be reusable, but there was no certainty about the booster for quite a long time. As part of this, many concepts were considered, some of which teetered on the brink of noble madness. For example, how about this concept of a reusable first stage, with a launch mass of 24 thousand tons (Atlas ICBM on the left, for scale). After launch, the stage was supposed to plop into the ocean and be towed to the port.

However, three were most seriously considered possible options: cheap expendable rocket stage (i.e. Saturn 1), reusable first stage with liquid rocket engine, reusable first stage with hypersonic ramjet engine. Illustration from 1966:

Around the same time, research began in the technical directorate of the Manned Spacecraft Center under the leadership of Max Faget. He, in my personal opinion, had the most elegant design created as part of the development of the Space Shuttle. Both the carrier and the space shuttle were designed to be winged and manned. It is worth noting that Faget abandoned the load-bearing body, judging that it would significantly complicate the development process - changes in the layout of the shuttle could greatly affect its aerodynamics. The carrier aircraft launched vertically, worked as the first stage of the system and, after the separation of the ship, landed at the airfield. When leaving orbit, the spaceplane had to slow down in the same way as the X-15, entering the atmosphere with a significant angle of attack, thereby creating an extensive shock wave front. After entering the atmosphere, Fage's shuttle could glide for about 300-400 km (the so-called horizontal maneuver, "cross-range") and land at a very comfortable landing speed of 150 knots.

Clouds are gathering over NASA

Here it is necessary to make a brief digression about America in the second half of the sixties, so that the further development of events becomes clearer to the reader. There was an extremely unpopular and costly war in Vietnam, in 1968, almost seventeen thousand Americans died there - more than the USSR lost in Afghanistan during the entire conflict. The black civil rights movement in the United States in 1968 culminated with the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent wave of riots in major American cities. Large government social programs became extremely popular (Medicare was passed in 1965), President Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" and infrastructure spending - all of which required significant government spending. The recession began in the late sixties.

At the same time, the fear of the USSR diminished significantly; a global nuclear missile war no longer seemed as inevitable as in the fifties and during the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Apollo program fulfilled its purpose by winning the space race with the USSR in the American public consciousness. Moreover, most Americans inevitably associated this gain with the sea of ​​money that was literally poured into NASA to accomplish this task. In a 1969 Harris poll, 56% of Americans believed that the cost of the Apollo program was too high, and 64% believed that $4 billion a year for NASA development was too much.

And at NASA, it seems, many simply did not understand this. The new director of NASA, Thomas Payne, who was not very experienced in political affairs, certainly did not understand this (or maybe he simply did not want to understand). In 1969, he put forward NASA's action plan for the next 15 years. A lunar orbital station (1978) and a lunar base (1980), a manned expedition to Mars (1983) and an orbital station for one hundred people (1985) were envisaged. The average (i.e. base) case assumed that NASA funding would have to be increased from the current 3.7 billion in 1970 to 7.65 billion by the early eighties:

All this caused an acute allergic reaction in Congress and, accordingly, in the White House too. As one of the congressmen wrote, in those years nothing was done as easily and naturally as astronautics; if you said at a meeting “this space program must be stopped,” your popularity was guaranteed. Over the course of a relatively short period of time, one by one, almost all large-scale NASA projects were formally abolished. Of course, the manned expedition to Mars and the base on the Moon were canceled, even the flights of Apollo 18 and 19 were canceled. The Saturn V rocket was killed. All giant space stations were canceled, leaving only the stump of Apollo Applications in the form of Skylab - however, the second Skylab was canceled there too. The nuclear shuttle and space tug were frozen and then cancelled. Under hot hand even the innocent Voyager (the predecessor of the Viking) was caught. The space shuttle almost came under the knife, and miraculously survived in the House of Representatives by a single vote. This is what NASA's budget looked like in reality (constant 2007 dollars):

If you look at the funds allocated to them as a % of the federal budget, then everything is even sadder:

Almost all of NASA's plans for the development of manned astronautics ended up in the trash, and the barely surviving Shuttle turned from a small element of the once grandiose program into the flagship of the American manned astronautics. NASA was still afraid of canceling the program, and to justify it, it began to convince everyone that the Shuttle would be cheaper than the then existing heavy carriers, and without the frantic cargo flow that had to be generated by the defunct space infrastructure. NASA could not afford to lose the shuttle - the organization was actually created by manned astronautics, and wanted to continue sending people into space.

Alliance with the Air Force

The hostility of Congress greatly impressed NASA officials, and forced them to seek allies. I had to bow to the Pentagon, or rather to the US Air Force. Fortunately, NASA and the Air Force have collaborated quite well since the early sixties, in particular on the XB-70 and the aforementioned X-15. NASA even canceled its Saturn I-B (bottom right) so as not to create unnecessary competition with the heavy ILV Titan-III (bottom left):

The Air Force generals were very interested in the idea of ​​a cheap carrier, and they also wanted to be able to send people into space - around the same time, the military space station Manned Orbiting Laboratory, an approximate analogue of the Soviet Almaz, was finally shut down. They also liked the declared possibility of returning cargo on the Shuttle; they even considered options for stealing Soviet spacecraft.

However, in general, the Air Force was much less interested in this alliance than NASA, since they already had their own used carrier. Because of this, they were able to easily bend the Shuttle design to suit their requirements, which they immediately took advantage of. The size of the cargo bay for the payload was, at the insistence of the military, increased from 12 x 3.5 meters to 18.2 x 4.5 meters (length x diameter), so that promising optical-electronic reconnaissance spy satellites could be placed there (specifically the KH-9 Hexagon and, possibly, , KH-11 Kennan). The shuttle's payload had to be increased to 30 tons when flying into low Earth orbit, and up to 18 tons when flying into polar orbit.

The Air Force also required a horizontal shuttle maneuver of at least 1,800 kilometers. Here's the thing: during the Six-Day War, American intelligence received satellite photographs after fighting ended, because the reconnaissance satellites Gambit and Corona, which were then used, did not have time to return the film to Earth. It was assumed that the Shuttle would be able to launch from Vandenberg on the west coast of the United States into a polar orbit, shoot what was needed, and immediately land after one orbit - thereby ensuring high efficiency in obtaining intelligence data. The required distance for the lateral maneuver was determined by the Earth’s displacement during the orbit, and was exactly the 1800 kilometers mentioned above. To fulfill this requirement, it was necessary, firstly, to install on the Shuttle a delta wing more suitable for gliding, and secondly, to greatly strengthen the thermal protection. The graph below shows the estimated heating rate of the space shuttle with a straight wing (Faget's concept), and with a delta wing (i.e. what ended up on the Shuttle as a result):

The irony here is that soon spy satellites began to be equipped with CCD matrices capable of transmitting images directly from orbit, without the need to return the film. The need for landing after one orbital revolution was no longer necessary, although this possibility was later justified by the possibility of a quick emergency landing. But the delta wing and the thermal protection problems associated with it remained with the Shuttle.

However, the deed was done, and the support of the Air Force in Congress made it possible to partially secure the future of the Shuttle. NASA finally approved as a project a two-stage fully reusable Shuttle with 12(!) SSMEs on the first stage and sent out contracts for the development of its layout.

North American Rockwell Project:

McDonnell Douglas Project:

Project Grumman. An interesting detail: despite NASA's requirement for complete reusability, the shuttle was nevertheless supposed to have disposable hydrogen tanks on the sides:

Economic justification

I mentioned above that after Congress gutted NASA's space program, they had to start making an economic case for the shuttle. And so, in the early seventies, officials from The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) asked them to prove the declared economic efficiency of the Shuttle. Moreover, it was necessary to demonstrate not the fact that launching a shuttle would be cheaper than launching a disposable carrier (this was taken for granted); no, it was necessary to compare the allocation of funds required to create the Shuttle with the continued use of existing disposable media and the investment of freed-up money at 10% per annum - i.e. in fact, the OMB gave the Shuttle a "junk" rating. This made any business case for the shuttle as a commercial launch vehicle unrealistic, especially after it was inflated by Air Force demands. And yet NASA tried to do this, because again, the existence of the American manned program was at stake.

A feasibility study was commissioned from Mathematica. The often mentioned figure for the cost of launching the Shuttle in the region of $1-2.5 million is only Muller’s promises at a conference in 1969, when its final configuration was not yet clear, and before changes caused by Air Force requirements. For the projects above, the cost of the flight was as follows: 4.6 million dollars 1970 model. for the North American shuttles Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas, and $4.2 million for the Grumman shuttle. The authors of the report were at least able to put an owl on the globe, showing that supposedly by the mid-eighties the Shuttle looked more attractive from a financial point of view than existing carriers, even taking into account 10% of OMB requirements:

However, the devil is in the details. As I mentioned above, there was no way to demonstrate that the Shuttle, with its estimated development and production cost of twelve billion dollars, would be cheaper than expendables when factoring in OMB's 10% discount. So the analysis had to make the assumption that lower launch costs would allow satellite manufacturers to spend significantly less time and money on research and development (R&D) and satellite production. It was declared that they would prefer to take advantage of the opportunity to cheaply launch satellites into orbit and repair them. Further, it was assumed very a large number of launches per year: The base case scenario shown in the graph above postulated 56 Shuttle launches each year from 1978 to 1990 (736 total). Moreover, even the option with 900 flights during the specified period was considered as an extreme scenario, i.e. start every five days for thirteen years!

Cost of three different programs in the base case - two expendable rockets and a Shuttle, 56 launches per year (millions of dollars):

I apologize for writing so much about financial details that may not be of interest to everyone. But all this is extremely important in the context of discussing the reusability of the Shuttle - especially since the figures mentioned above and, frankly, made up from thin air, can still be seen in discussions about the reusability of space systems. In fact, without taking into account the “PN effect”, even according to the figures accepted by Mathematica and without any 10% discounts, the Shuttle became more profitable than the Titan only starting from ~1100 flights (real shuttles flew 135 times). But don’t forget - we are talking about a Shuttle, “bloated” by Air Force requirements, with a delta wing and complex thermal protection.

The shuttle becomes semi-reusable

Nixon did not want to be the president who completely shut down the American manned program. But he also did not want to ask Congress to allocate a ton of money for the creation of the Shuttle, especially since after the conclusion of officials from OMB, congressmen would still not agree to this. It was decided to allocate about five and a half billion dollars for the development and production of the Shuttle (i.e., more than half what was needed for a fully reusable Shuttle), with the requirement to spend no more than a billion in any given year.

In order to be able to create the Shuttle within the allocated funds, it was necessary to make the system partially reusable. First, the Grumman concept was creatively rethought: the size of the shuttle was reduced by placing both fuel pairs in an external tank, and at the same time the required size of the first stage was reduced. The diagram below shows the size of a fully reusable spaceplane, a spaceplane with an external hydrogen tank (LH2), and a spaceplane with both an oxygen and hydrogen external tank (LO2/LH2).

But the cost of development still greatly exceeded the amount of funds allocated from the budget. As a result, NASA also had to abandon the reusable first stage. It was decided to attach a simple booster to the above tank, either in parallel or at the bottom of the tank:

After some discussion, the placement of boosters in parallel with the external tank was approved. Two main options were considered as boosters: solid propellant (SFU) and liquid-propellant rocket boosters, the latter either with a turbocharger or with a displacement supply of components. It was decided to focus on TTU, again due to the lower cost of development. Sometimes you can hear that there was supposedly something mandatory requirement using TTUs which supposedly ruined everything - but, as we see, replacing TTUs with boosters with liquid propellant rocket engines could not fix anything. Moreover, liquid-propellant rocket boosters splashing into the ocean, albeit with a displacement supply of components, would actually have even more problems than with solid-fuel boosters.

The result was the Space Shuttle that we know today:

Well Short story its evolution (clickable):

Epilogue

The shuttle was not such an unsuccessful system as it is usually presented today. In the eighties, the Shuttle launched 40% of the total payload mass delivered in that decade into low-Earth orbit, despite the fact that its launches accounted for only 4% of total quantities ILV launches. He also carried into space the lion's share of the people who have been there to date (another thing is that the very need for people in orbit is still unclear):

In 2010 prices, the cost of the program was 209 billion, if you divide this by the number of launches it will come out to about 1.5 billion per launch. True, the main part of the costs (design, modernization, etc.) does not depend on the number of launches - therefore, according to NASA estimates, by the end of the 2000s, the cost of each flight was about 450 million dollars. However, this price tag is already at the end of the program, and even after the Challenger and Columbia disasters, which led to additional safety measures and an increase in launch costs. In theory, in the mid-80s, before the Challenger disaster, the launch cost was much lower, but I don’t have specific figures. I'll just point out the fact that Titan IV Centaur's launch cost in the first half of the nineties was $325 million, which is even slightly higher than the above-mentioned Shuttle launch cost in 2010 prices. But it was the heavy launch vehicles from the Titan family that competed with the Shuttle during its creation.

Of course, the Shuttle was not cost-effective from a commercial point of view. By the way, the economic inexpediency of it greatly worried the leadership of the USSR at one time. They did not understand the political reasons that led to the creation of the Shuttle, and came up with various purposes for it in order to somehow connect its existence in their heads with their views on reality - the very famous “dive to Moscow”, or basing weapons in space. As Yu.A. Mozzhorin, director of the Central Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering, head of the rocket and space industry, recalled in 1994: “ The shuttle launched 29.5 tons into low-Earth orbit, and could release up to 14.5 tons of cargo from orbit. This is very serious, and we began to study for what purposes it is being created? After all, everything was very unusual: the weight put into orbit using disposable carriers in America did not even reach 150 tons/year, but here it was planned to be 12 times more; nothing was descended from orbit, and here it was supposed to return 820 tons/year... This was not just a program for creating some kind of space system under the motto of reducing transportation costs (our studies at our institute showed that no reduction would actually be observed ), she had a clear target military purpose. And indeed, at this time they began to talk about the creation of powerful lasers, beam weapons, weapons based on new physical principles, which - theoretically - allows you to destroy enemy missiles at a distance of several thousand kilometers. It was precisely the creation of such a system that was supposed to be used to test this new weapon in space conditions". A role in this mistake was played by the fact that the Shuttle was made taking into account the requirements of the Air Force, but the USSR did not understand the reasons why the Air Force was involved in the project. They thought that the project was initially initiated by the military, and was being done for military purposes. In fact NASA desperately needed the Shuttle to stay afloat, and if the Air Force's support in Congress depended on the Air Force demanding that the Shuttle be painted green and decorated with garlands, they would have done it. In the eighties, they already tried to attract the Shuttle to the program SDI, but when it was designed in the seventies there was no talk of anything like that.

I hope the reader now understands that judging the reusability of space systems using the example of the Shuttle is an extremely unsuccessful idea. The cargo flows for which the shuttle was made never materialized due to NASA spending cuts. The Shuttle's design had to be changed in major ways twice, first due to Air Force demands for which NASA needed political support, and then due to OMB criticism and insufficient appropriations for the program. All economic justifications, references to which sometimes come across in discussions of reusability, appeared at a time when NASA needed to save the shuttle, which was already heavily mutated due to the requirements of the Air Force, at any cost, and are simply far-fetched. Moreover, all participants in the program understood this - Congress, the White House, the Air Force, and NASA. For example, the Michoud Assembly Facility could produce at most twenty-odd external fuel tanks per year, that is, there was no talk of fifty-six or even thirty-something flights per year, as in the Mathematica report.

I took almost all the information from a wonderful book, which I recommend reading to anyone interested in the issue. Also, some text passages were borrowed from uv’s posts. Tico in this topic.

Shuttle and Buran

When you look at photographs of the winged spacecraft "Buran" and "Shuttle", you may get the impression that they are quite identical. At least there shouldn’t be any fundamental differences. Despite their external similarity, these two space systems are still fundamentally different.

"Shuttle"

The Shuttle is a reusable transport spacecraft (MTSC). The ship has three liquid rocket engines (LPREs) powered by hydrogen. The oxidizing agent is liquid oxygen. Entering low-Earth orbit requires a huge amount of fuel and oxidizer. Therefore, the fuel tank is the largest element of the Space Shuttle system. The spacecraft is located on this huge tank and is connected to it by a system of pipelines through which fuel and oxidizer are supplied to the Shuttle engines.

And still, three powerful engines of a winged ship are not enough to go into space. Attached to the central tank of the system are two solid propellant boosters - the most powerful rockets in human history to date. The greatest power is needed precisely at launch, in order to move a multi-ton ship and lift it to the first four and a half dozen kilometers. Solid rocket boosters take on 83% of the load.

Another Shuttle takes off

At an altitude of 45 km, the solid fuel boosters, having exhausted all the fuel, are separated from the ship and splashed down in the ocean using parachutes. Further, to an altitude of 113 km, the shuttle rises with the help of three rocket engines. After separating the tank, the ship flies for another 90 seconds by inertia and then, at a short time, two orbital maneuvering engines running on self-igniting fuel are turned on. And the shuttle enters operational orbit. And the tank enters the atmosphere, where it burns up. Some of its parts fall into the ocean.

Solid propellant booster department

Orbital maneuvering engines are designed, as their name suggests, for various maneuvers in space: for changing orbital parameters, for mooring to the ISS or to other spacecraft located in low-Earth orbit. So the shuttles visited several times orbital telescope Hubble for maintenance.

And finally, these engines serve to create a braking impulse when returning to Earth.

The orbital stage is made according to the aerodynamic design of a tailless monoplane with a low-lying delta-shaped wing with a double swept leading edge and with a vertical tail of the usual design. For control in the atmosphere, a two-section rudder on the fin (there is also an air brake), elevons on the trailing edge of the wing and a balancing flap under the rear fuselage are used. The landing gear is retractable, three-post, with a nose wheel.

Length 37.24 m, wingspan 23.79 m, height 17.27 m. Dry weight of the device is about 68 tons, takeoff - from 85 to 114 tons (depending on the mission and payload), landing with return cargo on on board - 84.26 tons.

The most important feature of the airframe design is its thermal protection.

In the most heat-stressed areas (design temperature up to 1430º C), a multilayer carbon-carbon composite is used. There are not many such places, these are mainly the fuselage toe and the leading edge of the wing. The lower surface of the entire apparatus (heating from 650 to 1260º C) is covered with tiles made of a material based on quartz fiber. Upper and side surfaces partially protected by low-temperature insulation tiles - where the temperature is 315-650º C; in other places where the temperature does not exceed 370º C, felt material coated with silicone rubber is used.

The total weight of thermal protection of all four types is 7164 kg.

The orbital stage has a double-deck cabin for seven astronauts.

Upper deck of the shuttle cabin

In the case of an extended flight program or during rescue operations, up to ten people can be on board the shuttle. In the cabin there are flight controls, work and sleeping places, a kitchen, a pantry, a sanitary compartment, an airlock, operations and payload control posts, and other equipment. The total sealed volume of the cabin is 75 cubic meters. m, the life support system maintains a pressure of 760 mm Hg. Art. and temperature in the range of 18.3 - 26.6º C.

This system is made in an open version, that is, without the use of air and water regeneration. This choice was due to the fact that the duration of the shuttle flights was set at seven days, with the possibility of increasing it to 30 days using additional funds. With such insignificant autonomy, installing regeneration equipment would mean an unjustified increase in weight, power consumption and complexity of on-board equipment.

The supply of compressed gases is sufficient to restore the normal atmosphere in the cabin in the event of one complete depressurization or to maintain a pressure in it of 42.5 mm Hg. Art. for 165 minutes with the formation of a small hole in the housing shortly after launch.

The cargo compartment measures 18.3 x 4.6 m and has a volume of 339.8 cubic meters. m is equipped with a “three-legged” manipulator 15.3 m long. When opening the compartment doors, they rotate together with them working position cooling system radiators. The reflectivity of radiator panels is such that they remain cool even when the sun is shining on them.

What the Space Shuttle can do and how it flies

If we imagine the assembled system flying horizontally, we see the external fuel tank as its central element; An orbiter is docked to it on top, and accelerators are on the sides. The total length of the system is 56.1 m, and the height is 23.34 m. The overall width is determined by the wingspan of the orbital stage, that is, 23.79 m. The maximum launch mass is about 2,041,000 kg.

It is impossible to speak so unambiguously about the size of the payload, since it depends on the parameters of the target orbit and on the launch point of the ship. Let's give three options. The Space Shuttle system is capable of displaying:

29,500 kg when launched east from Cape Canaveral (Florida, East Coast) into an orbit with an altitude of 185 km and an inclination of 28º;

11,300 kg when launched from the Space Flight Center. Kennedy into an orbit with an altitude of 500 km and an inclination of 55º;

14,500 kg when launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base (California, west coast) into a polar orbit at an altitude of 185 km.

Two landing strips were equipped for the shuttles. If the shuttle landed far from the spaceport, it returned home riding on a Boeing 747

Boeing 747 carries the shuttle to the spaceport

A total of five shuttles were built (two of them died in disasters) and one prototype.

During development, it was envisaged that the shuttles would make 24 launches per year, and each of them would make up to 100 flights into space. In practice, they were used much less - by the end of the program in the summer of 2011, 135 launches had been made, of which Discovery - 39, Atlantis - 33, Columbia - 28, Endeavor - 25, Challenger - 10 .

The shuttle crew consists of two astronauts - the commander and the pilot. The largest shuttle crew was eight astronauts (Challenger, 1985).

Soviet reaction to the creation of the Shuttle

The development of the shuttle made a great impression on the leaders of the USSR. It was believed that the Americans were developing an orbital bomber armed with space-to-ground missiles. The huge size of the shuttle and its ability to return cargo of up to 14.5 tons to Earth were interpreted as a clear threat of theft of Soviet satellites and even Soviet military space stations such as Almaz, which flew in space under the name Salyut. These estimates were erroneous, since the United States abandoned the idea of ​​a space bomber back in 1962 due to the successful development of the nuclear submarine fleet and ground-based ballistic missiles.

The Soyuz could easily fit in the Shuttle's cargo bay.

Soviet experts could not understand why 60 shuttle launches per year were needed - one launch per week! Where would the many space satellites and stations for which the Shuttle would be needed come from? The Soviet people, living within a different economic system, could not even imagine that NASA management, strenuously pushing the new space program in the government and Congress, was driven by the fear of being left without a job. The lunar program was nearing completion and thousands of highly qualified specialists found themselves out of work. And, most importantly, the respected and very well-paid leaders of NASA faced the disappointing prospect of parting with their lived-in offices.

Therefore, an economic justification was prepared on the great financial benefits of reusable transport spacecraft in the event of abandonment of disposable rockets. But it was absolutely incomprehensible to the Soviet people that the president and Congress could spend national funds only with great regard for the opinions of their voters. In connection with this, the opinion reigned in the USSR that the Americans were creating a new spacecraft for some future unknown tasks, most likely military.

Reusable spacecraft "Buran"

In the Soviet Union, it was initially planned to create an improved copy of the Shuttle - the OS-120 orbital aircraft, weighing 120 tons. (The American shuttle weighed 110 tons when fully loaded). Unlike the Shuttle, it was planned to equip the Buran with an ejection cabin for two pilots and turbojet engines for landing at the airfield.

The leadership of the USSR armed forces insisted on almost complete copying of the shuttle. Soviet intelligence By this time, she had managed to obtain a lot of information on the American QC. But it turned out that not everything is so simple. Domestic hydrogen-oxygen liquid rocket engines turned out to be larger in size and heavier than American ones. In addition, they were inferior in power to overseas ones. Therefore, instead of three liquid rocket engines, it was necessary to install four. But on an orbital plane there was simply no room for four propulsion engines.

For the shuttle, 83% of the load at launch was carried by two solid fuel boosters. The Soviet Union failed to develop such powerful solid-fuel missiles. Missiles of this type were used as ballistic carriers of sea- and land-based nuclear charges. But they fell very, very far short of the required power. Therefore, Soviet designers had the only option - to use liquid rockets as accelerators. Under the Energia-Buran program, very successful kerosene-oxygen RD-170s were created, which served as an alternative to solid fuel accelerators.

The very location of the Baikonur Cosmodrome forced designers to increase the power of their launch vehicles. It is known that the closer the launch site is to the equator, the larger the load the same rocket can launch into orbit. The American cosmodrome at Cape Canaveral has a 15% advantage over Baikonur! That is, if a rocket launched from Baikonur can lift 100 tons, then when launched from Cape Canaveral it will launch 115 tons into orbit!

Geographical conditions, differences in technology, characteristics of the created engines and different design approaches all had an impact on the appearance of the Buran. Based on all these realities, a new concept and a new orbital vehicle OK-92, weighing 92 tons, were developed. Four oxygen-hydrogen engines were transferred to the central fuel tank and the second stage of the Energia launch vehicle was obtained. Instead of two solid fuel boosters, it was decided to use four kerosene-oxygen liquid fuel rockets with four-chamber RD-170 engines. Four-chamber means with four nozzles. A large-diameter nozzle is extremely difficult to manufacture. Therefore, designers go to make the engine more complex and heavier by designing it with several smaller nozzles. As many nozzles as there are combustion chambers with a bunch of fuel and oxidizer supply pipelines and with all the “moorings”. This connection was made according to the traditional, “royal” scheme, similar to “unions” and “Easts”, and became the first stage of “Energy”.

"Buran" in flight

The Buran winged ship itself became the third stage of the launch vehicle, like the same Soyuz. The only difference is that the Buran was located on the side of the second stage, and the Soyuz at the very top of the launch vehicle. Thus, the classic scheme of a three-stage disposable space system was obtained, with the only difference being that the orbital ship was reusable.

Reusability was another problem of the Energia-Buran system. For the Americans, the shuttles were designed for 100 flights. For example, orbital maneuvering engines could withstand up to 1000 activations. After preventative maintenance, all elements (except for the fuel tank) were suitable for launch into space.

The solid fuel accelerator was selected by a special vessel

Solid fuel boosters were lowered by parachute into the ocean, picked up by special NASA vessels and delivered to the manufacturer's plant, where they underwent maintenance and were filled with fuel. The Shuttle itself also underwent thorough inspection, maintenance and repair.

Defense Minister Ustinov, in an ultimatum, demanded that the Energia-Buran system be as reusable as possible. Therefore, designers were forced to address this problem. Formally, the side boosters were considered reusable, suitable for ten launches. But in fact, things did not come to this for many reasons. Take, for example, the fact that American boosters splashed into the ocean, and Soviet boosters fell in the Kazakh steppe, where landing conditions were not as benign as warm ocean waters. And a liquid rocket is a more delicate creation. than solid fuel. "Buran" was also designed for 10 flights.

In general, a reusable system did not work out, although the achievements were obvious. The Soviet orbital ship, freed from large propulsion engines, received more powerful engines for maneuvering in orbit. Which, if used as a space “fighter-bomber,” gave it great advantages. And plus turbojet engines for flight and landing in the atmosphere. In addition, a powerful rocket was created with the first stage using kerosene fuel, and the second using hydrogen. This is exactly the kind of rocket the USSR needed to win the lunar race. “Energia” in its characteristics was almost equivalent to the American Saturn 5 rocket that sent Apollo 11 to the Moon.

"Buran" has a great external resemblance to the American "Shuttle". The ship is built according to the design of a tailless aircraft with a delta wing of variable sweep, and has aerodynamic controls that operate during landing after returning to dense layers of the atmosphere - rudder and elevons. He was capable of making a controlled descent in the atmosphere with a lateral maneuver of up to 2000 kilometers.

The length of the "Buran" is 36.4 meters, the wingspan is about 24 meters, the height of the ship on the chassis is more than 16 meters. The launch weight of the ship is more than 100 tons, of which 14 tons are fuel. A sealed all-welded cabin for the crew and most of the equipment for flight support as part of the rocket and space complex is inserted into the bow compartment, autonomously of flight in orbit, descent and landing. Cabin volume is more than 70 cubic meters.

When returning to the dense layers of the atmosphere, the most heat-stressed areas of the ship's surface heat up to 1600 degrees, the heat reaching directly to the metal the personal design of the ship, should not exceed 150 degrees. Therefore, “Buran” was distinguished by powerful thermal protection, ensuring normal temperature conditions for the design of the ship when passing through dense layers of the atmosphere during landing.

The heat-protective coating of more than 38 thousand tiles is made of special materials: quartz fiber, high-temperature organic fibers, partly oc-based material new carbon. Ceramic armor has the ability to accumulate heat without letting it pass to the ship's hull. The total weight of this armor was about 9 tons.

The length of the cargo compartment of the Buran is about 18 meters. Its spacious cargo compartment could accommodate a payload weighing up to 30 tons. It was possible to place large-sized spacecraft there - large satellites, blocks of orbital stations. The landing weight of the ship is 82 tons.

"Buran" was equipped with all the necessary systems and equipment for both automatic and manned flight. These are navigation and control devices, radio and television systems, automatic thermal control devices, crew life support systems, and much, much more.

Cabin Buran

The main engine installation, two groups of engines for maneuvering, are located at the end of the tail compartment and in the front part of the hull.

On November 18, 1988, Buran set off on its flight into space. It was launched using the Energia launch vehicle.

After entering low-Earth orbit, Buran made 2 orbits around the Earth (in 205 minutes), then began its descent to Baikonur. The landing took place at a special Yubileiny airfield.

The flight was automatic and there was no crew on board. The orbital flight and landing were carried out using an on-board computer and special software. The automatic flight mode was the main difference from the Space Shuttle, in which astronauts perform manual landings. Buran's flight was included in the Guinness Book of Records as unique (previously, no one had landed spacecraft in a fully automatic mode).

Automatic landing of a 100-ton giant is a very complicated thing. We did not make any hardware, only the software for the landing mode - from the moment we reach (while descending) an altitude of 4 km until stopping on the landing strip. I will try to tell you very briefly how this algorithm was made.

First, the theorist writes an algorithm in a high-level language and tests its operation on test examples. This algorithm, which is written by one person, is “responsible” for one, relatively small, operation. Then it is combined into a subsystem, and it is dragged to a modeling stand. In the stand, “around” the working, on-board algorithm, there are models - a model of the dynamics of the device, models of actuators, sensor systems, etc. They are also written in a high-level language. Thus, the algorithmic subsystem is tested in a “mathematical flight”.

Then the subsystems are put together and tested again. And then the algorithms are “translated” from a high-level language to the language of an on-board computer. To test them, already in the form of an on-board program, there is another modeling stand, which includes an on-board computer. And the same thing is built around it - mathematical models. They are, of course, modified in comparison with the models in a purely mathematical stand. The model “spins” in a general-purpose large computer. Don’t forget, this was the 1980s, personal computers were just getting started and were very underpowered. It was the time of mainframes, we had a pair of two EC-1061s. And to connect the on-board vehicle with the mathematical model in the mainframe computer, you need special equipment; it is also needed as part of the stand for various tasks.

We called this stand semi-natural - after all, in addition to all the mathematics, it had a real on-board computer. It implemented a mode of operation of on-board programs that was very close to real time. It takes a long time to explain, but for the onboard computer it was indistinguishable from “real” real time.

Someday I'll get together and write how the semi-natural modeling mode works - for this and other cases. For now, I just want to explain the composition of our department - the team that did all this. It had a comprehensive department that dealt with the sensor and actuator systems involved in our programs. There was an algorithmic department - they actually wrote on-board algorithms and worked them out on a mathematical bench. Our department was engaged in a) translating programs into the computer language, b) creating special equipment for a semi-natural stand (this is where I worked) and c) programs for this equipment.

Our department even had its own designers to create documentation for the manufacture of our blocks. And there was also a department involved in the operation of the aforementioned EC-1061 twin.

The output product of the department, and therefore of the entire design bureau within the framework of the “stormy” topic, was a program on magnetic tape (1980s!), which was taken to be further developed.

Next is the stand of the control system developer. After all, it is clear that the control system of an aircraft is not only an onboard computer. This system was made by a much larger enterprise than us. They were the developers and “owners” of the onboard digital computer; they filled it with many programs that performed the entire range of tasks for controlling the ship from pre-launch preparation to post-landing shutdown of systems. And for us, our landing algorithm, in that on-board computer only part of the computer time was allocated; other software systems worked in parallel (more precisely, I would say, quasi-parallel). After all, if we calculate the landing trajectory, this does not mean that we no longer need to stabilize the device, turn on and off all kinds of equipment, maintain thermal conditions, generate telemetry, and so on, and so on, and so on...

However, let's return to working out the landing mode. After testing in a standard redundant on-board computer as part of the entire set of programs, this set was taken to the stand of the enterprise that developed the Buran spacecraft. And there was a stand called full-size, in which an entire ship was involved. When the programs were running, he waved the elevons, hummed the drives, and so on. And the signals came from real accelerometers and gyroscopes.

Then I saw enough of all this on the Breeze-M accelerator, but for now my role was very modest. I did not travel outside my design bureau...

So, we went through the full-size stand. Do you think that's all? No.

Next was the flying laboratory. This is a Tu-154, whose control system is configured in such a way that the aircraft reacts to control inputs generated by the on-board computer, as if it were not a Tu-154, but a Buran. Of course, it is possible to quickly “return” to normal mode. "Buransky" was turned on only for the duration of the experiment.

The culmination of the tests were 24 flights of the Buran prototype, made specifically for this stage. It was called BTS-002, had 4 engines from the same Tu-154 and could take off from the runway itself. It landed during testing, of course, with the engines turned off - after all, “in the state” the spacecraft lands in gliding mode, it does not have any atmospheric engines.

The complexity of this work, or more precisely, of our software-algorithmic complex, can be illustrated by this. In one of the flights of BTS-002. flew “on program” until the main landing gear touched the runway. The pilot then took control and lowered the nose gear. Then the program turned on again and drove the device until it stopped completely.

By the way, this is quite understandable. While the device is in the air, it has no restrictions on rotation around all three axes. And it rotates, as expected, around the center of mass. Here he touched the strip with the wheels of the main racks. What's happening? Roll rotation is now impossible at all. Pitch rotation is no longer around the center of mass, but around an axis passing through the points of contact of the wheels, and it is still free. And rotation along the course is now determined in a complex way by the ratio of the control torque from the rudder and the friction force of the wheels on the strip.

This is such a difficult mode, so radically different from both flying and running along the runway “at three points”. Because when the front wheel drops onto the runway, then - as in the joke: no one is spinning anywhere...

In total, it was planned to build 5 orbital ships. In addition to “Buran,” “Storm” and almost half of “Baikal” were almost ready. Two more ships in the initial stages of production have not received names. The Energia-Buran system was unlucky - it was born at an unfortunate time for it. The USSR economy was no longer able to finance expensive space programs. And some kind of fate haunted the cosmonauts preparing for flights on the Buran. Test pilots V. Bukreev and A. Lysenko died in plane crashes in 1977, even before joining the cosmonaut group. In 1980, test pilot O. Kononenko died. 1988 took the lives of A. Levchenko and A. Shchukin. After the Buran flight, R. Stankevicius, the second pilot for the manned flight of the winged spacecraft, died in a plane crash. I. Volk was appointed the first pilot.

Buran was also unlucky. After the first and only successful flight, the ship was stored in a hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. On May 12, 2012, 2002, the ceiling of the workshop in which the Buran and the Energia model were located collapsed. On this sad chord, the existence of the winged spaceship, which showed so much hope, ended.

Ah, the life of an astronaut is above all, you say? Yes, don’t tell me... I think the Pindos could do it too, but apparently they thought differently. Why do I think that they could - because I know: just in those years they were already worked out(they actually worked, not just “flyed”) a fully automatic flight of a Boeing 747 (yes, the same one to which the Shuttle is attached in the photo) from Florida, Fort Lauderdale to Alaska to Anchorage, i.e. across the entire continent. Back in 1988 (this is about the question of supposedly suicide terrorists who hijacked the planes of 9/11. Well, did you understand me?) But in principle these are difficulties of the same order (landing the Shuttle on automatic and taking off - gaining echelon-landing of a heavy V- 747, which as seen in the photo is equal to several Shuttles).

The level of our technological lag is well reflected in the photo of the on-board equipment of the cabins of the spacecraft in question. Look again and compare. I am writing all this, I repeat: for the sake of objectivity, and not because of “adulation to the West,” which I have never suffered from..
As a point. Now these too have been destroyed, already hopelessly lagging electronics industries.

What then are the vaunted “Topol-M”, etc. equipped with? I do not know! And no one knows! But not yours - this can be said for sure. And all this “not our own” can very well be stuffed (certainly, obviously) with hardware “bookmarks”, and at the right moment it will all become a dead heap of metal. This, too, was all worked out back in 1991, when Desert Storm, and the Iraqis' air defense systems were remotely turned off. Looks like French ones.

Therefore, when I watch the next video of “Military Secrets” with Prokopenko, or something else about “getting up from your knees”, “analogue shit” in relation to new high-tech prodigies from the field of rocket, space and aviation high-tech, then... No, not I smile, there’s nothing to smile about. Alas. Soviet Space is hopelessly fucked up by its successor. And all these victorious reports are about all sorts of “breakthroughs” - for alternatively gifted quilted jackets

"Space Shuttle" ( Space Shuttle- space shuttle) is a reusable US manned transport spacecraft designed to deliver people and cargo to low Earth orbits and back. The shuttles were used as part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Space Transportation System (STS) program.

Shuttle Discovery ( Discovery, OV-103) began construction in 1979. It was transferred to NASA in November 1982. The shuttle was named after one of the two ships on which British captain James Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands and explored the coasts of Alaska and northwestern Canada in the 1770s. The shuttle made its first flight into space on August 30, 1984, and its last from February 24 to March 9, 2011.
His “record” includes such important operations as the first flights after the death of the Challenger and Columbia shuttles, the delivery of the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, the launch of the Ulysses automatic interplanetary station onto the flight path, as well as the second flight to Hubble for preventive and repair work. During its service, the shuttle made 39 flights into Earth orbit and spent 365 days in space.

(Atlantis, OV-104) was commissioned by NASA in April 1985. The shuttle was named after an oceanographic research sail vessel that belonged to the Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and operated from 1930 to 1966. The shuttle made its first flight on October 3, 1985. Atlantis was the first shuttle to dock with the Russian orbital station Mir, and it made seven flights to it in total.

The Atlantis shuttle delivered the Magellan and Galileo space probes into orbit, which were then sent to Venus and Jupiter, as well as one of NASA's four orbital observatories. Atlantis was the last spacecraft launched under the Space Shuttle program. Atlantis made its last flight on July 8-21, 2011; the crew for this flight was reduced to four people.
During its service, the shuttle completed 33 flights into Earth orbit and spent 307 days in space.

In 1991, the American space shuttle fleet was replenished ( Endeavor, OV-105), named after one of the ships of the British fleet on which Captain James Cook traveled. Its construction began in 1987. It was built to replace the space shuttle Challenger that crashed. Endeavor is the most modern of the American space shuttles, and many of the innovations first tested on it were later used in the modernization of other shuttles. The first flight took place on May 7, 1992.
During its service, the shuttle completed 25 flights into Earth orbit and spent 299 days in space.

In total, the shuttles made 135 flights. The shuttles are designed for a two-week stay in orbit. The longest space journey was made by the Columbia shuttle in November 1996 - 17 days 15 hours 53 minutes, the shortest - in November 1981 - 2 days 6 hours 13 minutes. Typically, shuttle flights lasted from 5 to 16 days.
They were used to launch cargo into orbit, conduct scientific research, maintenance of orbital spacecraft (installation and repair work).

In the 1990s, the shuttles took part in the joint Russian-American Mir - Space Shuttle program. Nine dockings were made with the Mir orbital station. The shuttles played an important role in the project to create the International Space Station (ISS). Eleven flights were carried out under the ISS program.
The reason for the cessation of shuttle flights is the exhaustion of the spacecraft's service life and the huge financial costs of preparing and maintaining space shuttles.
Each shuttle flight cost about $450 million. For this money, the shuttle orbiter could deliver 20-25 tons of cargo, including modules for the station, and seven to eight astronauts in one flight to the ISS.

Since the demise of NASA's Space Shuttle program in 2011, all shuttles have been "retired". The unflying shuttle Enterprise, which was located at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (USA), was delivered to the aircraft carrier museum Intrepid in New York (USA) in June 2012. Its place at the Smithsonian Institution was taken by the space shuttle Discovery. The shuttle Endeavor was delivered to the California Science Center in mid-October 2012, where it will be installed as an exhibit.

The shuttle is scheduled to arrive at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in early 2013.

The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources

Shuttles. Space Shuttle program. Description and technical specifications

A reusable transport spacecraft is a manned spacecraft designed to be reusable and reusable after returning from interplanetary or celestial space.

The development of the shuttle program was undertaken by North American Rockwell, commissioned by NASA, in 1971.

Today, only two states have experience in creating and operating spacecraft of this type– these are the USA and Russia. The USA is proud of the creation of a whole series of Space Shuttle ships, as well as smaller projects within the framework of the X-20 space program Dyna Soar, NASP, VentureStar. In the USSR and Russia, the Buran was designed, as well as the smaller Spiral, LKS, Zarya, MAKS, and Clipper.

The operation of the reusable spacecraft "Buran" in the USSR/Russia failed due to extremely unfavorable economic conditions. In the United States, from 1981 to 2011, 135 flights were made, in which 6 shuttles took part - Enterprise (did not fly into space), Columbia, Discovery, Challenger, Atlantis and Endeavor." The intensive use of shuttles served to launch the non-separable Spacelab and Seishab stations into orbit, as well as to deliver cargo and transport crews to the ISS. And this despite the disasters of Challenger in 1983 and Columbia in 2003.

The Space Shuttle includes three components:

A spacecraft, an orbital rocket plane (orbiter), adapted for launch into orbit.

External fuel tank with a supply of liquid hydrogen and oxygen for the main engines.

Two solid rocket boosters, operating life is 126 seconds after launch.

The solid rocket boosters are dropped into the water by parachute and are then ready for the next use.

The Space Shuttle Side Booster (SRB) is a solid rocket booster, a pair of which are used for launch and flight of the shuttle. They provide 83% of the launch thrust of the Space Shuttle. It is the largest and most powerful solid rocket engine ever flown, and the largest rocket designed and built for repeated use. The side boosters provide the main thrust to lift the Space Shuttle system off the launch pad and lift it to an altitude of 46 km. In addition, both of these engines carry the weight of the external tank and orbiter, transferring the loads through their structures to the mobile launch platform. The accelerator length is 45.5 m, diameter is 3.7 m, launch weight is 580 thousand kg, of which 499 thousand kg is solid fuel, and the rest falls on the accelerator design. The total mass of the boosters is 60% of the entire structure (side boosters, main fuel tank and shuttle)

The starting thrust of each booster is approximately 12.45 MN (this is 1.8 times more than the thrust of the F-1 engine used in the Stourn 5 rocket for flights to the Moon), 20 seconds after launch the thrust increases to 13.8 MN (1400 tf). Stopping them after they are launched is impossible, so they are launched after confirming the proper operation of the three main engines of the ship itself. 75 seconds after separation from the system at an altitude of 45 km, the boosters, continuing their flight by inertia, reach their maximum flight altitude (approximately 67 km), after which, using a parachute system, they land in the ocean, at a distance of about 226 km from the launch site. Splashdown occurs in a vertical position, with a landing speed of 23 m/s. Technical service ships pick up the boosters and deliver them to the manufacturing plant for recovery and reuse.

Design of side accelerators.

The side boosters include: the engine (including the housing, fuel, ignition system and nozzle), structural elements, separation systems, guidance system, rescue avionics system, pyrotechnic devices, braking system, thrust vector control system and emergency self-destruction system.

To the external tank via two side swing brackets and diagonal fastening the lower frame of each accelerator is attached. At the top, each SRB is attached to the external tank by the forward end of the nose cone. At the launch pad, each SRB is secured to the mobile launch pad via four launch-breakable pyrobolts on the bottom skirt of the booster.

The design of the accelerators consists of four individually manufactured steel segments. These SRBs are assembled into pairs at the manufacturing plant and transported by rail to the Kennedy Space Center for final assembly. The segments are held together by a collar ring, a clamp and pins, and are sealed with three O-rings (only two were used before the Challenger disaster in 1986) and a heat-resistant winding.

The fuel consists of a mixture of ammonium pechlorate (oxidizer, 69.9% by weight), aluminum (fuel, 16%), iron oxide (catalyst, 0.4%), polymer (such as en: PBAN or en: HTPB, serving as a binder , stabilizer and additional fuel, 12.04%) and epoxy hardener (1.96%). The specific impulse of the mixture is 242 seconds at sea level and 268 in a vacuum.

The shuttle launches vertically, using the full thrust of the shuttle's propulsion engines and the power of two solid rocket boosters, which create about 80% of the system's launch thrust. 6.6 seconds before the scheduled start time (T), three main engines are ignited, the engines are turned on sequentially with an interval of 120 milliseconds. After three seconds, the engines reach full starting power (100%) of thrust. Exactly at the moment of launch (T=0), the side accelerators produce simultaneous ignition, and eight pyro devices are detonated, securing the system to the launch complex. The system begins to rise. Subsequently, the system rotates in pitch, rotation and yaw to reach the azimuth of the target orbital inclination. The pitch gradually decreases (the trajectory deviates from the vertical to the horizon, in a “back down” pattern); several short-term throttles of the main engines are performed to reduce the dynamic loads on the structure. At moments of maximum aerodynamic pressure (Max Q), the power of the main engines is throttled to 72%. The overloads at this stage of the system's recovery are (max.) about 3 G.

126 seconds after ascending to an altitude of 45 km, the side boosters are detached from the system. Further ascent is carried out by the shuttle's propulsion engines, which are powered by an external fuel tank. They finish their work when the ship reaches a speed of 7.8 km/s at an altitude of more than 105 km before the fuel is completely exhausted. 30 seconds after the engines are stopped, the external fuel tank is separated.

After 90 s after the separation of the tank, an accelerating impulse is given for further insertion into orbit at the moment when the ship reaches the apogee of movement along the ballistic trajectory. The required additional acceleration is carried out by briefly turning on the engines of the orbital maneuvering system. In special cases, to accomplish this task, two successive activations of the engines were used for acceleration (the first pulse increased the apogee height, the second formed a circular orbit). This flight profile avoids dumping the tank in the same orbit as the shuttle itself. The tank falls, moving along a ballistic trajectory in Indian Ocean. In the event that the follow-up impulse cannot be produced, the ship is capable of making a one-orbit route along a very low trajectory and returning to base.

At any stage of the flight, an emergency termination of the flight is provided using appropriate procedures.

After the low reference orbit has already been formed (a circular orbit with an altitude of about 250 km), the remaining fuel is dumped from the main engines and their fuel lines are evacuated. The ship acquires its axial orientation. The cargo compartment doors open, thermally regulating the ship. The ship's systems are brought into orbital flight configuration.

Planting consists of several stages. The first is the issuance of a braking impulse to deorbit, approximately half an orbit before the landing site; at this time the shuttle flies forward in an inverted position. The orbital maneuvering engines operate for approximately 3 minutes during this time. The characteristic speed of the shuttle, subtracted from the orbital speed of the shuttle, is 322 km/h. This braking is sufficient to bring the orbital perigee within the atmosphere. Next, a pitch turn is performed, taking the necessary orientation for entry into the atmosphere. When entering the atmosphere, the ship enters it with an angle of attack of about 40°. Maintaining this pitch angle, the ship performs several S-shaped maneuvers with a roll of 70°, effectively reducing speed by upper layers atmosphere (including the task of minimizing the lift of the wing, which is undesirable at this stage). Astronauts experience a maximum g-force of 1.5g. After reducing the main part of the orbital speed, the ship continues to descend like a heavy glider with low aerodynamic quality, gradually reducing pitch. The vertical speed of the shuttle during the descent phase is 50 m/s. The landing glide path angle is also quite large - about 17–19°. At an altitude of about 500 m, the ship is leveled and the landing gear is extended. At the moment of touching the runway, the speed is about 350 km/h, after which the brakes are applied and the braking parachute is released.

The estimated duration of the spacecraft's stay in orbit is two weeks. The shuttle Columbia made its longest journey in November 1996 - 17 days 15 hours 53 minutes. The shortest journey was also made by the Columbia shuttle in November 1981 - 2 days 6 hours 13 minutes. As a rule, flights of such ships lasted from 5 to 16 days.

The smallest crew is two astronauts, a commander and a pilot. The largest shuttle crew was eight astronauts (Challenger, 1985). Typically the spacecraft's crew consists of five to seven astronauts. There were no unmanned launches.

The orbit of the shuttles on which they were located ranged approximately from 185 km to 643 km.

The payload delivered into orbit depends on the parameters of the target orbit into which the ship is launched. The maximum payload mass that can be delivered into space when launched into low Earth orbit with an inclination of about 28° (the latitude of the Canaveral Space Center) is 24.4 tons. When launching into orbits with an inclination of more than 28°, the permissible payload mass may be correspondingly reduced (for example, when launching into a polar orbit, the shuttle's payload capacity was halved to 12 tons).

The maximum weight of a loaded space shuttle in orbit is 120–130 tons. Since 1981, the shuttle has delivered more than 1,370 tons of payload into orbit.

The maximum mass of cargo delivered from orbit is up to 14,400 kg.

As a result, by July 21, 2011, the shuttles had completed 135 flights, of which: Discovery - 39, Atlantis - 33, Columbia - 28, Endeavor - 25, Challenger - 10.

The Space Shuttle project dates back to 1967, when the Apollo program was still more than a year away. It was a review of the prospects for manned spaceflight after the end of NASA's lunar program.

On October 30, 1968, NASA's two flagship centers (Houston and the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville) offered space companies the opportunity to create a reusable space system, which was expected to reduce the space agency's costs under conditions of intensive use.

September 1970 is the date of registration of two detailed drafts of probable programs by the Space Task Force under the leadership of US Vice President S. Agnew, created specifically to determine the next steps in space exploration.

The big project included:

? space shuttles;

Orbital tugs;

A large orbital station in Earth orbit (up to 50 crew members);

Small orbital station in orbit of the Moon;

Creation of a habitable base on the Moon;

Manned expeditions to Mars;

Landing people on the surface of Mars.

The small project implied the creation of only a large orbital station in earth orbit. But in both projects it was clear that orbital flights, such as supplying stations, delivering cargo into orbit for long-distance expeditions or blocks of ships for long-distance flights, crew changes and other tasks in Earth orbit, had to be carried out by a reusable system, which was called Space Shuttle.

There were plans to create a nuclear shuttle - the NERVA nuclear powered shuttle, which was developed and tested in the 1960s. It was planned that such a shuttle would be able to carry out expeditions between the Earth and the Moon and between the Earth and Mars.

However, US President Richard Nixon rejected all proposals, since even the cheapest one required $5 billion a year. NASA was put at a crossroads - it had to either begin a new major development or announce the termination of the manned program.

The proposal was reformulated and focused on a commercially profitable project by launching satellites into orbit. An examination by economists confirmed that when launching 30 flights per year and completely refusing to use disposable media, the Space Shuttle system can be cost-effective.

The US Congress adopted the project to create the Space Shuttle system.

At the same time, conditions were set according to which the shuttles were responsible for launching into earth orbit all promising devices of the US Department of Defense, CIA and NSA.

Military requirements

The flying machine had to launch a payload of up to 30 tons into orbit, return up to 14.5 tons to Earth, and have a cargo compartment size of at least 18 m long and 4.5 m in diameter. This was the size and weight of the KN-11 KENNAN optical reconnaissance satellite, comparable to the Hubble telescope.

Provide the ability for lateral maneuver for an orbital vehicle up to 2000 km for ease of landing at a limited number of military airfields.

The Air Force decided to build its own technical, launch and landing complex at Vanderberg Air Force Base in California for launch into circumpolar orbits (with an inclination of 56-104 °).

The Space Shuttle program was not intended to be used as a “space bomber.” In any case, this has not been confirmed by NASA, the Pentagon, or the US Congress. There are no public documents indicating such intentions. In the correspondence among the project participants, as well as in the memoirs, such “bombing” motives are not mentioned.

On October 24, 1957, the X-20 Dyna-Soar space bomber project was launched. However, with the development of silo-based ICBMs and a nuclear submarine fleet armed with nuclear ballistic missiles, the creation of orbital bombers in the United States was considered inappropriate. After 1961, “bomber” missions were replaced by reconnaissance and “inspection” missions. On February 23, 1962, Secretary of Defense McNamara approved the final restructuring of the program. From that point on, Dyna-Soar was officially called a research program whose mission was to investigate and demonstrate the feasibility of a manned orbital glider performing atmospheric reentry maneuvers and landing on a runway at a given location on Earth with the required precision. By mid-1963, the Department of Defense began to waver in the effectiveness of the Dyna-Soar program. And on December 10, 1963, Secretary of Defense McNamara canceled the Dyno-Soar project.

Dyno-Soar did not have technical characteristics sufficient for a long-term stay in orbit; its launch required not several hours, but more than a day and required the use of heavy-class launch vehicles, which does not allow the use of such devices for a first or retaliatory nuclear strike.

Despite the fact that Dyno-Soar was cancelled, many of the developments and experience gained were subsequently used to create orbital vehicles such as the Space Shuttle.

The Soviet leadership closely monitored the development of the Space Shuttle program, but seeing a “hidden military threat” to the country, they were prompted to make two main assumptions:

Space shuttles can be used as a carrier of nuclear weapons (to launch strikes from space);

These shuttles can be used to abduct Soviet satellites from Earth orbit, as well as long-term flying stations Salyut and manned orbital stations Almaz. For defense at the first stage, Soviet OPS were equipped with a modified HP-23 cannon designed by Nudelman-Richter (Shield-1 system), which was later to be replaced by Shield-2, consisting of space-to-space missiles. The Soviet leadership seemed justified in the Americans' intentions to steal Soviet satellites due to the dimensions of the cargo compartment and the declared returnable payload, which was close to the mass of the Almaz. The Soviet leadership was not informed about the dimensions and weight of the KH-11 KENNAN optical reconnaissance satellite, which was being designed at the same time.

As a result, the Soviet leadership came to the conclusion of building its own multi-purpose space system, with characteristics not inferior to the American Space Shuttle program.

The Space Shuttle series ships were used to launch cargo into orbits at altitudes of 200–500 km, conduct scientific experiments, and service orbital spacecraft (installation, repair).

In the 1990s, nine dockings were made with the Mir station as part of the Union Mir-Space Shuttle program.

During the 20 years of shuttle operation, more than a thousand upgrades were made to these spacecraft.

The shuttles played a major role in the International Space Station project. Some ISS modules were delivered by American shuttles (“Rassvet” was delivered into orbit by Atlantis), those that do not have their own propulsion systems (unlike the space modules “Zarya”, “Zvezda” and the modules “Pirce”, “Poisk” , they docked as part of Progress M-CO1), which means they are not capable of maneuvers to search for and rendezvous with the station. An option is possible when a module launched into orbit by a launch vehicle would be picked up by a special “orbital tug” and brought to the station for docking.

However, the use of shuttles with their huge cargo compartments becomes impractical, especially when there is no urgent need to deliver new modules to the ISS without propulsion systems.

Technical data

Space Shuttle Dimensions

Dimensions of the Space Shuttle compared to the Soyuz

Shuttle Endeavor with open cargo bay.

The Space Shuttle program was designated according to the following system: the first part of the code combination consisted of the abbreviation STS (English Space Transportation System - space transport system) and the serial number of the shuttle flight. For example, STS-4 refers to the fourth flight of the Space Shuttle program. Sequence numbers were assigned at the planning stage of each flight. But during such planning, there were often cases when the launch of the ship was postponed or postponed to another date. It happened that a flight with a higher serial number was ready for flight earlier than another flight scheduled for a later date. The sequence numbers did not change, so flights with a larger sequence number were often carried out before flights with a smaller sequence number.

1984 is the year of changes in the notation system. The first part of the STS remained, but the serial number was replaced by a code consisting of two numbers and one letter. The first digit in this code corresponded to the last digit of NASA's budget year, which ran from October to October. For example, if the flight is made in 1984 before October, then the number 4 is taken, if in October and after, then the number 5. The second number in this combination has always been 1. This number was used for launches from Cape Canaveral. It was assumed that the number 2 would have been used for launches from Vanderberg Air Force Base in California. But it never came to the point of launching ships from Vanderberg. The letter in the launch code corresponded to the serial number of the launch in the current year. But this ordinal count was not respected either; for example, the flight of STS-51D took place earlier than the flight of STS-51B.

Example: the flight of STS-51A occurred in November 1984 (number 5), the first flight in the new budget year (letter A), launched from Cape Canaveral (number 1).

After the Challenger accident in January 1986, NASA reverted to the old designation system.

The last three shuttle flights were carried out with the following tasks:

1. Delivery of equipment and materials and back.

2. Assembly and supply ISS, delivery and installation on the ISS magnetic alpha spectrometer(Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, AMS).

3. Assembly and supply of the ISS.

All three tasks were completed.

Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavor.

By 2006, the total cost of using the shuttles amounted to $16 billion, with 115 launches by that year. The average cost for each launch was $1.3 billion, but the bulk of the costs (design, upgrades, etc.) do not depend on the number of launches.

The cost of each shuttle flight was about $450 million; NASA budgeted about $1 billion 300 million for 22 flights from mid-2005 to 2010. Direct costs. For these funds, the shuttle orbiter could deliver 20–25 tons of cargo, including ISS modules, and another plus 7–8 astronauts in one flight to the ISS (for comparison, the costs of a disposable Proton-M launch vehicle with a launch load of 22 tons per currently amounts to 70-100 million dollars)

The shuttle program officially ended in 2011. All active shuttles will be retired after their final flight.

Friday July 8, 2011, the last launch of Atlantis was carried out with a crew reduced to four people. This flight ended on July 21, 2011.

The Space Shuttle program lasted 30 years. During this time, 5 ships made 135 flights. In total, it made 21,152 orbits around the Earth and flew 872.7 million km. 1.6 thousand tons were lifted as payload. 355 astronauts and cosmonauts were in orbit.

After completion of the Space Shuttle program, the ships will be transferred to museums. The Enterprise (which has not flown into space), already transferred to the Smithsonian Institution museum near Washington's Dulles Airport, will be moved to the Naval and Aerospace Museum in New York. Its place at the Smithsonian Institution will be taken by the Discovery shuttle. The shuttle Endeavor will be permanently docked in Los Angeles, and the shuttle Atlantis will be on display at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A replacement has been prepared for the Space Shuttle program - the Orion spacecraft, which is partially reusable, but for now this program has been postponed.

Many European Union countries (Germany, Great Britain, France), as well as Japan, India and China, are conducting research and testing of their reusable ships. Among them are Hermes, HOPE, Singer-2, HOTOL, ASSTS, RLV, Skylon, Shenlong, etc.

Work on the creation of shuttles began with Ronald Reagan in 1972 (January 5), the day the new NASA program was approved. Ronald Reagan during the program Star Wars"provided powerful support for the space program to maintain leadership in the arms race with the USSR. Economists made calculations according to which the use of shuttles helped reduce the cost of transporting cargo and crews into space, made it possible to carry out repairs in space, and launch nuclear weapons into orbit.

Due to underestimation of operating costs, the reusable transport spacecraft did not bring the expected benefits. But the refinement of engine systems, materials and technologies will make the MTSC the main and indisputable solution in the field of space exploration.

Reusable spaceships require launch vehicles for operation, for example, in the USSR it was “Energia” (a launch vehicle of a special heavy class). Its use was dictated by the location of the launch site at higher latitudes compared to the American system. NASA workers use two solid rocket boosters and the engines of the shuttle itself to launch the shuttles simultaneously, the cryogenic fuel for which comes from an external tank. After exhausting the fuel resource, the boosters will separate and splash down using parachutes. The external tank is separated in the dense layers of the atmosphere and burns there. Accelerators can be used repeatedly, but have a limited resource for use.

The Soviet Energia rocket had a payload capacity of up to 100 tons and could be used to transport particularly large cargo, such as elements of space stations, interplanetary ships and some others.

MTTCs are also designed with a horizontal launch, together with a sonic or subsonic carrier aircraft, according to a two-stage scheme, which is capable of launching the ship to given point. Since equatorial latitudes are more favorable for launch, in-flight refueling is possible. After delivering the ship to a certain altitude, the MTTC separates and enters the reference orbit using its own engines. The SpaceShipOne spaceplane, for example, created using such a system, has already surpassed 100 km above sea level three times. It is this height that is recognized by the FAI as the boundary of outer space.

A single-stage launch scheme, in which the ship uses only its own engines, without the use of additional fuel tanks, seems impossible to most experts with the current development of science and technology.

The advantages of a single-stage system in operational reliability do not yet outweigh the costs of creating hybrid launch vehicles and ultra-light materials that are necessary in the design of such a ship.

Development of a reusable ship with vertical take-off and landing under engine power is underway. The Delta Clipper, created in the USA and having already passed a series of tests, turned out to be the most developed.

The Orion and Rus spaceships, which are partially reusable, are being developed in the USA and Russia.

Shuttle Discovery

Discovery, NASA's third reusable transport spacecraft, entered NASA service in November 1982. In NASA documents it is listed as OV-103 (Orbiter Vehicle). First flight date: August 30, 1984, starting from Cape Canaveral. At the time of its last launch, Discovery was the oldest operational shuttle.

The shuttle Discovery was named after one of the two ships on which Briton James Cook explored the coasts of Alaska and northwestern Canada and discovered the Hawaiian Islands in the 1770s. Discovery was also the name given to one of the two ships on which Henry Hudson explored Hudson Bay in 1610–1611. Two more Discovery ships from the British Geographical Society explored the North and South Poles in 1875 and 1901.

The Discovery shuttle served as transport for the Hubble Space Telescope, delivering it into orbit, and participated in two expeditions to repair it. Endeavor, Columbia, and Atlantis also participated in such Hubble servicing missions. The last expedition to it took place in 2009.

The Ulysses probe and three relay satellites were also launched from the Discovery shuttle. It was this shuttle that took over the launch baton after the Challenger (STS-51L) and Columbia (STS-107) tragedies.

October 29, 1998 is the launch date of Discovery with John Glenn on board, who was 77 years old at the time (this is his second flight).

Russian astronaut Sergei Krikalev was the first cosmonaut to fly on the shuttle. This shuttle was called Discovery.

On March 9, 2011, at 10:57:17 local time, the shuttle Discovery made its final landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, having served for a total of 27 years. The shuttle, once operational, will be transferred to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.