Soviet space program history

Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov to publish book about Yuri Gagarin’s death in air crash

More:
http://tass.com/science/960475

Mir was the first modular space station in the World and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996.

That's an "interesting" pic, cuz its not Mir.  Some graphic artist has mashed Soviet & US modules together in a fairly haphazard manner.

Mir actually looked like this when its was finally completed:

50 YEARS AGO
Zond-5: A prototype of the Soviet crew capsule loops behind the Moon!

In September 1968, alarms probably sounded at US intelligence agencies and NASA, as the USSR finally succeeded in flying a crew vehicle prototype around the Moon during the Zond-5 mission. The first ever return of a spacecraft from the lunar vicinity, though only with tortoises and small organisms onboard, underscored for the US leadership the enormous importance of a recent decision to send the Apollo-8 crew into the lunar orbit before the end of the year. The Moon Race was quickly approaching its climax.



The Zond-5 mission at a glance:
Spacecraft designations: 7K-L1 (11F91) No. 9, 1968-076A
Launch vehicle: 8K82K (UR-500K, Proton-K) No. / Block D (11S824)
Launch site: Tyuratam, Site 81, "Left" pad
Crew: Unmanned
Launch date and time: 1968 Sept. 15, 00:42:10.77 Moscow Time (21:42 GMT on September 14)
Mission results: The flight around the Moon and the return to Earth
End of mission: 1968 Sept. 21
Landing point coordinate: 32 degrees 38 minutes South latitude, 65 degrees 33 minutes East longitude
Flight duration: 6 days 18 minutes 59 seconds

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/zond5.html

Buran space shuttle marks 30th flight anniversary

Back in November 1988, the spacecraft took off for the first time



MOSCOW, November 15. /TASS/. November 15, 2018 marks 30 years since the Buran reusable spacecraft performed its first and sole flight.

The Buran was part of the Energia-Buran reusable space system. It comprised the orbital spaceship, the Energia super-heavy carrier rocket and the ground-based space infrastructure. The Buran was capable of performing lengthy (up to 30 days) flights, orbital maneuvering, controlled descent and airplane landing on a specially equipped aerodrome.

Project’s history

The groundwork for creating a reusable space system was laid in the mid-1970s at the Energia Research and Production Association (the former design bureau OKB-1 of renowned Soviet Chief Designer Sergei Koroloyov; currently the Energia Space Rocket Corporation based in the town of Koroloyov outside Moscow) under the guidance of Valentin Glushko who was the enterprise’s director and chief designer at that time.

On February 17, 1976, the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers issued a resolution on creating a reusable space system and promising space complexes, which gave start to the Energia-Buran space program. The USSR Defense Ministry acted as the customer of the project and its technical specifications were issued on November 8, 1976. By that time, the United States had already assembled the Enterprise spacecraft developed under the similar Space Shuttle program and started preparing for its launch. The Buran space shuttle came as the Soviet response to the US program.

The Energia Research and Production Association was chosen as the lead developer of the Energia-Buran reusable space system. Apart from carrying out general work coordination and creating the Energia two-stage rocket, the enterprise also developed a propulsion unit for the Buran.

The Buran’s conceptual design was ready by the end of 1976. The program envisaged creating five spaceships (item 11F35). As a result, two space shuttles were built fully and one Buran spacecraft was 30-50% ready while the fourth and the fifth orbiters were laid down but their construction never started.

Several full-scale mockups of the Buran space shuttle were also created for various tests. The automatic landing mode was tested using the Buran’s full-scale copy - the BTS-002 (which stands for the large transport plane in Russian; item 11F35 OK-ML002 GLI deciphered as the orbital spacecraft, the mockup flight copy 002 for horizontal flight tests). Overall, 24 flights of the BTS-002 model were carried out in the atmosphere in 1985-1988 (including 17 flights in the automatic landing mode) with the involvement of six pilots who were members of the Team of Cosmonauts-Testers of the USSR Aviation Industry Ministry.

Overall, 1,206 enterprises and organizations from various industries were involved in the Energia-Buran program. The USSR Ministry of General Machine-Building exercised general work coordination at the inter-departmental level. The program’s expenses were estimated at 16.4 billion rubles by the beginning of 1992.

Buran’s design and technical characteristics

The space orbiter was designed as a low-wing monoplane. Externally, the Buran looked like the US space shuttle but could perform landing in an automated mode as compared to it. Also, the Soviet reusable spacecraft incorporated the crew ejection system.

Externally, the Buran was shielded by 39,000 special heat protection tiles. Most of the surface was protected by the tiles made of superfine quartz fiber and flexible elements of heat-resistant organic fibers. Tiles made of carbon-based material were used to shield the high-heat areas of the fuselage (for example, the wing and nose cone edges). The protection cover could withstand a heat of up to 1,600 degrees Celsius upon the spacecraft’s braking maneuver in the dense layers of the atmosphere. The spaceship’s nose part housed the airtight cabin for the crew and major equipment.

The Buran’s integrated propulsion system comprised two orbital maneuvering liquid-propellant rocket engines (17D12), 38 low-thrust control engines (17D15), eight engines of precise orientation, four solid-propellant emergency separation engines, and also fuel tanks. The main engines used environmentally friendly fuel components - the synthetic hydrocarbon fuel synthene and liquid oxygen.

Space shuttle’s technical characteristics:

- length - 36.37 m;

- wing span - 23.92 m;

- height on gear - 16.35 m;

- launch weight - up to 105 tonnes (including 14.5 tonnes of fuel);

- cargo compartment volume - 350 cubic meters;

- crew cabin volume - 73 cubic meters;

- payload weight - up to 30 tonnes;

- returnable payload weight - up to 20 tonnes;

- maximum landing speed - 360 km/h;

- maximum number of crewmembers - 10 (including the main crew of four, and also researcher cosmonauts);

- designed flight duration - from 7 to 30 days.

The Buran space shuttle had a service life of 100 flights. The orbital spaceship could perform flights both in the piloted and unpiloted (automated) mode.

Infrastructure

The assembly-testing and launch compounds were built at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the Energia-Buran reusable space system. The aerodrome Yubileiny with a runway of 4,500 m was built in the Cosmodrome’s northern portion for the space shuttle’s landing. The airport of Simferopol (where a runway of 3,701 m was built in 1982) and the Khorol military airfield in the Primorye Region in the Russian Far East (with a runway of 3,700 m) served as the reserve aerodromes for Buran space shuttles.

An Antonov An-225 Mriya heavy long-range turbojet transport plane with the super-large lifting capacity was created specially for transporting the carrier rocket and the orbital spacecraft. The sole such aircraft was developed and built by the Antonov Design Bureau in Ukraine (currently, the Antonov State Enterprise, Kiev).

Launch and flight

The Soviet designers made a decision to carry out the Buran’s first testing flight in an automated mode using the two-loop scheme. Initially, the launch was scheduled for October 29, 1988. The pre-launch preparations proceeded in a planned manner and the weather conditions were favorable. However, 51 seconds before the launch, the automatic system signaled an emergency halt of the carrier rocket’s preparation. The launch was halted as the mast was untimely moved away from the carrier rocket.

After the faults were removed and the Buran’s preparedness was confirmed again, the launch was scheduled for November 15, 1988. Despite unfavorable weather (low clouds, snow and rain and wind bursts of up to 20 m/s), the state commission did not put off the launch. The Buran space shuttle was launched at 06:02 a.m. Moscow time. The launch went off without a hitch and all the spacecraft’s systems worked in a normal regime. As was planned, the space shuttle made two rotations around the Earth and landed at the Yubileiny aerodrome 208 minutes after its launch.

The Soviet news agency TASS reported at the time: "On November 15, 1988, the Buran orbital spaceship landed on the runway of the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 09:25 a.m. Moscow time after performing a two-rotation orbital flight around the Earth. For the first time in the world, the landing was carried out in an automated mode. The program of the test flight of the Energia universal space rocket transport system and the Buran orbital reusable spaceship has been implemented in full."

Program’s closure

During the second flight, the Buran’s second copy was planned to accomplish a seven-day mission also in an unmanned mode. Its program envisaged docking with the Mir orbital station and testing an onboard manipulator for the delivery of research modules into orbit. The third space shuttle was being prepared for a manned flight. There were plans to use the Buran reusable spacecraft for servicing space stations and delivering various space vehicles into orbit.

However, the program was put on hold due to the shortage of financing. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it was transferred from the Defense Ministry to the competence of the Russian Space Agency. In 1993, the program was shut down and its accumulated potential was put on hold.

Although the Energia-Buran program was shut down, it gave rise to new technologies that found their application in outer space and on Earth. For example, the engineering materials developed for the Buran’s docking with the Mir space orbiter were used in the Russian-US Mir-Shuttle program: in 1995-1998, the space shuttles made nine dockings with the Russian space station.

At the Russia Arms Expo exhibition in Nizhny Tagil in October 2013, then-Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin said the following: "The future aircraft will be able to climb to the stratosphere while space vehicles can operate in both layers of the atmosphere already now, for example, the Buran, which considerably outpaced its time. In actual fact, all these spacecraft are vehicles of the 21st century and we will have to restart using them, whether we want this or not.".


More:
http://tass.com/science/1031062

Roskosmos video of Buran preparation and launch. The assembly hall footage is great stuff!

https://twitter.com/i/status/1062946073713491968

Too bad those ing Kazakhs refused to maintain the roof, or to properly maintain the other 2x vehicles in their possession.  Useless fecking idiots...

Blame Jelzin. Nasarbajew wanded the union to continue.

Hole wrote:Blame Jelzin. Nasarbajew wanded the union to continue.

Most Soviet citizens did. They wanted reform, not dissolution. Unfortunately, corrupt criminals in positions of power such as Yeltsin and Kravchuk (Ukropi nationalist cu*t) wanted to pursue their own agendas rather than look after the interests of the people.

Big_Gazza wrote:

Hole wrote:Blame Jelzin. Nasarbajew wanded the union to continue.

Most Soviet citizens did. They wanted reform, not dissolution. Unfortunately, corrupt criminals in positions of power such as Yeltsin and Kravchuk (Ukropi nationalist cu*t) wanted to pursue their own agendas rather than look after the interests of the people.

The moment first republic was granted Independence whole USSR thing was dead and buried

This happened way before Yeltsin

Same applies to any country anywhere

Soviet Moon Images

http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogMoon.htm

The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station

How two Cosmonauts battled extreme cold, darkness, and limited resources to save Salyut 7.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/2/

Interesting.

I thought that was going to be a video about the TP-82...

https://modernfirearms.net/en/shotguns/russia-shotguns/tp-82-eng/

A triple barrel pistol survival weapon with two 32 gauge shotgun barrels and a single 5.45x39mm barrel.

Perhaps an updated model could be developed in the form of a folding stock longer weapon... 32 gauge is a bit weak, perhaps a 20 or even 12 gauge option might be better, with perhaps a 5.45x39mm barrel for longer ranged targets and heavier game...

An old but nice article on Mir space station

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19517/mir-space-station-30th-anniversary/

I think that this topic fits in this part of the forum.  

Here is a video playing the Venera 14 sound recording during its landing and after:



So the atmosphere of Venus is emitting a continuous background "roar" like a storm.   It does not
sound like white noise to me and the audio quality is actually quite good in spite of the little boilerplate
snark from the narrator at the end.   The muffling aspect is due to the fact that the atmospheric
density is 100 times greater than on Earth at the surface so sound energy is being rapidly dissipated.
This also gives the "white noise" aspect to the background storm sound since it too is being muffled
by dissipation.   The dissipation cannot damp the noise completely since it is always being generated
volumetrically, but it can smear it out.

For some reason this recording does not get any attention.   But it is a historical achievement being
only the second one ever made, with the first made by Venera 13.

GarryB approves this post...

50 years ago - #OTD in 1970 - the legendary Soviet robotic lunar rover #Lunokhod1 began its mission on the surface of the Moon - first wheeled craft on another celestial body.

A busy robot: in 321 days it travelled 10,5 km, made 20k images, performed lunar soil analysis



https://twitter.com/Russia/status/1328477899603709952

Actually I think more recently they found it again... it has a corner reflector on it to focus and return laser beams specifically for laser ranging the surface of the moon. Perhaps some dust fell off, but the reflector was exposed and accurate measurements of the moon became possible as the reflector is large and greatly improves the accuracy of measurements.

There was this as well...

https://sputniknews.com/science/202009241080563440-Russian-Space-Agency-Unseals-Ambitious-Soviet-Plans-to-Build-Moon-Bases-in-the-1970s/

There is real physical evidence that none of the video purporting to show Americans on the Moon is real. It does not
matter that you can find some equipment at the locations they were alleged to have visited. That is not such a big
task.

I will concede that these cheesy Hollywood productions may have been necessitated by the fact that the film cameras
available at the time could not function properly due to the large amount of ionizing radiation, especially going through
the Van Allen belts thus making reel film unusable, but the Orwellian nature of this operation makes it more likely
that US "Moon" astronauts never left LEO and did not even spend over two weeks there. The fact that these astronauts
were prancing without effort right after landing proves their trips were a hoax. The Salyut station cosmonauts needed support
after spending similar amounts of time in LEO. Then we had the dour faces of the "Moon" astronauts at a news conference
after a much ballyhooed mission. They were not tired, and their expressions were not those of people thrilled to make
history. In fact, it was as if someone close to them died. This is circumstantial, but the preponderance of physical evidence
makes sense as to the why.

We supposedly had US astronauts on the Moon, but Musk has just made a "historic" launch of astronauts to the space station.
It would have been history in the early 1960s. And for some bizarre reason the US can't reproduce the Saturn V engines.
And here is another piece of evidence. A rocket on a path to the Moon and not to LEO has a different rate of ascent and
thus speed at different heights. It does not fly to LEO and then do a second stage, it "aims" for the Moon. The Saturn V
rockets shown taking US astronauts to the Moon had LEO flight characteristics.

Interesting historical document collection from Roskosmos, for those with an interest (like me!) in the Soviet science space programs!  

https://www.roscosmos.ru/28185/

Latest is the data from the 1st successful soft-landing on the Moon, performed by Luna 09 on Feb 3, 1966.  Released on the 55th anniversary of this major achievement.

https://www.roscosmos.ru/29868/

Typical of the available fare - good scans of the original data     So much better than the horrid low-rez scans of newspaper clippings we had to deal with in the old days!