The thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before. (The Space thread)

[FaultyMario]

didn't both agencies start cooperating (more) in the wake of the Challenger disaster?

smart people would realize how dumb it would be to keep competing in an scenario that is cloth expensive and potentially catastrophic. And there's plenty of smart people on both sides.

[Godson]

I hadn't heard that before, but I wouldn't be surprised.

The Roscosmos also were in the process of building their own space shuttle project, but they cancelled it before it flew iirc.

[Rare White Ape]

It was called the Buran Program. They built quite a few of them, most of which were partially built and left in various states of assembly at the time of its cancellation. Wikipedia has quite a comprehensive list of the remaining artefacts.

The spaceplane itself looks almost identical to the US Space Shuttles, as it was built mostly from stolen information gathered by Russian spies. It’s slightly larger and has a few engineering improvements over the Space Shuttle.

Buran’s rocket stack was a much more powerful version of the SST stack, called Energia. It had four liquid fuel boosters strapped to the side instead of two solid fuel, and was designed with the ability to launch with a payload on top like a conventional rocket, so there were rocket engines on the bottom of the central tank section.

Meanwhile the SST stack’s central tank was only designed to feed fuel into the Shuttle’s three main engines before being discarded. For the Artemis program, the SST stack was re-engineered to run in a vertical configuration and now shares more similarities with Energia, but still keeps the two solid fuel boosters on the side.

[MR2 Fan]

I thought this was a pretty good video on the Buran

[Crazed_Insanity]

Russian shuttle was definitely superior on paper, but given that it came later and at a wrong time, we’ll probably never know for sure…

However, Russians definitely had cheaper and more reliable way of transporting astronauts to space at the time.

The vision of weekly shuttle flights was simply impossible. Each turn around costs NASA more than a billion $! NASA did eventually reduced the cost down to 3/4 billion but that’s still not sustainable.

Reusability was deemed not very economically feasible.

Plan was to just go back to the Russian way of going to space using traditional disposable rockets… until Elno came and disrupted the aerospace industry. Everyone thought the guy must be an idiot from the Russians to the Apollo astronauts… even his friends tried to persuade him not to waste his money. But did he listen? Nope. The crazy idiot pushed forward…

[Godson]

Right, he spent government money ...

[Crazed_Insanity]

1st 4 flights were definitely not taxpayer money. SpaceX would’ve folded if 4th test flight failed to reach orbit. It’s only afterwards NASA began awarding SpaceX contracts.

I dont think NASA was confident enough to fund an unproven idiot right off the bat. SpaceX winning NASA over as one of its customers is inevitable, considering its success.

[Rare White Ape]

Musk had to invest almost his entire fortune into building SpaceX, but the first two flights were funded by DARPA. Prior to this NASA awarded a $396 million contract to SpaceX to develop crew and cargo resupply demonstrations to the ISS. After the first successful flight NASA gave SpaceX $1.6 billion.

[Crazed_Insanity]

Anyway, I think the point is he put up most of his emerald mine money and he could end up significantly poorer if test launches failed!

He bought into space in a similar fashion as he bought into Twitter. Every industry expert thought he’s crazy and were laughing at him.

Most aerospace companies get billions from NASA. Safe to say SpaceX has done a better, faster and cheaper job than it’s traditional competitors.

[Rare White Ape]

Anyway, Musk had a vision with SpaceX and filled a niche that didn't have many competitors, and took advantage of it through his ability to supply capital where nobody else was able. It worked out so now he is worth billions off the back of it!

He bought into Twitter in a different fashion he bought into SpaceX. By not innovating anything and trying to take a piece of the market that was already well served. Now everybody thinks he is crazy and is laughing at him.

Most social media companies get billions from advertising. Safe to say he's run Twitter into the ground and it's much cheaper than it's* traditional competitors.



*Unnecessary apostrophe added to maintain consistency between posts.