Never watched it but I heard in season 2 they made the Buran simply a straight copy of the Space Shuttle, and gave it the exact same accident as the Challenger, which would have been impossible because the Soviets didn’t use solid rocket boosters with the Buran-Energia launch system. They already had (in the real world) way more advanced liquid propellent rockets (RD-170) for that.
This is pure disrespect for actual history and really just a lack of creativity when you can’t come up with a better plotline and instead just transposed an actual American space shuttle disaster to the Soviets which you as a show writer should know is technically impossible if you even have a brief understanding of the Soviet space program.
That’s kinda what I’m saying. There are so many interesting “what ifs” if you dig into the history of American and Soviet space programs (in my opinion, the most basic research you should do if you want to make a show like this), but the showrunners took the lazy route like swapping real world events between the countries, without regards for the unique differences and characteristics of the space programs between the two ideologically opposing countries.
I’m not overly familiar with the design of rocket engines, but it’s not immediately apparent to me why a liquid propellant booster would be immune to a DDT style explosion in the case of a failed set of seals.
The Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster cannot be shut down once it has ignited. The Energia’s liquid propellent engine (RD-170) could be easily turned off and allow the crew to safely eject. There would not have been an explosion like the Challenger and the crew would very likely have survived if the Space Shuttle was designed like the Buran.
Completely different philosophies between the two countries. The Space Shuttle went with solid rockets because it was contracted to defense companies who built ICBMs which are solid rockets, and also because the US never mastered liquid rocket engines because they thought it was too technically challenging.
The point being that there are so many interesting avenues to explore about the American and Soviet space programs if you want to go the alt-history route but the show is too lazy to even do that.
Looking at the challenger flight timeline there was less than a second between verbal indication that something seemed wrong and the catastrophic failure of the orbiter and loss of downlink. Not a lot of time to realize what’s wrong and shut the engines down.
I agree the Buran would be better positioned to respond to a similar type challenger fuel leakage problem, but I think saying loss of the crew and orbiter from a OX/fuel leakage is impossible is overstating the case.
What do you mean? Abort systems are usually automated, as was the case with Soyuz 18A in 1975 and Soyuz MS-10 in 2018, two of the handful of times when abort systems were used. The problem with the Space Shuttle boosters is that no such abort mechanism exists due to the design of the solid boosters, so when the Challenger incident happened, they were pretty much cooked.
Sure, nothing is perfect, but numbers don’t lie. Hundreds of Soyuz launches (literally never stopped even after the collapse of the USSR) and a much longer history of manned space launches than the Space Shuttle (which ended its service in 2011 and Americans continued to rely on Russian Soyuz to send astronauts to space until 2020 with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon), still zero fatalities during the handful of launch incidents.
We’re talking about Buran not Soyuz. I’m not an engineer and I haven’t poured through the technical documents, but if you’re going to say Buran was in fact immune to the failure pathway that challenger experienced you’ve got to go beyond saying “liquid propellant engines can be shut off” and actually show that the mechanisms for an automated shutoff were in place and would have been triggered before catastrophic failure was inevitable. Some of Challengers main engines shut off automatically, but that wouldn’t have solved the problem and would likely have been too late even if it did address the issue. Would Burans systems save it if there were an external fuel/ox reaction outside of where it was supposed to be? I have no idea. Maybe.
That’s the sort of inside baseball that I’m not going to fault writers for engaging in, for all the other faults I’ve got with that show.
Once again, Soviet boosters did not have segments and O-rings because they were not solid fuel rockets, the O-ring fault that caused the Challenger explosion could not have happened on the Energia. Period.
Could it have encountered other problems? Sure, but years and years of Soviet and Russian Soyuz flights using liquid propellent rockets have shown that they are exceedingly safe and when there were launch incidents, automated systems were in place to abort the mission and ensure the safety of the crew. As I said, numbers don’t lie.
The Space Shuttle was fundamentally flawed in design and NASA was aware of the defects before the Challenger incident, but chose to keep quiet about it. And as I have mentioned, the worst part is that the solid rocket boosters could not shut down even when the system detects critical failure.
Never watched it but I heard in season 2 they made the Buran simply a straight copy of the Space Shuttle, and gave it the exact same accident as the Challenger, which would have been impossible because the Soviets didn’t use solid rocket boosters with the Buran-Energia launch system. They already had (in the real world) way more advanced liquid propellent rockets (RD-170) for that.
This is pure disrespect for actual history and really just a lack of creativity when you can’t come up with a better plotline and instead just transposed an actual American space shuttle disaster to the Soviets which you as a show writer should know is technically impossible if you even have a brief understanding of the Soviet space program.
It’s pretty clear the writers have no understanding of any of the space hardware they depict in the show
I haven’t watched this hot garbage, but in their defense, they did basically transfer the Nedelin Catastrophe to the US and yeet Gene Kranz into LEO.
That’s kinda what I’m saying. There are so many interesting “what ifs” if you dig into the history of American and Soviet space programs (in my opinion, the most basic research you should do if you want to make a show like this), but the showrunners took the lazy route like swapping real world events between the countries, without regards for the unique differences and characteristics of the space programs between the two ideologically opposing countries.
I’m not overly familiar with the design of rocket engines, but it’s not immediately apparent to me why a liquid propellant booster would be immune to a DDT style explosion in the case of a failed set of seals.
The Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster cannot be shut down once it has ignited. The Energia’s liquid propellent engine (RD-170) could be easily turned off and allow the crew to safely eject. There would not have been an explosion like the Challenger and the crew would very likely have survived if the Space Shuttle was designed like the Buran.
Completely different philosophies between the two countries. The Space Shuttle went with solid rockets because it was contracted to defense companies who built ICBMs which are solid rockets, and also because the US never mastered liquid rocket engines because they thought it was too technically challenging.
The point being that there are so many interesting avenues to explore about the American and Soviet space programs if you want to go the alt-history route but the show is too lazy to even do that.
mfing rocket historians on this site
Looking at the challenger flight timeline there was less than a second between verbal indication that something seemed wrong and the catastrophic failure of the orbiter and loss of downlink. Not a lot of time to realize what’s wrong and shut the engines down.
I agree the Buran would be better positioned to respond to a similar type challenger fuel leakage problem, but I think saying loss of the crew and orbiter from a OX/fuel leakage is impossible is overstating the case.
What do you mean? Abort systems are usually automated, as was the case with Soyuz 18A in 1975 and Soyuz MS-10 in 2018, two of the handful of times when abort systems were used. The problem with the Space Shuttle boosters is that no such abort mechanism exists due to the design of the solid boosters, so when the Challenger incident happened, they were pretty much cooked.
Sure, nothing is perfect, but numbers don’t lie. Hundreds of Soyuz launches (literally never stopped even after the collapse of the USSR) and a much longer history of manned space launches than the Space Shuttle (which ended its service in 2011 and Americans continued to rely on Russian Soyuz to send astronauts to space until 2020 with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon), still zero fatalities during the handful of launch incidents.
We’re talking about Buran not Soyuz. I’m not an engineer and I haven’t poured through the technical documents, but if you’re going to say Buran was in fact immune to the failure pathway that challenger experienced you’ve got to go beyond saying “liquid propellant engines can be shut off” and actually show that the mechanisms for an automated shutoff were in place and would have been triggered before catastrophic failure was inevitable. Some of Challengers main engines shut off automatically, but that wouldn’t have solved the problem and would likely have been too late even if it did address the issue. Would Burans systems save it if there were an external fuel/ox reaction outside of where it was supposed to be? I have no idea. Maybe.
That’s the sort of inside baseball that I’m not going to fault writers for engaging in, for all the other faults I’ve got with that show.
Once again, Soviet boosters did not have segments and O-rings because they were not solid fuel rockets, the O-ring fault that caused the Challenger explosion could not have happened on the Energia. Period.
Could it have encountered other problems? Sure, but years and years of Soviet and Russian Soyuz flights using liquid propellent rockets have shown that they are exceedingly safe and when there were launch incidents, automated systems were in place to abort the mission and ensure the safety of the crew. As I said, numbers don’t lie.
The Space Shuttle was fundamentally flawed in design and NASA was aware of the defects before the Challenger incident, but chose to keep quiet about it. And as I have mentioned, the worst part is that the solid rocket boosters could not shut down even when the system detects critical failure.