Soviet Shuttle Pondered for Plugging US Space Gap

By Thomas Gangale

With NASA set to retire its Space Shuttle fleet in 2010, and facing a five-year hiatus before its new Constellation system can be developed to replace it, a November 2008 Russian news article considered the possibility of solving the US space gap by reviving a Soviet space shuttle project that was shelved 20 years ago.

Soviet space shuttle could bail out NASA

The idea reads like "Plan 8 From Outer Space," not quite up to Ed Wood's high standards.

That one of the pilots who test-flew the Soviet space shuttle Buran would say the things attributed to him is only believable if he has spent the years since the project was canceled drowning his disappointment in cheap vodka. The news article quotes Magomet Talboyev as stating, "The Energiya-Buran programme was started to get the capability to attack the United States, just like the shuttle was able to attack the USSR. We also wanted to take the Skylab space station from orbit. Buran was supposed to put it in its cargo bay and deliver it back to Earth for studies."

First, a legal point: if the Soviet Union were to have taken Skylab without the permission of the United States government, under international law, it would have committed history's first act of piracy on the high frontier. But, the Soviets were always proud of their space "firsts." I can see the insignia on the Soviet shuttle now: a gold skull on a red field, with the crossed swords replaced by the crossed hammer and sickle. Argh! Johnny Depp is looking over the script, Pirates of the Korabl Buran.

Next, an historical point: if the Buran were intended "to take the Skylab space station from orbit," it faced severe schedule constraints. The first (and only) Buran unmanned orbital mission flew in November 1988, and its first manned flight was not expected before 1994. By then, the major components of Skylab had been sitting at the bottom of the Indian Ocean for 15 years; it fell out of orbit in July 1979.

Of course, noting the Soviet penchant for copying American technology, it's entirely possible that they were planning to fit the end of the Buran's remote manipulator arm with a claw-like device similar to the one that the Glomar Explorer used to pick up a section of a sunken Soviet submarine in July 1974. But, probably more technically feasible, and certainly just as legal, would have been to land the Buran on the Capitol Mall, steal the Skylab backup vehicle out of the National Air and Space Museum, and take off again (an atmospheric test vehicle version of the Buran was equipped with jet engines). Or, just buy an admission ticket... you can see whatever you want.

There are a number of other technical considerations.

The Buran's physical dimensions were nearly identical to the US Space Shuttle, whose payload bay has a 15-foot diameter; Skylab was 22 feet in diameter. If the payload don't fit... well, I don't know of any chop shops in space.

The only way I know of for a US Space Shuttle to "attack" a ground target is by raining all over it, a capability it demonstrated in February 2003 when Columbia "attacked" Texas.

But the main point of the article was reviving the Buran project and offering it to NASA. The US is retiring its own shuttle fleet, which is based on 1970s technology, but has nevertheless flown more than 120 successful missions. Why would it make sense to resurrect a program based on shoddy Soviet reverse engineering of 1970s US technology, and which was abandoned before it achieved a single manned flight?

Now, here we get back to schedule considerations: given that the first manned flight of the Soviet space shuttle was five years in the future at the time the program was suspended in 1979, it is difficult to see how a reconstituted program would be able to launch a manned mission less than five years from the turn-on date. The US plans to have the Constellation system flying by then, so what would be the point?

The Russian Federation... bringing you yesterday's technology tomorrow!

It would take a least a year to locate the old Buran engineers, pull them out of the bars, and run them through detox programs. And, you would really need to find these guys. Documentation was never as central to aerospace culture in the Soviet Union as it has always been in the United States; if you wanted to know how something worked, you had to go down the hall and ask Yuri. This is how Yuri protected his job security.

It didn't protect Buran, however. The Russian article mentions that the only Soviet shuttle that ever flew in space was destroyed in 2002 when a roof collapsed at Baikonur. Would you like to fly with guys who couldn't even built a decent hangar roof for one of their country's historical treasures? Dumayu, chto nyet!

I'm relieved that the article stated that "some American and Russian scientists are beginning to think of ways to revive the Buran programme." I'm glad he said "scientists;" if they were engineers, I'd be embarrassed. But it's appropriate to the name of Buran, which means "snowstorm," to propose such a scheme; if it were actually put over on NASA, it would be the snow job of the century.

Smashmouth Economics

by Thomas Gangale
California Progress Report
12 October 2008

George W. Bush pushes a $700 billion "rescue package" of government money to shore up the markets. Henry Paulson announces that the government will use some of the money to acquire stock in banks. John McCain proposes that the government buy up the bad paper on your home. And any number of deregulationist Republicans are now tripping over each other to step up to the pulpit and preach the need to replace our outdated, 20th century regulatory structure with a newfangled system for the 21st century. All of which leaves the Republican Party with about as much philosophical underpinning as the Communist Party in China, where capitalism is cleaning our clock. Perhaps the Communist Party and the Republican Party ought to swap names, for the GOP is now espousing the sort of capitalism that Karl Marx would have loved.

Really.

Contrary to popular belief, Marx was not an enemy of capitalism. His magnum opus, "Capital," fills a library shelf, the product of a lifetime of studying capitalism. If he was a critic of capitalism's excesses, given what has occurred in the past few weeks, is criticism such a bad thing? But Marx also gave capitalism its due as the most efficient mode of production ever devised. The problem, as Marx saw it, was that an economic system based on competition necessarily produces winners and losers. It creates wealth, but it creates it unevenly. What about the losers? Aiding society's small-time losers is called "welfare;" aiding its major league losers is called "rescue." By any name, both are socialism.

That's such a scary word! Worse than visions of doling out Cadillacs to the underclass, it conjures up your having to give half of your paycheck to everyone else, and if that were the case, no one would want to work very hard. I mean, just suppose that the 49ers have another disastrous season and end up at the bottom of the heap? Do they deserve to get the top draft picks in the college draft? When they go on the road to get creamed by the Dallas Cowboys, do they deserve to get 40% of the gate receipts at Texas Stadium?

That's right, the National Football League, one of the most successful capitalist enterprises in history, is socialist in its structure. Long ago, the team owners agreed that although competition was a good thing and the American way, driving each other out of business was bad business. What they wanted was "parity," to keep all of the franchises stable, to punish winners and reward losers, to limit the lifespan of team dynasties, to increase competition by constraining competition, to increase the creation of wealth by redistributing wealth. Without revenue sharing, the Green Bay Packers would be only a fond memory from the days of leather helmets. NFLism's merger of capitalism and socialism is as American as soccer-style place kickers, and it's the best of both worlds. Its socialist net makes the league safe for smashmouth capitalism. And everyone in it works very hard, because Americans always want to win.

Forget about the self-regulating "free market." It doesn't exist, it never has, it never will. The free market religion has a number of central tenets, a couple of which are demonstrably false. First of all, it assumes that everyone participating in the marketplace is rational; writing subprime loans was rational? Secondly, it assumes that rational actors have perfect information; how good was Lehman Brothers' information?

What has emerged in the American economic system over the decades is a sort of disaster socialism: government intervention to pull the economy back from the precipice. And it's a form of socialism that historically turns a profit. Bailing out Mexico, the savings and loans, Chrysler, and Lockheed, the American government made money every time. We're smarter socialists than the Soviets ever were. Recognizing that there is no free market that some preach, and being honest about the disaster socialism that we practice, we need to take the next step toward NFLism. Our current crisis of capitalism wouldn't be as dire if socialist intervention had been more timely, and had it been more timely, the intervention would have been so tiny as to be unremarkable. The free market coaches knew they had lousy field position, but they keep wanting to run up the middle on fourth down and long yardage anyway. We can do better, and we already know how to do better. NFLism runs capitalist and socialist plays like a smart coach uses the ground game and the air game, knowing when and how to use each. If salary caps for football players is a good idea, why not for CEOs as well?

So, let's go, America. We're getting blitzed, but we can get back in the game. Maybe John Madden will draw some yellow circles and lines on the NASDAQ board for us.

Backers of GOP Primary Rules Overhaul Decry Resistance From Campaign

By Kathleen Hunter
CQ Politics
27 August 2008

Republicans performed an about-face and nixed a plan to dramatically reshape the party’s primary process in 2012, with proponents of the plan accusing the McCain campaign of working to derail the overhaul.

“Once again the presidential nominee has killed any reform of the primary process,” said Ohio GOP Chairman Bob Bennett, the architect of the overhaul proposal.

The plan rejected Wednesday by the Republican National Committee’s rules-making panel was the same one the panel had endorsed in March as a way to establish a more orderly, drawn-out election schedule in 2012, with the goal of easing the “front-loaded” primary schedule that has developed in recent campaign cycles, while promoting more one-on-one interaction with voters.

Bennett and other supporters of the so-called “Ohio plan” accused the McCain campaign of launching a full-court press to persuade rules committee members to adopt a far more modest proposal.

FULL STORY

Democrats Move to Fix Primary Scramble

By Kisten Wyatt
Associated Press
23 August 2008

Democrats moved Saturday to change the way they nominate presidential candidates and avoid a repeat of this year's primary scramble.
But they shied away from substantive debate such as whether to take away Iowa and New Hampshire's jealously guarded status as the nation's first vetting grounds for presidential candidates.

As a rules panel within the Democratic National Convention Committee voted unanimously Saturday to start talking about how to avoid a repeat of this year's jammed up primary schedule, party leaders sought to put off substantive — and divisive — talk about how to do that until after this is year's campaign.

"No state was left behind in the primaries," Democratic Chairman Howard Dean told the rules panel, Dean said earlier this month that the party needed to review its primary and caucus rules and reduce the number of superdelegates.

There appears to be broad consensus among Democrats that the nomination process needs to be reformed in light of this year's seismic battle between Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and nominee-to-be Barack Obama.

FULL STORY

Obama Says He'll Support NASA Programs

By Eun Kyung Kim
Gannett News Service
29 July 2008

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged his commitment to NASA in a statement his campaign released Tuesday congratulating the agency on its 50th anniversary.
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The declaration may surprise many NASA supporters. Earlier in his campaign, the Illinois senator said he would rather see money budgeted for Constellation, the program to replace the aging shuttles, go instead toward education reform.

Yet, Obama said he would support the agency if elected this fall.

“I believe we need to revitalize NASA’s mission to maintain America’s leadership, and recommit our nation to the space program, and as President I intend to do just that,” he said.

FULL STORY

SEE ALSO:

A Letter to Lynn Woolsey on the 2008 NASA Authorization Act
Space Exploration: A Progressive Investment
A Progressive Vision of Human Space Exploration
Libertarianism Reaches for the High Frontier