"John Mullen" wrote in message
...
"David E. Powell" wrote in message
s.com...

(snip)

Well, that was one, unmanned flight. Vs. numerous ones in shuttles that
aged
over time, flew in different weather conditions, etc.

Challenger was done in partly by low temperature at launch, and the foam
that hit Columbia came off the external tank, Buran also has an
external
booster unit in a similar location, strapped to the belly. Both
accidents
happened after numerous successes. One cannot know Buran's true odds as
one
for one is 100 percent. Like a batter hitting 1000 after two at bats,
will
he still be batting 1000 at the middle of the season?

Challenger was killed by a SRB letting go. Buran-Energia had no SRB's.

Sir, Energia was a gigantic booster. Solid or liquid there is room for error
in each.

Columbia was killed by foam insulation falling off an ET and hitting a
wing.
I do not think this could happen in the Buran-Energia setup, looking at
how
they are oriented.

How so? I felt they were more or less similar, shuttle riding the
booster/fuel section, the Energia for Buran and the SRBs/Tank for the NASA
shuttle.

STS ~100 manned flights, two total losses, 14 deaths.

A hair over a 98% success rate, a bit better than Soyuz (Which also
had 2 fatal flights, with 100% crew loss on each, (But smaller
crews),
and several launch aborts. And a number of nasty landing incidents.

Really? I cannot easily find a total for the number of Soyuz missions
but
feel sure it must be way over the 100-odd of the STS. Do you have
better
figures?

Well there was that time one decompressed while still at very high
altitude
during a landing. Not sure about others, but then again there are still
rumors that not all the Soviet era space stuff has come out as yet,
accidents, etc.

AFAIK there were only the two well-documented Soyuz losses, one
decompression and one parachute failure. All the Soviet era accidents can
be
safely assumed to have come out I would say.

There is still the contorversy over whether another fellow went up before
Gagarin, though....

And to me the survivable aborts are an indication of the robustness of
the
1960s design. The people on Challenger would have loved a surviveable
abort
system. The people on Columbia would have loved merely to have
suffered
a
nasty landing incident.

Well nobody ever flew on Buran to find out I guess. As for Challenger,
any
survivable system under those circumstances, or in Columbia's
disintegration, would have had to be a heck of a system. The forces
involved
in both cases were literally unimaginable. I am not sure if Buran could
have
survived either disaster, or how she could have fared with her own
mechanics
over time. Nobody can know that, I suppose.

As I have said above, I do not think Buran would have been susceptible to
either disaster in the first place.

You are entitled to your opinion, but if there was some sort of insulator on
sections of Energia, and if the tank on Energia contained fuel and booster
units, the possibility IMO exosted for failures simply because similar
things were present. The composition of the foam and performance under
different conditions and the performance of Energia may not have as much
available data as those of the shuttle, and the question of possible
failures in Buran over time are hard to plot out from the one flight. I do
hope it was a sound ship, it is just toguh to look at it all now compared to
another system's record over years of flights, reuse cycles, weather
conditions, foam changes, etc.

Both were consequences of the poor design of the STS in the first place,
and
of breathtaking complacency within NASA about safety.

The foam thing really gets me, I cannot see the reason it was changed if the
old foam was fine. I know the envoronment matters, but the science being
dealt with is also important, and the tank either orbits or burns up in the
high atmosphere anyway.

Columbia's loss was from such a hit that I cannot be sure if any wing
built
could have survived, with that kind of glide path and loss of heat
shielding. Is there any information on what Buran's heating
characteristics
and glide path were intended to be, or recorded as during her flight?

(snip)

I am certain they were fine peices of equipment, but I would run one
down
at
the expense of the other. Energia is a fine piece of equipment - do they
still make them? Be the thing to get a Mars craft up there to orbit for
assembly.

It certainly would. AFAIK they are finished like the Buran.

That's sad. In the early 1990s I recall hearing mention of their possible
use a space station or large vessel component boosters. Very powerful
rocket....

John