The Soviet Union also launched an anti-SDI laser test satellite via the Energia heavy lifter, casually demonstrating the highest payload capacity since the Saturn V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_%28spacecraft%29
Thankfully, it failed to reach orbit due to a software bug.
(Said Energia rocket would then launch the Soviet space shuttle, Buran, on a completely unmanned mission, including autopiloted runway landing – something the US STS never could, because astronauts lobbied against any and every automation for fear of being made redundant.)
> According to Yuri Kornilov, Chief Designer of the Salyut Design Bureau, shortly before Polyus' launch, Mikhail Gorbachev visited the Baikonur Cosmodrome and expressly forbade the in-orbit testing of its capabilities. Kornilov claims that Gorbachev was worried that it would be possible for Western governments to view this activity as an attempt to create a weapon in space and that such an attempt would contradict the country's previous statements on the USSR’s peaceful intent.
That sounds so weird to me. If you're not going to test a laser in orbit, then why bother putting a laser in orbit? Is this story non-factual? Did Gorbachev say it publicly, for the record, with a big ol' wink? Or was it just poorly thought out, with the military really wanting to put a big weapon in orbit, the engineers really wanting to put anything big in orbit, and the politicians not wanting to put a new battlefield in orbit?
The Polyus was a violation of pretty much every space treaty. It was a clear weaponization of space designed to shoot down US satellites. Gorbachev knew that any attempt to use it would bring US retaliation in a variety of ways the USSR couldn't handle: move more nukes close to the USSR, ramp up nuke production, launch Reagan's SDI missile shield concepts, build large missile shields in Europe, etc.
Russia is not known for respecting treaties it signs, so I'm sure Reagan had some backchannel talks to Gorby over space weaponization that spooked him. Both backed off eventually. Reagan's SDI went nowhere and morphed into the SM anti-missile systems in use today and the Polyus, of course, failed to achieve orbit.
I'm not quite old enough, but it was just before my time and there were some stories in the press that it was for shooting their own satellites, at least officially. Remember the space shuttle was being pimped as being all things to all people, including the military, right around that time and satellite retrieval could happen to Russian as well as American satellites, after all abandoned non working wrecks and right of salvage at sea and all that. Now it would be a pity if the Russians shot at a decommissioned spy sat while the Americans shuttle on a classified .mil mission was trying to steal that satellite... also run the numbers on low earth orbit satellites, a decent head shot to a low orbit satellite deorbits the main pieces and the little parts have an awesome surface to volume ratio so they naturally deorbit and the precious delicate space shuttle isn't going to fly thru a cloud of satellite parts to steal a russian spy sat, now, is it?
The shuttle has enough delta-V that in the old days before advanced surveillance sats its not unrealistic it could have snatched a decommissioned low orbit russian spy sat while out of ground observation range. In fact, how exactly do you know what did or didn't happen during the many classified early missions...
There was also a some popular press scientific claims. If "we" think "we" can shoot actively dodging incoming ICBMs out of the sky in the 80s, shooting a "big" asteroid should be pretty easy in the 70s, right? So wait for a close approach, record the spectrograph of the impact, compare to the known composition of the shell, report back on the first direct chemical analysis of a meteor in space before re-entry. This is a little impractical, but ...
Any rational actor does not respect any treaties. That's the normal way of business in international relations. It's a grand chessboard. The point is to put your opponent in check and keep it that way. In order to do that you can utilize any means necessary to do so while appearing as if you are following the rules.
It's the same way all government organizations in the West operate.
This is speculation, and my opinion only, but . . .
Astronauts are highly intelligent individuals with science and engineering backgrounds, so I doubt that they were/are against technology and automation, per se. However, they also generally have pilot, particularly test pilot, backgrounds. The shuttles could not be considered mature technology by any stretch, so I suspect that the astronauts felt more comfortable being personally in control of a vehicle that could kill them than relying on an automated system. Despite (or rather because of) the fact that they work with the most cutting edge technology, test pilots are some of the most conservative people you will find. They need to be that way to stay alive.
The Shuttle could not be landed by autopilot until far into the 2000s. Astronauts insisted that there had to be something only humans could do. It wasn't until 2006 that one Shuttle was finally modified for full autopilot control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-3xx#Remote_Control_Orbiter
"Astronauts insisted that there had to be something only humans could do"
Its been a common rationalization meme for many years because it feels so good.
However the actual reason is during the entire mission everything is either unrecoverable due to equipment failure (see actual disasters) or happens slowly and/or reversibly enough that some combination of human and automatic controls can return to nominal.
Except the landing gear. That deploys and you're done. Not like normal aviation gear where you can lift gear in flight. I would have to look at the L/D ratios and the heading alignment cones but it "feels likely" that an early deployment at any stage of the mission other than 15 seconds before landing means you're not landing on the runway.
Everything else you can compensate for or have an abort mode or so "something". You can only lift the gear on the ground with support crew not wearing space suits removing a spring loaded lock and even then the shuttle doesn't have the plumbing to lift the gear. Simplicate and add lightness.
This is something that never really made it into sci fi books or fan fic or thrillers or whatever. If you want to trap a shuttle in orbit and make it un-deorbitable you don't need to take a fire axe to equipment racks or fire rifles or all kinds of hollywood idiocy, just push the gear down button and its all over, that's one ship that won't be landing without extensive spacewalk work.
So... you don't need autoland capability unless a suicidal crewman or russian agent or whatever popped the gear, because you don't currently have a way to un-pop the gear... Pre ISS there were no failure modes that would result in the crew not being able to ride the orbiter down even if they had to be in suits (O2 failure or something). Post ISS if the O2 system failed rather than trying a landing in full pressure suits they'd probably have tried an auto-land... and guess about when they developed the autoland cable...
In practice if it happened in orbit, perhaps attached to the ISS, someone would figure out and ship up some kind of weird levers for shuttle astronauts to use to re-lock the gear, then do an auto-landing and hope it works. Also I think you have to boot up the APU(s) first before pressing the button would do much of anything.
Something to think about is the shuttle was originally sold to be all things to all people and the .mil probably didn't like the idea of the Russians being able to remotely steal a shuttle or remotely mission kill it.
As a meta question why would you launch a manned mission if an unmanned mission would have worked just as well?
And linked to above, if all you need is a "simple" 25 foot cable to autoland, why will the meme of "can't autoland" never die? Its like talking about mysql not having transactions, despite transactions having been added back in '95 or so.
These days instead of sending up another shuttle with tools or parts they woukd probably try 3d printing something, at least while they waited for the launch.
Read the novel "The Right Stuff" for more background. There was a disagreement as to whether astronauts would be pilots of their spacecraft or mostly along for the ride.
I wonder if any of that desire was responsible for the Space Shuttle.
Early on--being the late 50s and into the early 70s--the desire for pilot control was entirely the rational thing. Automation was very primitive and pretty much limited to doing the right thing only when the situation was nominal. Pilots are easily overwhelmed by tedium and a "pilot in the loop" design methodology prevailed at NASA. Basically that means if a human can do it, they should. The Soviet design took a different tack and invested more in automation, dooming some cosmonauts but being probably for the best long-term.
Nowadays we know how to do some things very, very well--rendezvous--so heavy automation makes sense. In other areas that are more research projects pilot in the loop still makes sense.
It's a tradeoff of efficiency for flexibility and fault tolerance.
It looks to me, as an amateur observer, that the automation vs. pilot-in-the-loop debate is today not yet settled. The Air France crash into the Atlantic was entirely caused by pilots who were used to automation, and made a series of wrong decisions when it cut out on them, even though it cut out according to spec (i.e. it did not fail, just handed control to humans as designed). It's arguable that had human pilots been actively flying that plane the whole time, it would not have crashed.
Absolutely. It'll never be settled, so long as human ambition pushes us into unknowns. You can automate what you understand perfectly and make trade-offs in areas where you don't, as above. Fascinating subject, really.
The mission was rushed, politically motivated, and a failure. There was nothing casual about it. After the 60s the USSR space program was a mess of failures and catching up to NASA.
>because astronauts lobbied against any and every automation for fear of being made redundant.)
Well, when you don't live in an autocratic state, you actually get a say on what gets done especially when its your ass on the line. Perhaps fears were overplayed with the auto system dropping landing gear and killing everyone, but a simple compromise was reached: a cable (which every compatible STS shuttle had) would be plugged into the landing gear and then the computer for full automation. Frankly, I wouldn't trust 1970s era automation to land the spaceship I'm in.
Considering the massive bodycount of the USSR space program (Soyuz 1, Nedelin catastrophe, Soyuz 11, etc) maybe erring on the side of caution made sense instead of risking life and limb on "firsties." US Astronauts were very aware of the early Soviet deaths and failures and wanted nothing of them. Cosmonauts on the other hand, had no choice but to obey their communist masters unless they wanted to spend the rest of their lives in a gulag. Komarov walked into Soyuz 1 knowing he would die, for example. Polyus project managers knew it wasn't going to work because top leadership rushed it and wanted to 'show up the Americans,' etc. Environments built on fear perform sub-optimally.
edit: driveby downvoters, my comment is factually correct, please explain yourselves.
edit2: cant post a new item right now so my reply to the parent below:
The era I'm discussing was prior to the Challenger. The US casualty numbers was well below USSR numbers at the time (its a stupid comparison anyway considering how many more people the HUGE STS could hold). Those astronauts knew those numbers. They didn't want to take changes like the risky and deadly USSR approach. That's why we didn't automate the Shuttle. NASA had a lower tolerance for risk because it respected the lives of its astronauts. In an autocracy you just throw bodies at the problem until you get the desired results.
>the Nedelin catastrophe, which was completely unrelated to the space program
It was a rocket explosion at the Baikonur Cosmodrome using the same staff/crew/engineers as the space program. The USSR didn't separate their military and civilian space program, so yes, its perfectly appropriate to hold them accountable for their lax safety standards that killed over 100 people! Hell, the Soviets even buried it and tossed these poor people into a mass grave and told the West that Nedelin died in a plane crash! So yeah, they saw it as part of their space program and it shamed them enough to lie about it.
In that era, NASA had First pilot-controlled space flight, first orbital solar observatory, first geosynchronous satellite, first satellite navigation system, first geostationary satellite, first Mars flyby, eight-day human spaceflight record, first orbital rendezvous, first 14-day human spaceflight record, first spacecraft docking, first orbital ultraviolet observatory, first humans on the Moon, first mobile rover driven by humans off earth, first spacecraft to orbit another planet: Mars, first human-made object sent on escape trajectory away from the Sun, first mission to enter the asteroid belt and leave inner solar system,84-day human-crewed space record (skylab 3), First Jupiter flyby, First planetary gravitational assist (Venus flyby), First Mercury flyby,etc. AND THAT'S JUST UP To 1974!
Its clear that NASA was going for scientific and difficult technical achievement and the Soviets were going for propagandist achievements. By the mid 60's the USSR couldn't keep up with NASA's achievements and the USSR space program became a joke with putting guns into space after the US moon landing and of course, the US's STS which changed the game in regards to human spaceflight from a crew/mass perspective. The ISS wouldnt be possible without its lifting and cargo capabilities.
> The mission was rushed, politically motivated, and a failure.
Polyus was, yes. Energia performed well.
> After the 60s the USSR space program was a mess of failures and catching up to NASA.
You mean after the end of the moon landings? When NASA was, essentially, dicking around and trying to figure out what to do with their expensive new toy, while doing a handful (quite PR effective) probe launches?
Roskosmos, meanwhile, launched six Saljut stations, Mir, and about as many planetary missions as the rest of the world combined, including the first extraplanetary rovers.
> Considering the massive bodycount of the USSR space program (Soyuz 1, Nedelin catastrophe, Soyuz 11, etc)
"Etc."? That's it. NASA has a higher body count between Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia, Ignoring the Nedelin catastrophe, which was completely unrelated to the space program – ICBM accidents hardly count, or we could add a lot more fatalities on both sides, e.g. close to sixty alone from Titan II accidents in the USA.
> Roskosmos, meanwhile, launched six Saljut stations, Mir, and about as many planetary missions as the rest of the world combined, including the first extraplanetary rovers.
You've mistook Russia for USSR? Roskosmos definitely not a Soviet space agency.
> Frankly, I wouldn't trust 1970s era automation to land the spaceship I'm in.
This comment led to me looking up a few details of the lunar landings on Wikipedia; pretty interesting stuff. Apparently the Apollo 14 trusted the computers and the engineers back on Earth enough to reprogram the things on the fly, although the radar system was still buggy - but I'm not sure if the latter counts as software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent
Astronauts would have been aware of Apollo era automation problems. The most notable the Apollo 11 Rendezvous Radar Switch eating all available CPU and nearly aborting the mission.
There's also a cultural problem here. Many of the early astronauts were test pilots, who came from a "I fly this" culture. Taking away their autonomy was difficult and every screw up that engineers made caused further rifts between the two. Engineers vs astronauts was a common narrative back then.
> The most notable the Apollo 11 Rendezvous Radar Switch eating all available CPU and nearly aborting the mission.
Except that it wasn't. The Apollo Guidance Computer had full multitasking, and it was reporting that the rendezvous radar, which the crew had accidentally left on, was trying to eat up CPU and was denied it by the scheduler. The (correct) reaction was ignoring it and letting the scheduler continue booting the radar off the task list.
Actually, leaving the rendezvous radar active was the checklisted procedure. Remember that in the event of an aborted landing they would be needing the rendezvous radar right away to try and find the CSM, so the idea was to have it powered up and locked on.
The problem was that the computer that guided the radar antenna controlled the orientation by phase angle. Everything was running on 28V AC, but the computer and the radar mount were on separate AC feeds. The documentation specified that the supplies needed to be frequency-locked, but failed to specify the need for being phase-locked as well.
So basically the two systems could be at any phase angle relative to each other. In this case, when they flipped the switch they were really out of phase and the computer was commanding traverses that were entirely out of range. The invalid angle caused the radar antenna to continuously issue interrupts.
I'd imagine the system basically works like an open-loop system. That would mask the fault, since usually the radar would just lose some of its field-of-view around the edges but work fine in the center. Or that usually it would just cause the antenna to slew a bit off-target at first before the control loop guided it back, but this time it was so far out of range the antenna wouldn't even accept it.
It's probably a good thing they didn't need to abort, because with such a fault I doubt the rendezvous radar would have functioned properly. Even if they knew about the design problem (I don't think they did?) they probably would have a hard time power-cycling it. There is no "off" setting for that switch, only SLEW (on) and AUTO (computer controlled). During an abort I would imagine that AUTO would have the computer keep the radar online, so they would have had to use the DSKY to have the computer turn it off and back on. Who knows what effect that might have on an active abort program.
Yes, the executive was a great piece of engineering and definitely saved the mission. Margaret Hamilton was a great systems engineer, and NASA as a whole has a track record of rigorous software engineering practices. As a result, in the last 11 versions of the Shuttle's 420k-line software package they have had a total of 17 bugs.
I was going to say much of the same, but I won't echo you.
I just recently watched this really interesting video from London Code Mesh 2015 on the Apollo Guidance Computer where the radar antenna-generated interrupts were discussed (among other interesting bugs).
> US Astronauts were very aware of the early Soviet deaths and failures and wanted nothing of them.
So they jumped in an overengineered spacecraft, built by bureaucrats from NASA, sometimes 8 at a time, and as a result more astronauts died.
The shuttle went the way of the dodo and we are using Soviet's 70s technology to get into orbit. If anything, the history is hard to ignore. And the irony is there too, staring us it the face.
Also nevermind that Soviet's Buran prototype was the first fully automated space shuttle, so again autocratic state wins? (going by your labels here...)
> Environments built on fear perform sub-optimally.
History proves you wrong again. A lot of environments built on fear produced rugged dependable products.
>The shuttle went the way of the dodo and we are using Soviet's 70s technology to get into orbit.
We're between systems, like the seven years between Apollo and the STS. Its a happy coincidence Russia still has a legacy system for lifting people into the largely STS built and ferried ISS. The SLS/Orion and SpaceX systems will be the next generation of spaceflight that will take us out of the LEO. Neither the Soyuz or the STS could leave LEO.
>was the first fully automated space shuttle, so again autocratic state wins?
The Buran sent as many men into space as Zimbabwe. Zero. That's not a "win" in anyone's book. It was a prototype and a blatant copy of the STS.
The STS had automatic capabilities but astronauts, feared rightly, that if the landing gear went down accidentally they would die. The Shuttle does NOT HAVE the capabilities to lift its own landing gear. That's done by a ground crew. If this went off accidentally in space then these people are stranded. If it goes off during re-entry they would die.
Having a removable and stowed cable for plugging the flight computer into the landing gear was a rational compromise. This allowed scenarios where an abandoned shuttle could fly itself home.
It was a great win for two reasons -- they could do it technically and they proved it, even automated the whole thing (just like Zimbabwe right ;-) ). And the other win was they realized this was an expensive endeavor and not a very good approach to taking people into space.
It took Americans many hundreds of billions dollars and lives to realize that?
> We're between systems, like the seven years between Apollo and the STS.
That makes sense, hadn't thought of it that way. It has been only 4-5 years since last launch. Yeah I am looking forward to Orion/SLS!
> Its a happy coincidence Russia still has a legacy system for lifting people into the largely STS built and ferried ISS.
Is it? From a country that did pretty well with many firsts in space, builds reliable military hardware, killed less astronauts/cosmonauts than our Shuttle. I mean, yeah, we all hate Russia and their commie regime, but I think it is a disservice a bit to downplay their engineers.
> History proves you wrong again. A lot of environment built on fear produced rugged dependable products.
I think he meant political fear - in modern terms, the fear of your manager yelling at you, or firing you, or demoting you - and back then, of your manager sending you off to break rocks in the far east.
That's not the same thing as a fear of your hardware killing a man, and over-engineering as a result.
In a way that is not different than NASA. Perhaps at a local level, large bureaucracies are not that different. Even if political environment at the very top is so different.
(One can argue perhaps that large companies with hundreds of thousands of employees are like mini-communist, central-planned economy countries with all the pain and inefficiencies built in).
Soviet space mastermind Korolev was transferred from Siberian camp to a separate camp built for scientists so they can work their hearts out in hope that they will not be punished.
The after-accident investigations of the shuttle disasters don't exactly inspire confidence in NASA...
You probably were downvoted because you are mixing a lot of issues.
Energia and Buran were good and probably superior systems. That doesn't mean that the soviets didn't do other things "badly" (technically, morally, ...), but that isn't directly relevant.
>>because astronauts lobbied against any and every automation for fear of being made redundant.)
> Well, when you don't live in an autocratic state, you actually get a say on what gets done especially when its your ass on the line.
Buran could fly without "asses on the line", so I don't see how that argument works. Which also means the owners of said asses aren't getting fame afterwards...
Keeping just the landing gear away from the autopilot doesn't keep anyone safe. That's letting it do all the hard parts but out of some weird neurosis not letting it do one of the easiest things.
It was to keep astronauts feeling important and in the loop, it was a political decision. If space shuttles could be completely automated imagine how you'd feel as an astronaut, who trained for all those years, waited, and then you just mostly sit and watch the flight computer do the work for you.
The fact that Popular Mechanics scanned, traced, and digitally reconstructed the exterior of the weapon from some grainy footage is almost more interesting than the article itself.
I think it's fair to say that Anatoly Zak did it. I've never seen it before, but look at all the renderings on http://www.russianspaceweb.com/ (browse around).
I would even guess that he shopped around first printing of it and they picked it up, that they didn't commission it.
I'm wondering about 'kick' when firing a cannon mounted in an aluminum can (space station). Why didn't the thing rip a hole? And what about orbital mechanics - the cannon ball goes that way, space station goes the other way. And the gasses expelled from the breech - noxious fumes in an enclosed space! It sounds like a fabulously dangerous thing.
They just fired their rockets to compensate for the inertia.
If you want recoiless weapons in space, you could probably just buy a 1960's era Gyrojet pistol or rifle. The launched rocket powered bullets instead of conventional ammo and because the rocket ammunition was self-propelled, it was nearly recoiless.
Also, the weapons, especially the rifle, have this wonderful 1960's era futurist design to them. The Gyrojet weapons are probably worthy of their own posting.
They specifically mentioned that they were firing retro-jets in the opposite direction at the same time they fired the cannon, and I imagine that the cannon was mounted on the outside; they weren't pulling a trigger by hand.
The aluminum cans have to be strong enough to withstand making it to orbit - I imagine they're not as flimsy as an open coke can.
Was the purpose of the cannon to take down other satellites or just for research purposes? Presumably whilst this appears to be a weapon with a considerable range, satellites don't operate that close to each other?
The mathematics to calculate hitting another satellite traveling in a different orbit and at a different speed sounds like an interesting challenge.
If you were trying to disable a satellite what would be the best target? Solar cells?
> The mathematics to calculate hitting another satellite traveling in a different orbit and at a different speed sounds like an interesting challenge.
It's the exact same mathematics you already need to be able to dock spacecraft, change orbits, or get into orbit in the first place. Any organization capable of putting things in orbit would have no trouble, it's just a case of plugging some different numbers in.
> If you were trying to disable a satellite what would be the best target? Solar cells?
Relative velocities are going to be enormous without even trying, so it doesn't matter where you hit it - the energy will have to go somewhere.
> Relative velocities are going to be enormous without even trying, so it doesn't matter where you hit it - the energy will have to go somewhere.
With so much energy, it really doesn't matter? I imagine it would look like shooting a bullet through cardboard - the latter gains a hole, but otherwise doesn't even notice. Energy generally stays in the bullet that continues its flight.
The quoted range was two miles though I have to think that was within the atmosphere. Even in LEO something fired @ 1500mph relative to the source should continue to travel at that speed unless it interacts with something no?
It'd slow down eventually, LEO still has a really thin atmosphere that would still affect a bullet, it'd be way longer than 2 miles though. Effective range makes more sense for a spacegun and would be more of your ability to accurately point and fire than the distance the round could travel. If you can only accurately hit objects within 2 miles the fact that the rounds would orbit for a while doesn't really matter.
Thankfully, it failed to reach orbit due to a software bug.
(Said Energia rocket would then launch the Soviet space shuttle, Buran, on a completely unmanned mission, including autopiloted runway landing – something the US STS never could, because astronauts lobbied against any and every automation for fear of being made redundant.)