[HN Gopher] Declassified spacecrafts and orbital weapons of the ...
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Declassified spacecrafts and orbital weapons of the USSR (2018)
Author : eternalban
Score : 245 points
Date : 2021-02-17 13:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.xissufotoday.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.xissufotoday.space)
| mabbo wrote:
| I can't stay on that website long because I start getting motion
| sick from the background. Animated gif backgrounds belong in the
| 90s.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Somebody should really call the Polyus.
| jugg1es wrote:
| So the space laser crashed because the same command was
| accidentally used for both opening the solar panels and
| discarding the side module covers?
| tdy721 wrote:
| Or because Gorbachev ordered it...
| sneak wrote:
| I wish the US would declassify the space weapon stuff it did in
| the 70s and 80s.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In 1993 I saw a complete ground-based anti-satellite laser
| system in New Mexico that had everything to burn a satellite
| except for the laser (aka. "optical tracking system") It
| actually did have a 25W laser that excited a "sodium guide
| star" in the upper atmosphere that controls a mirror that
| undoes atmospheric twinkling and is necessary if you want to
| uplink laser energy with high efficiency.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| That's nothing - in 1985 I saw a demo for an orbital 5
| megawatt laser.
| reasonabl_human wrote:
| Okay, story time!
| moreati wrote:
| I think it's a reference to Real Genius
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2018)
|
| and here's some more discussion about Soviet space cannon from
| years back
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10575450
| joshgoldman wrote:
| Beware this page is mostly conspiracy theories
| KineticLensman wrote:
| and / or some artists impressions of the systems that were
| never actually funded or constructed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| No it is basically correct. A 1 MW chemical laser and optical
| targeting system of that scale was very possible at that time,
| see
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
|
| and
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Energy_Laser
|
| for examples closer to Earth. It is by no means an apocalyptic
| weapon, but a satellite-to-satellite laser attack could make a
| detectable space junk mess for decades to come.
|
| That generation of chemical lasers use dangerous chemical
| reactions, like burning hydrogen in fluorine or mixing
| different kinds of bleach: operator safety concerns kept them
| from being fielded.
| p_l wrote:
| The laser was supposed to take care of SDI sats and other
| space-borne elements, indeed.
| p_l wrote:
| With exception of the RAKS entry, all the other stuff has been
| confirmed. It's just mostly experimental, but built, systems.
|
| A bit of that happened because USSR ended up assuming that USA
| was more ready with some techs than they thought, and scaled to
| match (the amount of crazy that was due to essentially
| misunderstandings was, well, crazy).
| moftz wrote:
| Interesting that Sierra Nevada Corp's space plane looks so
| similar to the USSR Spiral
| stetrain wrote:
| The SNC Dream Chaser is based on several previous US designs,
| which probably involved some back-and-forth responding to what
| the USSR was doing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL-20_Personnel_Launch_System
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar
| imglorp wrote:
| If you want a lifting body with a high AOA reentry,
| maneuverable approach, and runway landing, then the physics
| probably dictates everyone converging on similar shapes. Also
| in this group: Buran, Shuttle, and X37.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Also in this group: Buran, Shuttle
|
| Buran/shuttle were more than just lifting bodies. They had
| the large wings necessary for cross-range flight, something
| more than just landing. This was needed for military
| single-overflight mission profiles that were never flown.
| petard wrote:
| Some of these look like German WWII aircraft eg ME-163
| nixass wrote:
| Russians poached some German engineers as well, not only NASA
| jryle70 wrote:
| The Soviets also transferred the entire rocket manufacturing
| line from Germany to USSR
|
| http://www.russianspaceweb.com/rockets_ussr_germany.html
| inglor_cz wrote:
| And a lot of the documentation that was on the territory of
| the future GDR.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| More comprehensive and authoritative source for same data:
|
| http://www.astronautix.com/
|
| eg Kliper (2004)
|
| http://www.astronautix.com/k/kliper.html
| tectonic wrote:
| We recently wrote a piece about space warfare for Orbital Index:
| https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-12-02-Issue-93/#space-...
|
| One of the resources we linked to was this recent PDF
| (https://aerospace.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/Reesman_Ph...)
| called "The physics of space war: how orbital dynamics constrain
| space-to-space engagements" from Aerospace Corp. which talks
| about how the limited [?]v budgets of space vehicles limits
| warfare and makes planning and timing essential to an attack. The
| PDF, oddly, has the following invisible text on the first page if
| you click and drag to highlight it: "THIS MATERIAL IS BEING
| PROVIDED PRE-RELEASE SOLELY FOR THE USE OF GEN. JAMES DICKINSON,
| AND IS NOT APPROVED FOR RELEASE."
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Such statements are true of low-orbit but once you get out to
| places like geostationary orbits things do slow down. Sats out
| there can do things with much lower deltaV, things like direct
| dashes at targets, that are not practical in lower orbits.
| edumucelli wrote:
| Nice find!
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| Not sure how much I trust this page but if you are interested in
| an alternative history version of the space race I highly
| recommend For All Mankind on AppleTV+! It's a great show IMO. It
| shows what might have happened if the USSR beat the US to the
| moon and the Space Race never ended. It kicks the US into high
| gear and leads to a more advanced and in my opinion better USA
| (more liberal and technological/focused on Science). It's a
| biased towards a progressive viewpoint (so am I so it works
| really well for me).
| cydonian_monk wrote:
| I wish I could recommend "For All Mankind", but I can't. And
| while I feel the first three episodes were strong and well
| produced, I just really really didn't agree with where it ended
| up going. I'll still watch the second season because it's scifi
| on TV and it's a genuinely interesting show, but I can't shake
| the "late seasons of Battlestar Galactica" feeling the later
| 2/3rds or the season left me with.
| sumitviii wrote:
| Maybe the show tries to say that winning leads to slacking off?
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| I'd say it says the competition can bring out the best in us.
| Which I find to be generally true, of course it can also
| bring out the worst in us also!
| Koshkin wrote:
| Honestly, I have never understood why landing on the Moon first
| would amount to winning the space race (except being nice to
| think about it as such).
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| I think that's part of the premise for the show. Landing on
| the Moon did slow down the Space Race, there are a ton of
| documented plans for the advancement of the Space program but
| the will to push them through disappeared as soon as the US
| "beat" the Soviets. I think the real reason was that many,
| maybe even most people only really cared about Space from a
| standpoint of beating the other team. The show really leans
| into that in the early episodes. It does cast the USA as the
| "good" guys, in that even if we are losing we never give up
| until we win.
| ljf wrote:
| Totally this. I have a little (uniformed) ramble I do when
| explaining 'Vision' over 'Mission' to people.
|
| In that putting a man on the moon was just the mission, we
| don't actually know the vision. The vision statement (if
| there was one) could well have been 'win at space, and
| therefore have the most developed scientific processes'
| 'beat the damn Russians' 'show the world the superiority of
| capitalism'
|
| (then you can rattle down the vmost pyramid - the
| objectives (bring them back alive, broadcast it in real
| time etc) - the strategies (a pure oxygen environment
| simplifies some things for engineering - and is far too
| dangerous... ) and the tactical day to day/week to week
| decisions that had to be made. But all the 'MOST' are
| easier when people on the project understand the vision.
| leetcrew wrote:
| it seems even more odd if you view the space race as mostly
| being a fig leaf for ICBM development. I find this argument
| mostly convincing, but if the main goal is to build effective
| warhead delivery systems, why spend so much on manned flight
| specifically? there's not much of a practical case for
| building stuff that can take humans all the way to the moon
| and back. ICBMs don't need nearly as much delta-v nor do they
| need to keep humans onboard alive, and by far the most useful
| things to put in space are LEO or GEO satellites.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| Didn't the ICBM development come first? The Mercury and
| Gemini programs used barely modified ICBM boosters and the
| engineers at first didn't want to put controls in at all,
| they were already confident of their ability to maneuver
| and navigate in orbit. At some point I think the simplest
| explanation is the correct one - it was a giant contest of
| wills between the superpowers.
| arethuza wrote:
| President Johnson made a fascinating comment about the
| space program:
|
| _I wouldn 't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35
| or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else
| had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from
| space photography, it would be worth ten times what the
| whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many
| missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were
| way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were
| building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring
| fears we didn't need to harbor._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Yes but the manned space program was very different than
| the spysat spacelaunch program. If the goal was only
| unmanned satellites, the space program would have cost a
| tenth of what it did. just look to the ICBM/SLBM
| programs, which diverged from the manned rocket programs
| after only a couple years. The tech looks similar but is
| actually very different in practice.
| [deleted]
| outworlder wrote:
| If countries were companies, the Apollo Program would have
| got a large portion of its funding from the "Marketing"
| department. Because that's what it was.
|
| It was still money well spent. Far greater returns than all
| the billions that are sunk in the military each day.
|
| In this particular case, I think it started as a means to
| show off ICBMs (the Sputnik in particular) and I guess spy
| satellites. But then the race started and it got out of
| hand.
|
| If the adversary has already managed to put a satellite up,
| you don't go and put yours as it would just get you to
| parity (at a later date even, so you are actually behind!).
| What you do is you one-up them. What can you put up there
| that's better than a satellite? People. But they did that
| too. What do you do then? Let's put people on the freaking
| Moon, let's see you top that!
|
| Had the USSR managed to land people on the Moon too and
| this kept escalating, we would have orbital habitats on
| Europa by now.
| HeavenFox wrote:
| I think the U.S. basically won by the Soviets' "forfeiting".
| If USSR landed on the moon second but soon after, say, landed
| a man on Mars, and the U.S. unable to accomplish the feat, we
| would say the Soviets won.
| nickff wrote:
| The Soviet program was doomed by technology and
| circumstance. The USSR was far behind on hydrogen,
| computers, and control systems; then the linchpin of their
| program, Sergei Korolev died (likely due in part to his
| term in the Gulags). They didn't give up, they failed (as
| exemplified by the N1 rocket failures).
| izacus wrote:
| No, the Sovient program was doomed because the military
| lost any interest in funding Korolev's trips to Moon
| after they got what they wanted from the program - a
| fully working ICBM capable of reaching USA.
|
| After that the funding was heavily curtailed and
| redirected to other near-military projects like spy
| satellites.
|
| The fact that the program itself was ruinously expensive
| for USSR (which was still less developed than US) and was
| burning precious R&D resources was also not
| insignificant.
|
| Korolev by James Harford is a rather readable insight
| into what was going on inside the Soviet space program:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213301.Korolev
| wwarner wrote:
| Scientific and technological achievement are critical for
| evaluating the effectiveness of policy. As I understand it,
| the issue really was that the Soviets believed that socialism
| should lead to a more scientific society, as they believed
| that socialism itself was based on the values of scientific
| progress. So defeat in the sciences was truly a blow to the
| philosophical underpinnings of the entire Soviet project. Not
| to mention that scientific advances lead directly to economic
| power and military superiority. I read that when Reagan
| announced the plan to fund the hugely expensive Strategic
| Defense Initiative, Soviet generals, having exhausted all
| their financial reserves losing the space race, felt that
| there was no way that the Soviet economy could keep up with
| the military advances of the West.
| wwarner wrote:
| I guess recently released Soviet documents don't support
| the idea that Soviet generals were afraid of the scale of
| SDI.
|
| [0] http://russianforces.org/podvig/2013/03/did_star_wars_h
| elp_e...
| pueblito wrote:
| Every race has to have a finish line
| sobellian wrote:
| The most obvious counterexample to this would be an arms
| race.
| conk wrote:
| Maybe we just haven't hit the "finish line" yet with the
| arms race...
| gengear wrote:
| We can reduce this to halting problem. We will never know
| finish line exists until we reach one?
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| On one hand, it's pure propaganda from the side that didn't
| already have the first satellite or human in space to their
| name.
|
| On the other, landing on an extraterrestrial body is a
| significantly more difficult challenge, particularly the
| precision computing to steer the lunar lander.
|
| Computers at the time were hand-welded and unsuitable for the
| rigors of space (turbulence, radiation). The brand new
| invention of the integrated circuit sought to solve these
| problems, but they were wildly expensive, so the US dumped
| boatloads of money into making them cheaper and easier to
| manufacture. Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, and the
| foundations for the personal computing era were in place.
|
| So in a way, Silicon Valley owes an eternal debt of gratitude
| to Cold War propaganda insistent that the finish line of the
| space race was to be the lunar surface.
| Koshkin wrote:
| OTOH see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9
| lostlogin wrote:
| The show is great. Without too much of a spoiler, the route it
| takes toward the end with its need for individual heroics is
| rather unfortunate.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| FYI, there's another season starting in just a few days. Just
| sharing in case you weren't aware.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| I think that's one of the things I really like about the
| show. That is shows that even in Hard(ish) SciFi there is
| room for humans to be heroes. Also minor spoiler
|
| ------
|
| it show's diverse crews as being able to perform heroics just
| as much as the standard male heroic type.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| May I recommend The Expanse as another, possibly more mature,
| take on humanity's space era.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| Actually the expanse, for all mankind, and the martian are
| my erm ... I guess holy trinity of modern hard(ish) sci fi
| about space exploration. There is a lot of overlap in the
| fandoms of each and each series references each other to
| give a very unofficial shared universe feel. For example:
|
| The expanse has had references to the USN Jamestown which
| is from For All Mankind (it was a model in the expanse in
| an office of a thing -trying to avoid spoilers - that
| appears in FAM)
|
| The expanse had a ship named the MCRN Watney (Mark Watney
| is the name of the character in the Martian)
|
| The Authors of each series have praised the other series
| and jokingly said that it's the same timeline/universe. I
| know it's not really but in my head cannon it is and I
| really LOVE that timeline.
|
| I'd HIGHLY recommend all three as they are my favorite
| media properties.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| I think they address this pretty well actually. It's hard to
| say exactly where without spoilers but in particular a
| character talks about the difference that a death of a hero
| (astronaut) makes vs the command control guys or nameless
| ground crew. One of the many things I liked about the show is
| pointing out how that really matters why it shouldn't.
| simonh wrote:
| To be fair in the end it's down to a very small number of
| individuals a long way from Earth having to deal with
| extraordinary circumstances. That's hardly unrealistic given
| the circumstances.
| itissid wrote:
| Very unfortunate because a lot of practical engineering and
| battle tested systems design practices came from the apollo
| program and it would not have happened without teams of
| people working together.
| f6v wrote:
| Sounds interesting, is it filled with drunk angry soviets
| though?
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| There has only been one season and the main Russian on the
| show was actually pretty cool IMO. The show does a decent job
| of showing the USSR's people as being real people, not evil
| communists.
| tzfld wrote:
| Kliper never was a classified project.
| trhway wrote:
| it had huge natural overlap with hypersonic maneuverable
| reentry vehicle R&D which has been all the rage, at least in
| the Russian weapon program, in the last couple decades, so a
| lot of Kliper programs would be highly classified.
| weinzierl wrote:
| The "Spaceshuttle" BURAN ended up in a German Museum
| https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran
| aarchi wrote:
| It's not the only extant orbiter. Most of them are in Baikonur
| or Moscow. The one in Speyer was an atmospheric test vehicle.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme#List_of_vehi...
| [deleted]
| oytis wrote:
| The website doesn't look really reliable overall.
| imglorp wrote:
| Wiki lists some primary sources. Not a terribly different
| story.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)
| nanna wrote:
| From a UX perspective, the moving background on this site
| literally makes me feel sick.
| tauwauwau wrote:
| This worked for me
| document.body.style.backgroundImage =
| 'url(\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com/noimage.png)'
| jaywalk wrote:
| Came here to say this as well. I can't say I've ever had a
| website make me feel that way before, so that's really
| something.
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(page generated 2021-02-17 21:00 UTC)