MOSCOW, Nov 15 The United States abandoned reusable spacecraft, because a large cargo flow to orbital stations and back to Earth did not form, and their flights turned out to be not profitable and safe enough, as originally expected, said Sergei Tsybin, deputy flight director of the Buran orbital ship for the automated flight control system (ACS).
November 15 marked 35 years since the first and only automatic flight of the Soviet reusable spacecraft Buran.
“The reason is very simple — both the shuttle and Buran were created not to put payloads into orbit, but to remove cargo from orbit, and for this there had to be a cargo flow at the orbital stations. We were promised ultra-pure crystals, ultra-pure biological substances and the like. Where is all this? There is nothing of this,» Tsybin said at the opening of the «People of Buran» exhibition at the Central House of Aviation and Cosmonautics DOSAAF Russia, dedicated to the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Buran spacecraft.
Another reason for the “decline” of the Space Shuttle program, the engineer named a miscalculation of economists — reusable spacecraft turned out to be not as profitable as expected.
«»When the Americans asked for money for the program, they presented a business plan, according to which at the first launches the cost of putting a kilogram of payload into orbit would cost approximately 3.5 thousand dollars, and after five years — 330 dollars. When constant flights began shuttle, NASA realized that it couldn’t handle it, and invited Lockheed to outsource, this company calculated everything honestly and set the amount — $500 million for the launch — with a shuttle payload of 20 tons, that’s 25 thousand dollars per kilogram,” explained Tsybin.
The third reason for abandoning reusable spacecraft, he named two crashes of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, which claimed the lives of 14 US astronauts.
The Space Shuttle Challenger crashed on its tenth launch on January 28, 1986, 73 seconds into its flight. One of the boosters came off the ship and pierced the fuel tank, igniting the fuel and destroying the shuttle. Seven astronauts died.
On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia crashed while returning to Earth. All seven crew members were killed. This was the 113th orbital flight of the Space Shuttle. After the accident, American shuttles made 22 more flights before the program was closed in 2011. A total of five such ships were built for space flights.