Space Hardware

I'm not here, per se, but I'm around.

You guys are blowing up my phone almost ten years after I stopped regularly updating this blog. I think it's terrific that there's a new wave of people finding these posts and enjoying them long after my original audience and mutuals deactivated or moved on. I hope everyone has a good time finding these old images and my probably-terribly-written captions from back in the day and sharing them around.

I've long since lost access to the archives I used to get my images from, and my life is too busy to support the amount of work this used to take, but you can rest assured I won't be deleting anything on here—so feel free to follow and scroll through when you feel like it.

You know, that is an excellent question. at least some of it was based on one-upsmanship with the United States (Buran was more advanced in many ways, definitely) and cheap, rapid launching of military payloads. I just recently read an article which stated Buran would only be very cost-effective if it launched every few weeks, much as our own Shuttle was supposed to.

Of course, Buran had one thing going for it that was quite exceptionally a good idea: The Energia booster, and everything that came with it. Even if the reusable spaceplane concept turned out to be a bust (as it did with the Shuttle), Roscosmos had a standalone modular heavy-lift launch vehicle. The boosters alone were effective first stages alone (and still are, as Zenit has proven), and the RD-170 has time and again been shown as one of the most reconfigurable engines the world has ever seen.