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> One of the problems with the ultimate design is that the Shuttle stack relied in part on the SSMEs to get into orbit.

In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.

> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).

The engines used for its boosters, however, are used in modified form in the Zenit (RD-171, like RD-170 with extra axis of movement) and Atlas V (RD-180; size-reduced version) rockets, and will be used in Angara.

I'd like to correct - Energia didn't have solid boosters; the four strap-ons were considered the first stage and burned LOX/kerosene in RD-170. RD-170 has 2 axis of thrust vectoring for each chamber, and RD-171 - the variant used in Zenit rockets - has 1 axis of thrust vectoring (the tangential one).

Oops, yep, they weren't solid.

>>In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.

They were reused and were extremely efficient with a much higher unit cost than the equivalent energia stack main engine. The Soviets intended to design a carrier shuttle with reusable engines just like the US Shuttle but abandoned the effort due to reliability concerns.

That is the whole point of the space shuttle design in any case. If you can't reuse very powerful main engines that can be made to be very efficient there is no point in using a shuttle-truck design in the first place.

> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).

The energia was suboptimal for launching very large items due to its requirement that payloads have to carried on the side. This increases the weight due to atmospheric shielding that cannot be jettisoned and, more importantly, means a third stage cannot be used for efficiency. Every payload also has to be able to deploy itself into the correct orbit which requires custom development for each launch payload. So while energia was powerful it was very expensive as a standalone launch platform and never would have seen much use and consequently was never seriously considered as a future development platform.

The soviets would have done better just to develop a lh2/lox successor to the failed n1 rocket in the first place; especially if they didn't think the shuttle was going to be economical. Instead, they developed a sub-optimal launch vehicle that was itself based on a flawed concept and they had every intention of running the program out to the year 2000 even with a handful of launches scheduled and development costs that were already higher than the US shuttle.

Part of the problem with reusing SSMEs was that they burned hydrogen and hydrogen embrittlement basically ensured that any sort of fast or cheap turn around with SSMEs was impossible.

Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to work with if you want a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was really only nominally reusable, the engines had to practically be rebuilt every time to make sure everything was alright (the SRBs were hardly any better, though at least they were simpler.) (Really, hydrogen is just a pain in the ass in general though. It isn't very dense and needs to be kept much cooler than LOX to boot (requiring all that foam on the external tanks), which is why the Shuttle external tank had to be so goddamn big. The massive efficiency of LOX/LH2 are somewhat mitigated by these factors.)

If SpaceX can get their F9R working well, that will likely be the first properly reusable rocket (first stage anyway). Those will burn RP-1 which won't suffer from hydrogen embrittlement.

The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they discontinued Energia). Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.

Yeah, the SSME's were never as reusable as projected but their efficiency helped to mitigate somewhat the massive cost in weight of the shuttle. If you are committed to a shuttle design you might as well choose a very efficient partially reusable engine over one with RP-1 or a less efficient lox/h20 engine with lower total costs. That isn't an argument in favor of the shuttle just a reasonable design choice.

>>The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they discontinued Energia).

I have to disagree with this. The soviets began developing LH2/LOX technologies immediately after the N1 failure for the same reason that the Saturn V used LH2/LOX as an upper stage fuel: it is hard to make the math work for massive rockets that only consume RP-1. The weight penalty on the upper stages is just too large to be cost effective. You might as well pay the cost of LH2/LOX development if you intend to launch super heavy payloads.

>>Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.

If the criteria for deciding between SLS/Buran-Energia is which one can launch the most payload then, yes, you would choose Energia. This wasn't an intended benefit of Energia and was simply due to reliability concerns about reusing rocket engines(especially with fuel sources that the Soviets didn't have experience with).

It is hard to evaluate the cost of reusing Energia technology and developing a new booster that would be more optimal going forward. If the Soviets had the money and the political foresight to cancel Buran they might have been able to do it and use Soyuz and Energia together.

SSMEs were commonly reused. Only 46 were built and 3 were used for each of the 135 missions. I wouldn't say that 9 missions per engine is rare.

Mean SSME resuse was 8.8 flights per engine, median is 8. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/SSME_Flig...

> then had the common sense to realize the idea was silly

No, that's not what happened. Post-Perestroika economy collapse and massive inflation happened. The R&D funding crashed to absolute zero across all domains and Buran was just one of the casualties.

The resources of the Russian space program had to be prioritized, and the Buran didn't make the grade. Had shuttles actually been as great as everybody claimed, it would have.

From wikipedia:

Commenting on the discontinuation of the program in his interview to New Scientist, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov confirms their accounts: "We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed. It was originally designed as a military system for weapon delivery, maybe even nuclear weapons. The American shuttle also has military uses.[5]"

Its not like everything stopped in the early 90s; they continued to run Progress and Soyuz missions.

[...] and stealing Soviet spy satellites

Wow, now that you say it that seems logical that the shuttle could steal a satellite, but did that ever happen? I'm really hoping for some cool declassified stories from one/both sides of such a mission. :)

I'd be very surprised if it did. It's likely that the Russians would know about any Shuttle launch (I'm guessing they had a capability to track orbital objects) so it would be fairly obvious that the American's did it. At the height of the Cold war, things could have escalated pretty quickly is the US stole a spy satellite!

No, I don't believe it ever did. It had several classified missions, but I don't think any of them could have plausibly been used for stealing spy satellites.