Gagarin's Start now Soyuz-FG's End as shutters pulled on historic launchpad Russia bade farewell to the old "Gagarin's Start" yesterday as the last Soyuz-FG to be launched from the pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan headed to the International Space Station (ISS). Having seen the latest trio of ISS occupants safely off the Earth, "Site 1" will undergo some substantial modernisation ahead of …
Thus ends one of the most exhilarating and bold chapters of the history of our species, bogged down by beancounters and politicians with no balls.
But everything must end some day, so enter Musk and Bezos and capitalism and corporate profits, which will be the basis of actual space expansion.
Sad, but inevitable.
In fairness, that wouldn't be hard. From all the documentaries I've seen about the Space Shuttle it seems to have been a pig with lipstick/brick hybrid designed by committee. Which is not to say it wasn't used to do great things, the Hubble repair springs to mind. It was just designed to do everything, which is to say nothing.
Buran was worse, it was built by somebody copying the committee's homework on the bus.
It had no engines because the shuttle's engine are an amazing piece of engineering and the USSR couldn't build them. But it still was shaped to have engines and sat on the side of the booster where it would need to be if it had engines.
It took off in the wrong direction and had to do a stressfull aerodynamic roll to point toward orbit, because the shuttle did that. But the shuttle only did it because they were reusing an Apollo era launch platform that was built the other way around
It's main advantage was that it could be flown to orbit and back remotely, in which case why did you need pilots and so why did you have to design the craft to have pilots seats and windows at the front ?
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