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rfmcdonaldSiberian Light has a post containing pictures and video of the abortive Soviet space shuttle Buran as it floats down the Rhine to its new home in the Technik Museum Speyer.
This makes me a bit sad. In general, I tend to agree with Charlie Stross' famous June 2007 argument that the massive colonization of extraterrestrial bodies is unlikely for all manner of psychological, economic, and physical reasons. In this specific situation, the idea that the Soviet Union would adopt a full-scale space shuttle program at a time of serious economic crisis is very ill-advised, especially when the space shuttle technology used by the much richer United States just hasn't worked out nearly as well as its proponents originally thought.
And yet. Those dreams of space colonization might be fundamentally flawed, and a more active Soviet/Russian space program in the 1990s would almost certainly have been a bad idea for so many reasons. Still, a good part of me wonders "what if" it could have worked out spectacularly well. If nothing else, I would have enjoyed linking to human interest stories on people in Earth orbit, or on the Moon, or even on Mars.
This makes me a bit sad. In general, I tend to agree with Charlie Stross' famous June 2007 argument that the massive colonization of extraterrestrial bodies is unlikely for all manner of psychological, economic, and physical reasons. In this specific situation, the idea that the Soviet Union would adopt a full-scale space shuttle program at a time of serious economic crisis is very ill-advised, especially when the space shuttle technology used by the much richer United States just hasn't worked out nearly as well as its proponents originally thought.
And yet. Those dreams of space colonization might be fundamentally flawed, and a more active Soviet/Russian space program in the 1990s would almost certainly have been a bad idea for so many reasons. Still, a good part of me wonders "what if" it could have worked out spectacularly well. If nothing else, I would have enjoyed linking to human interest stories on people in Earth orbit, or on the Moon, or even on Mars.
