[NCC-73515]

Technically, it's more advanced than the US shuttle.

[Saquist]

How so

[tomcatjosh]

Well yeah they stole the shuttle design and improved it.

[Futureguy]

Originally Posted by tomcatjosh

Well yeah they stole the shuttle design and improved it.

Apparently they had the "Auto Pilot" function working well enough to launch and land it without any "On-Board Astro/Cosmo-nauts. That should have been something our shuttles should have had from the start. That way they could have sent up cargos without the need for charging the life support systems, using it as a delivery system for construction and then sending up a crew to do the assembly. Still would have been a bit convoluted using a man-rated vehicle for mere delivery and separate missions for crewed assembly. This is where a smaller crew-only shuttle would have been ideal to develop, leaving a larger work-horse shuttle to deliver and return cargo without additionally endangering a crew. The shuttle-c would have been such a vehicle, but the smaller shuttle would have still been needed to transfer crew.

[Saquist]

The American Shuttles have always had auto pilot.
That's why they can time the landing from de-orbit down to the second. They don't let the astronauts pilot the ship through reentry...

They just practice that incase of equipment casualty.
Now the shuttle isn't auto on the ground like the Buran for braking and navigating once on the ground.

[Ensign James T. Kirk]

Originally Posted by NCC-73515

Technically, it's more advanced than the US shuttle.

You mean because of the jet engines in the tail? That just reduces payload capacity, and of course the Soviets never really meant to use Buran for workhorse duty, it seems.

Buran was a "Nyah, nyah, us too" project stolen from the US.

[Saquist]

Actually my theory is that they couldn't achieve the same balance in mass the orbiter has in weight and found that they needed the jet engines to make the landing.

I noticed that the shuttle has it's nose gear actually in the nose and the Buran has the gear further back. This would take away from crew deck just as the jet engines take a way from the payload.

[tomcatjosh]

Yeah The reason was cuz the soviets didn't have the guts to send anyone up on the thing.

[NCC-73515]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_program
section "key differences"

[Saquist]

I'm not sure if you can count the payload advantage since the Buran's mass didn't include jet engines.

Most of the pluses for the Russian shuttle actually lie with the Energia Lift System which everyone with any intrest in aeronautics knows is a superior launch system if not a superior design.

I was surprised to see the shuttle was less aerodynamic than the Buran.