Testing the hardware

For most rocket, satellite, and spacecraft programs, the Soviet philosophy was to limit ground testing to the bare minimum and “fly the bird and see how it behaves”, no matter how many test flights were required before declaring it operational. For Energiya-Buran the Russians could hardly afford to do the same, if only because of the astronomical cost of the system and the serious implications of losing one or several vehicles in a small fleet of precious reusable spacecraft. Moreover, the Energiya-Buran system represented a leap in technology the likes of which had not been seen in the Soviet space program. It featured the country’s first reusable spacecraft (and a big one at that), the world’s most powerful liquid-fuel rocket engine (the RD-170), the first big domestic-built cryogenic engine (the RD-0120), the use of a vast array of new materials, and so on. Finally, the N-1 debacle, at least partly attributable to a lack of ground testing (particularly of the first stage), was firmly etched in everyone’s memories and a sure sign of the need to approach things differently when the next program of comparable proportions came along.

Therefore, for Energiya-Buran, the Russians had no choice but to shift the emphasis from in-flight to ground-based testing, requiring a major investment in infrastructure and hardware. Although the Russians undoubtedly benefited from more than seven years of US experience with Space Shuttle missions before Buran was finally launched, they clearly left no stone unturned when it came to testing their hardware, even for systems that were very similar to those flown on the Shuttle. In fact, in many respects the Energiya-Buran test program was more exten­sive than the Shuttle’s. Still, even that didn’t stop the Russians from sticking to their tradition of flying a piloted vehicle unmanned on its first mission, unlike NASA, which for the first time in its history put a crew on a first-flight vehicle with Columbia in 1981.