Manned or unmanned?

Irrespective of whether the first Energiya should carry a flight-rated orbiter or not, the question also arose whether to fly the real orbiter unmanned or manned, whenever it was ready to go. All earlier Soviet piloted spacecraft (Vostok, Voskhod, and Soyuz) had flown unmanned test missions before being cleared to fly cosmonauts. NASA had done the same in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, but departed from the practice for the first Space Shuttle flight, flown by astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen in April 1981.

The Russians, on the other hand, decided to play it safe and fly their first mission unmanned. In fact, at least two unmanned flights were envisaged in the test flight schedules known to have been drawn up in the late 1980s. While this came as a surprise to many in the West (simply because NASA had done it the other way), it was a completely logical decision in light of what had happened in earlier Soviet manned space projects.

Not only had it always been a tradition to put new piloted spacecraft through their paces in the unmanned mode, even when cosmonauts were on board, their role was often secondary to that of automatic systems. Vostok, the Soviet Union’s first piloted spacecraft, was a highly automated vehicle, partly because of early concerns over the effects of zero-g and other factors on a cosmonaut’s ability to control a spacecraft, but also because its design was unified with that of an unmanned spy satellite. While the same can be said of America’s Mercury spacecraft, mission success increasingly depended on human involvement as NASA moved on to the Gemini and Apollo programs, in no small part due to pressure from the astronauts themselves. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, the high degree of spacecraft automation continued in the Voskhod and Soyuz programs, even though experience had shown by that time that people could perfectly operate in weightlessness.

All this regularly resulted in fierce man-vs.-machine debates between Air Force officials, on the one hand (in favor of manual control), and the design and industry teams, on the other hand (in favor of automatic control), especially when it came to deciding whether Soyuz dockings should be performed in manual or automatic mode. However, the Air Force and its cosmonaut team had little say in the design of piloted spacecraft. This was considered the exclusive domain of the design bureaus themselves and of the space branch of the Strategic Rocket Forces, which officially placed orders for both manned and unmanned space vehicles (including Buran) and lacked the Air Force tradition of emphasizing the need to have a man in the loop. The results of this policy are still evident today. Dockings of Soyuz spacecraft with the International Space Station continue to take place in automatic mode, with the commander allowed to take over manual control only in emergency situations.

When the Russians were faced with the decision whether to fly Buran manned or unmanned, launch and orbital operations were probably not a major issue in the discussion. Launch is a highly automated process anyway with little or no crew involvement (as it is in the Space Shuttle program) and orbital operations could be limited to an absolute minimum if a very conservative test flight were planned.

The biggest difference with earlier ballistic spacecraft was that Buran would land like an airplane, an operation usually entrusted to pilots. Indeed, Space Shuttle pilots have so far always taken control of the Orbiter for the final approach and landing, although autoland capability has been present from the beginning of the program. However, for Buran, automatic landings would have been the preferred technique even for manned missions, meaning there was little point in risking the lives of cosmonauts on a first-flight vehicle.

Among the official reasons given was that with the limited amount of landing opportunities the ship would have to be able to land in adverse weather conditions such as snow and fog. Also, there was a need to safely bring the vehicle down if the pilots suffered from the effects of zero-g or became incapacitated for some reason [27]. Another factor may have been that, by the time Buran flew, there was more con­fidence in the ability of microwave landing systems to ensure safe hands-off landings than there had been almost a decade earlier when the Space Shuttle was gearing up for its test flights [28]. However, the real underlying reason appears to have been a preference in the space industry for highly automated spacecraft that was firmly rooted in the history of the Soviet space program.

Cosmonaut Oleg Makarov, one of the more outspoken members of the cosmo­naut corps, voiced his view on the matter in an interview shortly after Buran’s flight. He said the country’s space program had been built primarily on expendable launch vehicle technology, whereas the US program had evolved from both launcher and winged vehicle experience, and had included significant participation of personnel with aviation backgrounds. He said:

“The aviation industry is strong in the US, but it is just the opposite in my country. While the US places more confidence in the crew, the Soviet space program places full reliance on totally automatic missions for initial tests, such as the first launch of Buran. The [most important role] in the Soviet space program is [played] by launch vehicle engineers’’ [29].

Despite the industry’s preference for dead stick landings, there can be little doubt that the man-vs.-machine debate would have flared up again if Buran had ever got to the point where it was ready to carry a crew. Actually, there was skepticism in the cosmonaut corps not only about automatic landings, but also about the wisdom of flying Buran unmanned at all. According to the official history of NPO Energiya a number of cosmonauts, including Igor Volk and Aleksey Leonov, sent a collective letter to the government several months before the launch, saying that Buran could not reliably fly in unmanned mode and should be manned on its first mission.

However, a special commission set up to investigate this matter concluded that Buran should fly unmanned. One concession that was apparently made as a result of the discussion was to fly a conservative two-orbit mission rather than a more ambitious three-day flight considered earlier [30].

The formation of the commission may have been a symbolic move more than anything else. Speaking after the flight, Igor Volk stated that there had never really been an option to fly the first mission of Buran with a crew. He called the timing of the flight political, saying it had been demanded by management to demonstrate the vehicle in competition with the return to flight of the Space Shuttle after the Challenger accident in 1986. Volk rated the system’s maturity for the first flight as “near-zero”, saying the two-orbit mission was flown because that was all the ship’s computers could handle at the time [31].