memes

Which makes the Space Shuttle one of the most stupidest designs of an actual spacecraft in existence.

The Solid Rocket Boosters cannot be shut down. That’s why the Challenger was cooked the moment the O-ring on the segmented boosters failed.

The Soviets actually had a “copy” of a Space Shuttle called the Buran. It’s a “copy” only in-so-far as it superficially resembled the American Space Shuttle. But those were two entirely separate beasts.

The Space Shuttle had a rocket engine (RS-25) built-in to the spacecraft itself. After every mission, the Space Shuttle had to be grounded for months just to repair the engine.

The Energia-Buran are two separate systems. The Energia is the launch vehicle, and can be used to launch anything other than spacecrafts. The Buran is its own spacecraft without an attached rocket engine, so it doesn’t need to be grounded for extensive repairs after each flight.

The Energia is powered by liquid propellent staged combustion rocket engines (which the Americans never mastered, they simply bought an entire warehouse of the RD-180s after the USSR fell to power their own Atlas rockets, and only recently did SpaceX attempted one themselves for their Super Heavy because everyone now realizes just how good the concept is), which means it can be shut down by automated systems should a failure is detected. The crew would have enough time to safely abort the mission. The Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster cannot be shut down even if the system determines that a critical failure is imminent. The entire crew is dead the moment that happened for the Challenger.

As an added bonus, the Buran had an autonomous flight system that allows automated landing. The first and only Buran flight was done without any crew - the first uncrewed flight of spaceplane in history that completed the orbital flight and landed on the designated runway all by itself.