After that, the Soviet shuttle program was terminated, and a piloted version of the Buran was never launched.Ī particularly important role in the evolution of the Soviet approach to automation belonged to the attempts to develop and use onboard computers. This automatic version successfully completed its one and only flight in Novemberġ988 (see Natalia Dubova's essay). Unlike the Americans, who from the very beginning designed their Space Shuttle as a piloted spacecraft, the Soviets decided the make the first version of the Buran fully automatic. Space Shuttle program with the construction of their own reusable space vehicle, the Buran. In the mid-1970s, the Soviets decided to meet the challenge of the U.S. Cosmonauts gradually began to play a more prominent role in the space program, although numerous failures of automatic systems and unsuccessful manual dockings in the absence of onboard guidance computers significantly slowed down the Soviet program. In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union made a strategic turn toward the construction of long-term space stations with an extensive program of onboard research. The failure of hasty, scattered, and underfunded Soviet attempts to catch up with the Apollo lunar program illuminated numerous shortcomings of the Soviet space industry. Of manned spacecraft, while many in the military gave preference toĪutomatic spy satellites (see cosmonauts' 1965 letter The cosmonauts strongly argued for the development They believed that the reliability and functionality of piloted spacecraft were largely dependent on the technical characteristics of automatic systems, and they conceptualized the automation of spacecraft control as a complete replacement of human activity with automaticĭevices (see Valentina Ponomareva's essay space program the astronauts were given primary responsibilities for these tasks, the Soviet designers largely continued their reliance on automatic As the space exploration agenda became more ambitious and included such complex tasks as rendezvous, docking, and lunar landing, the designers of the new Soyuz spacecraft faced the problem of optimal division of functions between human and machine onįeoktistov). The first piloted spacecraft, the Vostok and the Voskhod, were almost entirely automatic with back-up manual control systems. This project covers the period from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 to the launch of the Buran, the Soviet space shuttle, in 1988. Onboard computers in a larger technological, institutional, and This web project is aimed to examineĬritically such views and to document the development of Soviet It is often claimed that theseĬonsiderations delayed the implementation of computer technology onīoard Soviet spacecraft and hampered the development of the Soviet Leaders of this program to choose the simplest, well-tested, most The Soviet space program "failure-free" compelled the Computing in the Soviet Space Program: An Introduction
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