A Summary History of Reusable Spaceplane Development in the Soviet Union

Details A Summary History of Reusable Spaceplane Development in the Soviet Union A Summary History of Reusable Spaceplane Development in the Soviet Union

Jan 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002iaf..confe.286s&link_type=abstract

IAF abstracts, 34th COSPAR Scientific Assembly, The Second World Space Congress, held 10-19 October, 2002 in Houston, TX, USA.,

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Scientific paper

Beginning the early years of space advocacy in the 1920s, the Soviets proposed a large number of winged space vehicle concepts as part of broader work on space transportation systems. These designs left an important legacy that has remained unexamined. In the 1920s, theorists and publicists such as Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy and Fridrikh Tsander were the earliest proponents of spaceplane designs. These were followed in the 1930s by the first concrete projects for rocket-propelled aircraft designed by the young Sergey Korolev. During World War II, the Soviets experimented with a number of rocket-planes, not for spaceflight, but for battle purposes. Subsequently, in the postwar years, the Soviet government for the first time funded a research project into a hypersonic winged vehicle for delivery of nuclear weapons. In later years, in the 1960s, with the growth of the Soviet space program, Soviet designers fielded a multitude of spaceplane programs that all culminated in the development of the famous Buran space shuttle. In this article, I will summarize all known hypersonic and spaceplane proposals during the Soviet era. Despite considerable funding, none of the spaceplane designs ever reached operational status. My goal is to highlight the technological lineage of Soviet and Russian reusable spaceplane concepts in the hope of illuminating design approaches that have continued to influence approaches to developing space transportation systems.

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