The rear part of the two shuttles are very different. The STS orbiter has three different kind of engines at the rear, the SSME (for putting it into orbit), the OMS for orbit insertion and RCS (steering system) for precision movement once in the working orbit. Buran has only two king of engines, the mains (which use liquid oxygen and kerosene) and the steering system with gazeus oxygen. This major difference make the rear of Buran much more lighter and less complicated to maintain.
Moreover there is no pods (for the OMS) so the engineers decided to put turbojet at the base of the vertical stabilizer to increase the travel distance during the re-entry phase in case Buran miss the entry window. But they were removed for the first flight because the system was not ready yet.
Autonomous
The on-board computers are made on the same principle, an important redundancy, to avoid erros in processing and hardware breakdown. The Buran's computer is cadenced à 4MHz (3 MHz for STS), it is composed of 4 independent units (5 for STS), the dead memory is stored on magnetic tapes, the memory of the Buran's computer is 819 200 words of 32 bits (106 496 words of 16 bits for STS) which give it a better calculation power. The engineers of the STS computer decided to use well known languages such as FORTRAN for coding the algorithme whereas for Buran new computer science languages were developed (high and down level). It's more powerful because it uses all the power of the hardware but needs more time to make the language and needs more time for the engineers and technicians to be fully ready to work on it.
Buran
Spaceshuttle BURAN in Technik Museum Speyer, Germany
组团报名
Compare with space shuttle, technically
Buran
History
Models
Destroyed
Speyer
Engine
The rear part of the two shuttles are very different. The STS orbiter has three different kind of engines at the rear, the SSME (for putting it into orbit), the OMS for orbit insertion and RCS (steering system) for precision movement once in the working orbit. Buran has only two king of engines, the mains (which use liquid oxygen and kerosene) and the steering system with gazeus oxygen. This major difference make the rear of Buran much more lighter and less complicated to maintain.
Moreover there is no pods (for the OMS) so the engineers decided to put turbojet at the base of the vertical stabilizer to increase the travel distance during the re-entry phase in case Buran miss the entry window. But they were removed for the first flight because the system was not ready yet.
Autonomous
The on-board computers are made on the same principle, an important redundancy, to avoid erros in processing and hardware breakdown. The Buran's computer is cadenced à 4MHz (3 MHz for STS), it is composed of 4 independent units (5 for STS), the dead memory is stored on magnetic tapes, the memory of the Buran's computer is 819 200 words of 32 bits (106 496 words of 16 bits for STS) which give it a better calculation power. The engineers of the STS computer decided to use well known languages such as FORTRAN for coding the algorithme whereas for Buran new computer science languages were developed (high and down level). It's more powerful because it uses all the power of the hardware but needs more time to make the language and needs more time for the engineers and technicians to be fully ready to work on it.
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