“I’ll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded”

Not just THE BIBLE, but the King James version. The one that Jesus himself wrote, without the aid of a translator, because God.

I’ll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded.

50 years, really. And say what you will (it is ‘old tech’), but it is still getting work done:

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/shuttle_station/features/shuttle_map.html

Ok, I’m not pro russian by any stretch of the imagination, much less pro soviet (sovietism was not socialism or communism), but it’s been around so long because it just works and cheaply at that. The same cannot be said for the shuttle.

I don’t care how little atmosphere it experiences, if you can’t escape the gravity well at least enough to reach orbit, you aren’t in space.

Only one unmanned mission flew during the program and the orbiter was later crushed in a hanger collapse.

Well Buran only went up unmanned. I don’t know if they ever got pictures of it in space, I can’t find any, only artist renderings. Many US astronauts felt the Buran was better because they didn’t like solid fuel rockets which are more dangerous. I saw an interview with some and their feelings about the other project.…

The Russians actually made one big improvement. Our shuttles have those 3 big rocket engines in the rear. Those rockets are used to achieve orbit and are not used during flight or re-entry or landing. So there’s really no need to carry them into orbit. The Russians apparently were going to use a different kind of lift…

I’m sure the soyuz has evolved during that timespan. And it has proven to be quite reliable as well - that’s a benefit of using older tech you’ve had time to work the kinks out of...

It would have, had the program not been cancelled. There were two major factors behind the premature end of Energia-Buran. One was the loss of Polyus, a space station launched aboard the second Energia. A series of screwups led to it deorbiting itself before it completed one revolution of the Earth. It would have…

You just listen to the old Pork Chop Express and take his advice on a dark and storm night, all right? When some wild-eyed, eight foot tall maniac grabs your neck and taps the back of your favorite head up against the bar room wall and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if you’ve paid your dues, well you…

No orbit, no count.

The sad thing is that the Buran design (apart from making a number of seemingly arbitrary changes to the space frame) actually improved the engines. It used a different type of fuel, and somehow that made them more reliable than engines in the US fleet.

Someone needs to do an asteroid disaster movie, where Buran is humanity’s last chance, and call the movie “Snowstorm”, then it can rest in its abandoned peace forever after.

A big difference is these guys planned ahead of time and understood the risks when they did it and took precautions to hopefully not get caught.

The Enterprise wasn’t a mock-up. It had full warp drive and phaser and photon torpedo capacity and did a 5 year mission for crying out loud.

Sorry to have to do this, but this always drives me crazy:

Did you say minke?