Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Soviet shuttle
Message-ID: <1988Oct7.165349.20174@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1988Oct1.224801.11041@utzoo.uucp> <1109@cfa237.cfa250.harvard.edu> <1988Oct5.232401.15176@utzoo.uucp> <4938@hplabsb.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 88 16:53:49 GMT

In article <4938@hplabsb.UUCP> dsmith@hplabsb.UUCP (David Smith) writes:
>> Proton is not man-rated, by the way.
>
>Is there anything fundamentally un-man-ratable about it?  Or is it just
>that there has been no mission which requires the bother of getting
>it man-rated?

It's not entirely clear.  Proton does, reportedly, give its payloads a
fairly rough ride.  There are people who claim that the Soyuz 1 disaster
occurred because Soyuz 1 went up on a Proton.  (For those who forget,
Soyuz 1 had control problems after reentry, and possibly before, and its
pilot (Komarov) was killed when the parachute straps tangled.)  I'd guess
that it's a combination of both:  problems with Proton, lack of real need.

Proton may be sort of a hacked-together booster in any case.  Its upper
stages look a bit big for its first stage, and there is speculation that
the second and third stages were originally meant to be third and fourth
stages for the "G" superbooster.  The suggestion is that when the G was
abandoned (after three launch attempts all ended in explosions), Proton
was cobbled together in an attempt to salvage something from the project.
Proton's first stage *is* kind of a weird design.
-- 
The meek can have the Earth;    |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
the rest of us have other plans.|uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu