Well, the $20 nuts and bolts come from all the paperwork that is attached to
it. Aerospace fastener and materials strength are carefully controlled;
much tighter spec then the commercially available fasteners; smaller run.
This certainty in the strength of material helps you to design light weight
aircraft and rockets. Uncertainty means, "We need to beef it up just in
case it fails!" Russian rockets were heavier because they used fastener and
materials from there local hardware store! They just beefed it up to make
sure it flew. Nothing is wrong with that approach, and their vehicles were
properly designed to account for the uncertainty.

It is not as simple as just copying the shuttle design. The design is based
on American philosophical thinking in design and in infrastructure.

Emilio.

Scott Ferrin wrote in message
...
On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 11:23:25 -0500, "Emilio"
wrote:

Actually they admitted they copied the US Shuttle.

More I think about Buran, it is clear that the politician who decided to
"copy" the shuttle and not the engineers.

No, they actually did a lot of testing and came to the conclusion that
they were duplicating all the studies NASA did so they decided to copy
it.


Russian industry simply was not
setup to produce space qualified $20 nuts and bolts like we do.

I don't know about that. I think it's more outright stupidity than
anything nefarious when it comes to the dreaded $300 pliers etc. That
and a lack of understanding of the problem by those quoting the
numbers. The pliers make sense if you know what happened. It wasn't
a SMART thing to do but it does make sense. While taking a Cost
Estimating class in college the instructor related the pliers tale to
us. He was working for Boeing at the time and apparently the contract
said something to the effect of Boeing producing all the tooling for
the project and hey pliers are tools. So Boeing made like twelve
pairs of pliers or something. That and they weren't exactly the kind
you'd find at Home Depot. So a production run of 12 made by an
aerospace company. Is it any wonder they weren't eight bucks? That
story about the rivets related here on r.a.m. a while back though. . .
Makes you wonder how much the defense budget could buy if all of that
inefficency and waste could be eliminated. Would take a hell of an
audit to find it all though.



If they
made special run to make such nuts and bolts it would have cost them $100
a
peace. Buran must have been reengineered to be able for them to build it
there. That's a problem though. It's going to get heavier than a US
shuttle. Reentry and flight parameters will no longer be the same do to
added weight. It's amazing that they made it to work in the first place.

Well, the Astronauts never flew it. That tells you something.

Emilio.