Why did the Shuttle have main engines on the orbiter and Buran didn't?

Chemical Byrne

I have always wondered what the logic was when NASA's shuttle was designed to have the 3 main engines mounted on the orbiter itself? They are completely useless once the orbiter reaches orbit and surely they take up a significant amount of space and add a weight penalty, although the latter is probably more
relevant to the return flight as the engines would have to reach orbit anyway.

I felt the Buran had a more elegant design in basically having an orbiter which is unpowered iteself, piggy backing on the Energia carrier rocket. This would have saved weight and space in the orbiter.

What's more I'd imagine the NASA shuttle would have had a more complicated arrangement for routing fuels from the tank to the engines on the orbiter via some divisible interface - a complicaiton avoided in the Buran.

Was there a logic to this design of having the engines on the orbiter? Was it done for a particular reason?

Zubeneschamali

Chemical Byrne wrote: »

Was there a logic to this design of having the engines on the orbiter? Was it done for a particular reason?

Reusability?

If the engines are on the throwaway tank, you need new engines every flight.

Chemical Byrne

Shag it! Why didn't I think of that! Makes sense. Although didn't they have to be removed, stripped and refurnished after each flight? There would still be substantial saving I suppose.

nokia69

the Russians could never figure out why the yanks were building the shuttle it just made no sense to them, so they thought that it must have some use that we just can't see yet so we should build one too, just in case

so they built Buran and flew it just once, then cancelled it saving billions, and got a nice lesson into the US political system and pork powered rockets

franer1970

Face it - a Space Shuttle without big ass rocket motors on the back of it would have been totally lame-o.