Space Shuttle Buran (Soviet)
The Soviet reusable spacecraft program Buran ("Бура́н" meaning "snowstorm" or "blizzard" in Russian) began in 1976 at TsAGI as a response to the United States Space Shuttle program. Soviet politicians were convinced that the Space Shuttle would be an effective military weapon since the U.S. Department of Defense took part in the project, and could pose a potential threat to the balance of power during the Cold War. The project was the largest and the most expensive in the history of Soviet space exploration. Because Buran's debut followed that of Space Shuttle Columbia's, and because there were striking visual similarities between the two shuttle systems — a state of affairs which recalled the similarity between the Tupolev Tu-144 and Concorde supersonic airliners — many speculated that Cold War espionage played a role in the development of the Soviet shuttle. It is now known, however, that, while externally it was an aerodynamic copy of the Space Shuttle, internally it was all engineered and developed domestically.
Key differences from the NASA Space Shuttle
DevelopmentThe Soviet reusable space-craft program has its roots in the very beginning of the space age, the late 1950s. Though it was neither continuous, nor consistently organized, the idea of Soviet reusable space flight is very old. It is clear that before Buran, no project of the programme reached production. The idea saw its first iteration in the Burya high atmosphere rocket aircraft, which reached the prototype stage. Several test flights are known, before it was cancelled by order of the Central Committee. The Burya had the goal of delivering a nuclear payload, presumably to the United States, and then returning to base. The cancellation was based on a final decision to develop ICBMs. The next iteration of the idea was Zvezda from the early 1960s, which it seems also reached a prototype stage, although nothing else about the project is clear. After Zvezda, there was a hiatus in reusable projects until Buran. The development of the Buran began in the early 1970s as a response to the U.S. Space Shuttle program. While the Soviet engineers favoured a smaller, lighter lifting body vehicle, the military leadership pushed for a direct, full scale copy of the delta wing Space Shuttle, in an effort to maintain the strategic parity between the superpowers. The construction of the shuttles began in 1980 and by 1984 the first full-scale Buran was rolled out. The first suborbital test flight of a scale-model took place as early as July 1983. As the project progressed, five additional scale-model flights were performed. A test vehicle was constructed with four jet engines mounted at the rear; this vehicle is usually referred to as OK-GLI, or as the "Buran aerodynamic analogue". The jets were used to take off from a normal landing strip, and once it reached a designated point, the engines were cut and OK-GLI glided back to land. This provided invaluable information about the handling characteristics of the Buran design, and was much more convenient than the carrier plane/air drop method used by the USA and the Enterprise test craft. Twenty-four test flights of OK-GLI were performed after which the shuttle was "worn out". First flightThe first and only orbital launch of the (unmanned) shuttle Buran 1.01 was at 3:00 UTC on 15 November 1988. It was lifted into orbit by the specially designed Energia booster rocket. The life support system was not installed and no software was installed on the CRT displays. The shuttle orbited the Earth twice before returning, performing an impressive automated landing on the shuttle runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome. Part of the launch was televised, but the actual lift-off was not shown. This led to some speculation that the mission may have been fabricated, and that the subsequent landing may not have been from orbit but from a shuttle-carrying aircraft. (Note that in the United States, this procedure was used to test the flight characteristics of the Space Shuttle on approach and landing using the Approach and Landing Test vehicle Space Shuttle Enterprise, so that by the time mission STS-1 drew to a close, the handling characteristics of Space Shuttle Columbia would be known.) Since then, the launch video has been released to the public, confirming that the shuttle did indeed lift off, with the poor weather conditions described by the Russian media at the time easily seen. AftermathAfter the first flight the project was suspended due to lack of funds and the political situation in the Soviet Union. The two subsequent orbiters, which were due in 1990 (informally Ptichka, meaning "little bird") and 1992 were never completed. The project was officially terminated on June 30, 1993 by President Boris Yeltsin. At the time of its cancellation, 20 billion roubles had been spent on the Buran program. [1] Shuttle Buran was destroyed in 2002 when the roof of the building it was being stored in collapsed, killing several workers in the process. While lack of money is generally accepted as the reason for the cancellation of the Buran program, rumours abound that the original Buran was so damaged upon return from its only space flight as to make another launch unfeasible. Photographs and videos of the Buran upon landing from orbit do not lend much credence to this hypothesis. The program was to have boosted national pride, carried out research, and met technological objectives similar to those of the U.S. shuttle program, including resupply of the Mir space station, which was launched in 1986 and remained in service until 2001. When Mir was finally visited by a space plane, the visitor was an American shuttle, not Buran. The Buran SO, a docking module that was to be used for rendezvous with the Mir space station, was refitted for use with the U.S. Space Shuttles during the Shuttle-Mir missions. The completed shuttles 1.01 (11F35 K1, "Buran") and 1.02 (11F35 K2, informal "Ptichka"), and the remains of the project are now the property of Kazakhstan. In 2002, the hangar housing the sole space-flown Buran 1.01 orbiter and a mockup of the Energiya booster rocket collapsed due to incomplete maintenance, destroying the vehicle. Eight workers were also killed in the collapse of the building's roof [2]. Burans 2.01 (11F35 K3) and 2.02 (11F35 K4) (a second series with a modified flight-deck design, equipped with Zvezda K-36RB ejection seats for the first manned flights) never left the Tushino factory and remain there in poor condition. Parts from these vehicles are being sold on the Internet. The partially built Buran 2.03 (11F35 K5) was dismantled when the programme was closed, and no longer exists. As well as the five "production" Burans, there were eight test vehicles. These were used for static testing or atmospheric trials, and some were merely mock-ups for testing of electrical fittings, crew procedures, etc. Serial numbers and current status
The OK-GLI test vehicle was fitted with four jet engines mounted at the rear (the fuel tank for the engines occupied a quarter of the cargo bay). This Buran could take off under its own power for flight tests, in contrast to the American Enterprise test vehicle, which was entirely unpowered and relied on an air launch. After the program was cancelled, OK-GLI was stored at Zhukovsky Air Base, near Moscow, and eventually bought by an Australian company, Buran Space Corporation. It was transported by ship to Sydney, Australia via Gothenburg, Sweden [3] — arriving on February 9, 2000 — and appeared as a static tourist attraction under a large temporary structure in Darling Harbour for a few years.[4][5] Visitors could walk around and inside the vehicle (a walkway was built along the cargo bay), and plans were in place for a tour of various cities in Australia and Asia. The owners, however, went into bankruptcy, and the vehicle was moved into the open air, where it suffered some deterioration and vandalism. In September 2004 a German reporter team found the Shuttle near Bahrain. It was bought by the Sinsheim Auto & Technik Museum, but has not yet been transported to Germany. The 2003 grounding of the U.S. Space Shuttles caused many to wonder aloud whether the Russian Energia launcher or Buran shuttle could be brought back into service. By then, however, all of the equipment for both (including the vehicles themselves) had fallen into disrepair or been repurposed after falling into disuse with the collapse of the Soviet Union. 
Buran in science fictionShuttle Buran, alongside with another Soviet space orbiter project, Spiral, is used in Sergey Lukyanenko's The Stars Are Cold Toys novel. Equipped with a fictional 'jumper engine', Buran is one of the primary means of interstellar trade with aliens. Similar plotlines featuring Space Shuttle are typical in Western science fiction. However, it is likely that whatever nation or coalition undertakes the next manned space flight above Earth's van Allen belts, it will use traditional space capsules, not space planes. The shuttle Buran is also featured in a mission of the Rainbow Six video game expansion pack, Eagle Watch. See alsoRussian space
SpaceExternal links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia Encyclopedia article "Shuttle Buran" |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![[2]](http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/2169/burandamaged7jm.jpg){kind=link}
![[4]](http://www.suburbia.com.au/%7Ecolinc/buran/buranc1.jpg){kind=link}