Buran

On the day the first US shuttle flew into space for the very first time, my whole primary school class was sat in front of a TV watching it. I was seven years old. As a result, to this day I still regard the American shuttles as a shining success for NASA. I understand that the shuttles themselves represent a failure of politics in that they were designed to service a space station that was never built, a Mars mission which never took place and their original purpose was to be able to be relaunched within a week of landing.

Still. I don't see any of that as being NASA's fault really. Politics and war took away the funding and killed the dream before ever Enterprise lifted off. The shuttles remain a technological achievement eclipsed only by the Apollo programme and the Soviet/Russian space stations.

To illustrate just how difficult it is to build a reusable space craft in that order of size, one needs only look to the Soviet designs; the Burya, the Buran, the Baikal and the Spiral The Buran shuttles were similar in basic design, but differed in a number of ways. Some people regard them as a rip off, but others point to the greater number of differences which seperate the two designs. Where as the American shuttle was an orbital ferry, the Soviet shuttle was only one part of a much greater plan to build heavy orbital lifters with superior engines, a greater payload and a much more flexible booster system. The work which eventually led to the Soviet shuttles started as far back as 1951 and under went multiple redesigns. Had they ever gone operational, there is little doubt that the ambitious Buran shuttles would have been superior to NASA's design. Alas, they never went operational. Only an initial unmanned flight made it into space before the whole programme was cancelled due to costs.



Footage of test launches and landings of the Buran-Energia heavy lift system. Note that on one take off, the boosters are carrying a black cargo pod and not the shuttle.



Footage of the Antonov 225 carrying the Buran shuttle (sorry about the tacky music)



The Buran was designed to be bigger and better than its American competitor, and this is probably what killed it. It had the separate Energiya heavy rocket system to take it into orbit, capable of lifting a hundred ton payload and with specially designed engines that were so powerful that they are used today by the USA, the specially built Antonov 225 aircraft (still the largest operational cargo plane in the world) to return it to Baikonur Space Centre and it even had its own visual programming language called DRAKON, which is now used by the Sea Launch company. Naturally the whole system needed its own manufacture and launch facilities also.

The sheer scale of the ambition is all the more breath taking when one considers how reticent the Soviets were of announcing their intentions. The Energiya rocket (named after the Energiya Bureau which designed it) was a technological marvel all by itself, with numerous variations, one being the 'Vulkan-Hercules' designed to increase the payload to a fantastic 175 tons (by comparison the Saturn V had a payload of 118 tons, the NASA shuttles have a payload of 24 tons and the previous Soviet super rocket, the N1 had a payload of 75 tons). Too bad the Soviets weren't as good at making money as they were at spending it.

The Energiya-Buran programme was cancelled in 1993 after a single unmanned test flight of the orbiter on my eighteenth birthday (15 Nov) in 1988, but sources in Russia claim a second Soviet shuttle, the Baikal flew on 4th February 1992. Whether or not this is true is difficult to determine, but photographs of the Baikal show it followed by Mig 29 chase planes where as the Buran was followed by Mig 25's. Your guess is as good as mine but given the gap between the dates of the respective flights I think its probably a hoax.

According to DRB

According to them, there is an interesting story associated with the naming of these ships. Everybody knows that "Buran" means a snowstorm. "Baikal", however, was the originally intended name for the program, scrapped in fears that some of the letters will burn out on landing and transform the name into "Baika" (which means a fairy-tale, untrue story), or even worse, into "kal" which means simply "crap". With "Buran"'s successful flight in 1988 these fears were put to rest, so "Baikal" again became a viable moniker. It's also worth mentioning that the projected future ships would also bear stormy names - like "Hurricane / Uragan" and "Typhoon".

I can well believe that, even though I don't believe the story from that same site that the Baikal ever flew. In the end the Soviet shuttles were discarded, literally; one was discovered in the Persian Gulf and taken to the Speyer Technical Museum in Germany. In all some ten Buran shuttles were built, most for testing and never meant to fly, and unfortunately most were left to rot. One was put in storage and another was used as a test bed for . The story ends on a tragic note however, for the Buran in storage, the same which flew in 1988 I am informed, was destroyed in 2002 when the roof of the building which housed it collapsed, killing eight people.

There is a lot of conflicting information on this subject, much of it confounding in nature, or written in Russian, but the bottom line is, only one nation has thus far managed to build, use and maintain a re-usable fleet of space craft. For all the many achievements of the Energiya-Buran system, after 14.5 billion rubles had been poured into the project, it failed in its primary purpose, and may even have helped take the Soviet Union down with it.

Wouldn't it be cool though if Energiya and the ESA could get together and build a new one?

I can still remember how amazed and inspired I was in 1977. I didn't even know that NASA wasn't British, or that the shuttle was something which really belonged to other people. Watching it take off, I felt it was mine, that as a human being, it belonged to me. I wish I could feel that again!

Official Buran site
Buran-Energiya
More video of the Buran Launch (low quality)
Buran at Astronautix


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