To get there, Jonk and three friends flew to the nearby city of Kyzylorda and took a four-hour bus ride to the small town of Toretam. (Since NASA ended its shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts have hitched rides into space with the Russians.)īaikonur's location in the middle of the vast Kazakh Steppe presented another challenge. For one thing, Baikonur is still an active spaceport-the Russian space program leases the site from Kazakhstan for around $115 million a year, and uses it to launch its own and other country's astronauts into space. But few places were more difficult to access than the Buran hangar. Jonk is a veteran urban explorer, or "urbexer," who estimates he's photographed around 1,500 abandoned places around the world. Among them is French photographer Jonk, who managed to sneak into the hangar in April 2018. The site has also been targeted by international adventurers seeking a glimpse at Soviet space history. Over the years, local scavengers have snuck into the hangar to harvest valuable metals and electronics. The other two-including the shuttle that was scheduled to fly the second mission-are rotting away in an abandoned hangar in another part of the sprawling Baikonur complex. One, a full-scale test model, is on display at the Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum.
#Buran shuttle locations full#
After the flight it was full of cracks, and the engines needed a major overhaul,” the project participant Stanislav Aksyonov recalls.Today, three versions of the Buran survive. “The reusable spacecraft turned out to be not so reusable. The idea to develop Buran as a space bomber was also abandoned due to the easing of the strained Soviet-American relations in the late 1980s. It was much cheaper to use disposable Proton and Soyuz carrier rockets. In the end, the cost of a single flight by one Buran was calculated to be too high. This money could instead have been used to build a huge megapolis from scratch. In total, the Energia-Buran project cost over 16 billion rubles. Cost too highĪlthough Buran was a true technical breakthrough, it was too expensive for the Soviet Union, which had been spending colossal amounts for more than a dozen years. However, the main difference was that the Soviet Buran, unlike the shuttle, was able to fly and land in automatic mode, which was perfectly demonstrated during its single flight. In addition, the crew size also differed: ten Soviet cosmonauts could squeeze inside Buran, compared to seven U.S. It could lift 30 tons of cargo, against the American spacecraft’s 24. Designed several years later than its American counterpart, the Soviet spacecraft took the mistakes of its predecessor into account and was in fact more advanced.īuran could be in orbit twice as long as the shuttle - 30 days instead of 15-17. Copy of the shuttle?īuran looked like the shuttle, but the resemblance was the only thing they had in common. Seven years after the first American shuttle Columbia was launched in 1981, the Soviet Buran made its first legendary flight.
#Buran shuttle locations trial#
The Soviet leadership assigned the task to its engineers “to make an American-style craft,” since they had already had gone a long way through trial and error. Rather skeptical at first, the Soviets soon began to design their own reusable spacecraft, called Buran. īut in the 1970-80s, the shuttle was seen as a new breakthrough in space exploration. Each flight by the shuttle cost a colossal $1.5 billion, which eventually caused the project to fold in 2011. History showed that they were completely wrong. The Americans believed that with reusable craft space flights could be undertaken much more often at a far lower cost. Now was the time to design a new breed of spacecraft of the reusable kind, able not only to go into space, but successfully return as well. space engineers decided that the epoch of disposable space flights had come to an end. The promising “Soviet shuttle,” the last grandiose Soviet project, was abandoned. The flight proceeded in fully automatic mode without a single person on board - the first one in history by an orbital spacecraft.ĭespite its success, this first flight of the spacecraft was also its last. It was lifted into space by the carrier rocket Energia, completed two orbits around the Earth, and then landed back on its launch site. Thirty years ago, on 15 November 1988, the first Soviet reusable spacecraft Buran made its debut.
0 kommentar(er)
