Category Energiya-Buran

Winged spacecraft were not only studied at spacecraft and aviation design bureaus, they were also the subject of academic studies by the original Air Force cosmonauts during the 1960s. In September 1961 most of the cosmonauts of the original “Gagarin group’’ began studying at the prestigious Zhukovskiy Academy in Moscow to improve their engineering skills in preparation for future space missions. In 1964 they were joined by the five women who had been selected for cosmonaut training in 1962. The culmination of the studies would be a thesis in a chosen field of specializa­tion that the candidates would defend before their tutors in written and oral sessions at the end of their course.

Rather than pick a completely different subject for each candidate, it was decided that all would work on one general theme. In 1965 Sergey Korolyov recommended that the cosmonauts should study a practical design for a winged reusable spacecraft, a suggestion that was accepted by the cosmonauts’ supervisor Professor Sergey Belotserkovskiy. Fifteen cosmonauts were involved in the thesis work: Yuriy Gagarin, Gherman Titov, Andrian Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, Valeriy Bykovskiy, Aleksey Leonov, Boris Volynov, Yevgeniy Khrunov, Georgiy Shonin, Viktor Gorbatko, Dmitriy Zaikin, Valentina Tereshkova, Irina Solovyova, Tatyana Kuznetsova, and Zhanna Yorkina. Each of them was given the liberty of choosing from a series of topics suggested by their tutors. Gagarin, for instance, decided to focus on aerodynamics during approach and landing, Nikolayev on aerodynamics at hypersonic and supersonic speeds as well as on thermal protection, Titov on emergency escape systems, Popovich on engine design, Khrunov on orientation systems, Bykovskiy on fuel supply, etc.

By mid-1966 the cosmonauts had picked a lifting body shape somewhat reminiscent of the M2F1 “flying bathtub’’ that NASA had been testing at Edwards Air Force Base since 1963. The vehicle would have small wings that would only be

unfolded for the final approach and landing. In order to improve stability at super­sonic speeds, the cosmonauts decided to add small lattice wings to the nose section similar to the ones used in the emergency escape system of the Soyuz launch vehicle.

Part of the work was to test wooden scale models of the spaceplane in wind tunnels and also to practice landings on a crude simulator using primitive analog computers. The tutors followed the cosmonauts’ work with due scrutiny and their critical remarks were not always easily accepted by national heroes like Gagarin. In the autumn of 1967 Gagarin’s thesis failed to pass a critical review because the vehicle had poor gliding characteristics during the final phase of the flight. Gagarin’s solution to the problem, namely to land the spaceplane by parachute, was deemed unaccept­able. It took Gagarin several more weeks of theoretical and simulator work to refine the design such that the ship could make an unpowered runway landing.

Most of the cosmonauts defended their thesis projects in January 1968. Gagarin’s turn came on 17 February 1968, only weeks before he died in a plane crash. All of them graduated from the Academy with the diploma of “Pilot-Engineer – Cosmonaut”. Only Gorbatko’s thesis got the result “good” rather than “excellent”.

As it turned out later, this was not because his thesis was worse than the others’, but simply because it was felt not all of them should have the same result. Gorbatko, as one of the unflown cosmonauts at the time, had the misfortune of being picked as the “victim” [30].

The cosmonauts’ spaceplane studies were considered top secret, as was all diploma work at the Zhukovskiy Academy for that matter. Professor Belotserkov – skiy was not even allowed to take snapshots of his pupils, but used a hidden camera nevertheless to record their activities [31]. After having been safely hidden in a safe for almost twenty years, many of them were eventually published in 1986 in a book called “Gagarin’s Thesis’’ [32]. However, even that provided little solid information on the diploma work and did not contain a single proper picture of the spaceplane. This had to wait until another publication by Belotserkovskiy in 1992, where the spaceplane was nicknamed “Buran-68’’ [33]. There is also a famous picture released in the 1970s showing Gagarin and several other cosmonauts examining a model of a delta-wing spaceplane, but that is not “Buran-68”. Belotserkovskiy claims it is Dyna-Soar, but it clearly is not that either. Some have questioned the authenticity of the picture, but the model in question has recently been seen at the Zhukovskiy Academy.

Research on the diploma project coincided with early work on the Spiral system, but as yet there is no evidence of any interaction between Mikoyan’s team in Dubna and the Air Force cosmonauts, although Titov began training for the Spiral program in 1966-1967 and must have been aware of the project’s details. Although the finished thesis projects were sent to Lozino-Lozinkiy’s team, there are no indications that they in any way influenced the design of Spiral or future spaceplanes [34].

This was a virtual carbon copy of the US Space Shuttle, namely a delta-wing orbiter with three LOX/LH2 main engines in the back and strapped to the side of an external

fuel tank. Sadovskiy’s team even went as far as studying the use of large solid-fuel rockets. Sadovskiy was no newcomer to solids, having earlier headed the develop­ment of two large solid-fuel nuclear missiles (the RT-1 and RT-2), the only such rockets ever built at the Korolyov bureau. This may even have been the very reason he was placed in charge of shuttle development at NPO Energiya.

However, the idea to use solids was abandoned because of the absence of the necessary industrial basis for the development of large solid-fuel rockets and the equipment to transport the loaded boosters to the launch site. Also, it would have been difficult to operate the boosters in the temperature extremes of Baykonur. Still, the idea to use solids was briefly reconsidered in the early 1980s as the RD-170 suffered serious development problems (see Chapter 6).

Instead, it was decided to use four 40.75 m high LOX/kerosene strap-ons, each powered by a single RD-123 engine. The orbiter itself would be fitted with three RD-0120 LOX/LH2 engines with a vacuum thrust of 250 tons. The orbital maneuver­ing system engines and reaction control system thrusters were arranged almost identically as on the US Orbiter (in two aft pods and a forward module) and would also use hypergolic propellants, the only difference being that the fuel on the Soviet vehicle would be dimethyl hydrazine rather than monomethyl hydrazine. The most striking novelty on the Soviet vehicle was the presence of two jettisonable 350-ton thrust solid-fuel escape motors on the aft fuselage that would have allowed it to instantly separate from the external tank in case of a launch accident.

The OS-120 orbiter owed its name to its 120-ton mass, which was the launch mass with a full 30-ton payload and minus the 35-ton emergency escape system, jettisoned

in the course of the launch. The overall launch mass of the stack would have been about 2,380 tons, almost 400 tons more than that of the Space Shuttle. In order to match the payload capacity of the Space Shuttle, the combined thrust of the engines was about 75 tons higher. This was also needed to compensate for the relatively high latitude of Baykonur (45°), where rockets benefit less from the Earth’s eastward rotation than they do from Cape Canaveral (28°). Had the OS-120 been launched from Cape Canaveral, it would have exceeded the Shuttle’s payload capacity by more than 5 tons for launches into 28° inclination orbits.

Being virtually identical to the Space Shuttle, the OS-120 inherited many of its drawbacks. While the LOX/kerosene engines of the strap-on boosters could be tested in flight on the 11K77 medium-lift rocket, the cryogenic engines were going to have to be tested with the priceless orbiter in place from the very first flight. With the spectacular N-1 failures still fresh in their memories, this was not an attractive idea to the Soviet planners. Therefore, they considered testing the engines in flight by mounting them on an unmanned payload canister replacing the orbiter (similar to the American Shuttle-C configuration), but this was a costly plan. The location of the main engines also shifted the vehicle’s center of gravity to the aft, imposing significant restrictions on the payloads it could carry and their distribution over the payload bay. It would also place higher acoustic loads on the orbiter, making it necessary to strengthen its structure, and also worsened the vehicle’s aerodynamic characteristics.

The OS-120 design also posed problems specific to the Soviet situation. If the engines were going to be on the orbiter, they would have to be made reusable, making their development even more challenging than it already was for an industry with very limited experience in cryogenic engine technology. Perhaps even more signifi­cantly, the orbiter would be so heavy that it could not be transported by any of the aircraft available at the time. The only aircraft capable of doing so, the Antonov design bureau’s An-124 “Ruslan”, was only on the drawing boards and years away from its first flight. Such an aircraft would also be needed for atmospheric drop tests, similar to the ones performed by NASA with Enterprise and a modified Boeing 747 [55].

Buran’s landing gear was arranged conventionally, consisting of a nose landing gear and left and right main gear. All three gear wells were covered by one door each (as opposed to the two doors on the Orbiter’s nose gear). Each gear was actuated by a single hydraulic cylinder. If the hydraulic systems failed, there was a back-up pro­cedure to deploy the gears pyrotechnically. The wheels, two on each gear, were about twice as light as similarly loaded wheels on aircraft thanks to the use of tubeless tires made from natural rubber and beryllium brake disks. Because of the heat that accumulates in the brakes during roll-out, the main landing gear wheels were cooled with nitrogen gas right after the completion of the landing roll-out. During long missions the landing gear was maintained at the proper temperature by electric heaters and also by circulating hydraulic fluid through it.

Buran as well as the BTS-002 atmospheric test vehicle were equipped with drag chutes to relieve the stress on the brakes and reduce the landing roll-out distance by 500 m. Stored in a container under the vertical stabilizer, the drag chutes were automatically activated by a pyrotechnic system as soon as the main landing gear touched the runway. The three chutes (each having an area of 25 m2) were extracted by three small pilot chutes and then jettisoned once the speed had been reduced to 50 km/h. Heaters and thermal protection ensured that the temperatures inside the parachute compartment did not drop below — 50°C in orbit and did not exceed + 100°C during re-entry [11]. NASA originally also planned to have drag chutes for the Orbiter flight tests, but deleted them in 1974 because it was reasoned that the lakebed runways at Edwards Air Force Base were more than long enough. However, they were eventually introduced on Endeavour in 1992 and later installed on the other Orbiters as well.

Because of the absence of main engines, the layout of the aft part of Buran’s on-orbit propulsion system differed from that of the Shuttle Orbiter. The Shuttle’s OMS and aft RCS engines are concentrated in separate “OMS pods’’ on either side of the vertical stabilizer and are each divided into two compartments, one for the OMS and one for the aft RCS. Buran had a single pod (“Base Unit’’ or BB) for both DOM engines under the vertical stabilizer, with two Reaction Control System units (“Con­trol Engine Unit’’ or BDU) attached to either side of the aft fuselage. The left BDU (BDU-L) and right BDU (BDU-P) each had twelve primary thrusters and four verniers.

The pod housed one big LOX and one big sintin tank, two auxiliary sintin tanks (exclusively used for the Reaction Control System), and gaseous oxygen tanks (solely used for the primary thrusters). if needed, sintin could be transferred from the main tank to the auxiliary ones with a turbopump driven by gaseous oxygen. The helium tanks were immersed in the main LOX tank in order to save space and cool the gas.

The forward reaction control system unit (BDU-N), situated in the nose of the vehicle, had 14 primary thrusters. Unlike the Shuttle Orbiter’s forward RCS, it carried no verniers. Also installed in the BDU-N were one gaseous oxygen tank and one auxiliary sintin tank. The BDU-N was connected to the aft engine pod via several interconnect lines that allowed gaseous oxygen, sintin, and helium gas to be trans­ferred from aft to front. After the orbital phase of the mission was completed, any remaining sintin from the front auxiliary tank was transferred back to the aft main tank to satisfy center-of-gravity requirements for landing. Although the Shuttle

Orbiter has always had the capability of cross-feeding propellant between the two OMS pods, it cannot transfer propellant between the OMS pods and the forward RCS. Such an interconnect system was proposed as one of many Shuttle upgrades, but the idea was eventually shelved.

A Return Maneuver (MV) enabled Buran to return to its launch site runway in case of a single-engine failure on the strap-ons or the core stage early in the launch. The “negative return” point would have been reached between T + 2m05s-2m10s in the event of a strap-on failure and between T + 3m00s-3m10s if a core stage engine shut down.

If an RD-170 engine in one of the four strap-ons failed, the engine of the diametrically opposed booster would also shut down to make sure that the rocket did not deviate from its trajectory. Subsequently, all the remaining liquid oxygen in both strap-ons would have been dumped overboard to minimize the amount of dead weight carried up by the rocket and also to ensure that conditions at separation were close to the ones originally planned. The LOX could be released via a 600 mm diameter drainage channel, which exited the lower end of the LOX tank, situated some 15.5m above the engines. Kerosene, which comprised only one-third of the overall propellant mass in each booster, would not have been dumped overboard to prevent the formation of an explosive mix.

The return profile would have been very similar to that of a Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort during Space Shuttle launches. The vehicle would have continued to fly downrange to expend excess propellant and would have performed a pitch- around maneuver to orient the stack to a heads-up attitude pointing towards the launch site. The core stage would then be separated, allowing Buran to glide to a landing on its cosmodrome runway. In order to improve Buran’s weight and center of gravity for the glide phase and landing, excess propellant for the ODU propulsion system was to be expended by simultaneously firing the two DOM engines and dumping liquid and gaseous oxygen overboard.

Yet another proposal came from Vladimir Myasishchev, whose Experimental Machine Building Factory was heavily involved in the Buran program after its incorporation into NPO Molniya in 1976. Myasishchev’s idea was to convert his old 3M long-range strategic bomber into a transport plane. Also known as the 201M, 103M, or M6 (with NATO designation Bison-B), the 3M had made its debut back in 1956 and was a modification of the original 2M or M4 (“Bison-A”). With a cargo capacity of just about 50 tons, the converted strategic bomber would not be able to transport a fully outfitted Buran or carry a complete Energiya core stage, leaving much of the final assembly work to be done at the cosmodrome itself. It was therefore only seen as an interim solution until a more capable aircraft came along. Many felt that Myasishchev’s plan was outrageous, especially given the fact that the 3.5 m wide 3M would be dwarfed by Energiya’s 8 m diameter core stage. Among the skeptics was none less than Minister of the Aviation Industry Pyotr Dementyev himself, but with no better solutions available in the short run, he eventually agreed, reportedly under pressure from Ustinov. Approval for the use of the 3M came in the party and government decree on Buran of 21 November 1977, which was followed by an official order from the Ministry of the Aviation Industry on 30 December 1977.

Even before this, several ways had been studied of adapting the 3M for its new role. The most radical was to widen the fuselage from 3.5 m to 10 m and only retain the 3M cockpit, wings, and engines, giving the plane an appearance reminiscent of a C-5 Galaxy. It would have to be outfitted with a twin-fin tail and unlike the basic 3M would have required a tricycle rather than a bicycle landing gear. Another idea was to transform the 3M into something that more or less resembled a Boeing 377 “Guppy”. In this configuration the nose section, mid fuselage, wings, engines, and landing gear of the 3M remained unchanged. Bolted on top of the mid fuselage would have been a cylindrical container that would be an integral part of the aircraft, with the aft section serving as the plane’s tail (with two fins). Cargo would have been loaded via the nose section of the container. Both versions were turned down because they essentially turned the 3M into a new airplane, taking many years to develop. Moreover, the orbiter could only be transported by these planes if its wings and vertical stabilizer were removed.

The next idea was to mount a 37.5 m long and 9 m wide removable container on top of the 3M. The big advantages of this approach were that the 3M itself required only minimal modifications (only the double fin) and that the cargo could be loaded into the container on the factory floor and off-loaded inside the assembly buildings at Baykonur. This is the configuration that was approved by the government decree on Energiya-Buran of 21 November 1977. A drawback of the design was that the container alone weighed 17.8 tons. Although by this time the core stage had been changed to a dual-section design with four propellant tanks, it would still take three ferry flights to transport all elements to the cosmodrome.

The following year, as the core stage returned to its original single-element configuration, engineers of the Myasishchev bureau decided to do away with the container and transport both Buran and elements of the core stage exposed to the open air on top of the 3M. Buran would have to be flown to the launch site in a stripped-down state and it would still take two flights to transport all the elements of the core stage, but it was the best solution at hand until a more capable aircraft came along. On 16 November 1978, MOM and MAP put forward a plan calling for the 3M to carry four types of payloads:

– OGT (mass 45.3 tons, later increased to 50.5 tons, length 38.45 m): a stripped-down Buran (among other things without the vertical stabilizer and ODU propulsion system).

– 1GT (mass 31.5 tons, length 44.46m ): the liquid hydrogen tank with forward and aft protective covers.

– 2GT (mass 30.0 tons, length 26.41 m): the liquid oxygen tank, the RD-0120 engine section, the instrument section, and a forward protective cover, with the tip of the LOX tank acting as the aft protective cover.

– 3GT (mass 15.0 tons, length 15.67 m): the protective covers for 1GT and 2GT. After the liquid hydrogen tank had been delivered to Baykonur, the forward and aft covers were taken off, joined together, and flown back to the manufacturer. Installed inside the two covers was the disassembled forward cover used to transport the liquid oxygen tank. The 3GT configuration could also have been used to transport Buran’s crew compartment.

After extensive wind tunnel tests of each configuration at TsAGI, the final go – ahead for modifying the 3M for its new role came in mid-1979. Selected for the job were three 3M aircraft that had earlier been modified as tanker aircraft (3MN-2). One (tail number 01504) was to be used only for static tests at TsAGI, while the other two (tail numbers 01402 and 01502) would enter service. Among the modifications were the replacement of the four VD-7B engines by the more powerful VD-7MD (with an afterburner for higher take-off thrust), the installation of a new, longer aft section with two horizontal and two vertical tails, and the use of improved flight control, navigation, and radio systems. Maximum crew size was reduced from eight to six. The refueling hardware was removed from the aircraft, but re-installed on 01402 in 1984 with the aim of canceling the refueling stop required during the long flights with the OGT payload from Zhukovskiy to Baykonur. Although some in-flight “dry” hook-up tests were performed in conjunction with a 3MN-2 tanker aircraft, it appears that the refueling system was never actually used. With a total length of 51.2m and a wingspan of 53.14 m, the aircraft weighed 139 tons at take-off (minus the payload). Maximum take-off weight (with the OGT payload) was 187 tons. The payloads were hoisted onto the aircraft and off-loaded with a mate-demate device known as PKU-50, which was available in Zhukovskiy, Kuybyshev, and at the Baykonur cosmodrome.

The name originally painted on the planes was 3M-T (“T” standing for trans­port), but since 3M was a secret designator, the name was changed shortly before one of the planes was demonstrated at a Moscow air show. The most straightforward change was to repaint the 3 as the Cyrillic equivalent of the letter V (“B”), resulting in the name VM-T. These also happened to be the initials of Myasishchev’s first name and patronymic (Vladimir Mikhaylovich). The planes were also called Atlant (Russian for “Atlas”, the Greek mythological figure who held the burden of Earth on his shoulders).

Before transporting actual flight hardware, the Atlant planes undertook numer­ous test flights from the Flight Research Institute in Zhukovskiy. These began on 29 April 1981 with the first in a series of 19 flights of Atlant 01402 without a payload. In October 1981 the same plane was loaded with a mock-up 1GT payload, which had been delivered from the Progress factory in Kuybyshev to Zhukovskiy by barge via the Volga, Oka, and Moscow rivers. After several taxi tests and take-off runs, the combination took to the skies on 6 January 1982 with a six-man crew commanded by Anatoliy Kucherenko, climbing to an altitude of 2 km before returning to its home base. To onlookers it seemed as if a giant cylinder was flying in the sky, with the “small” Atlant barely visible under it. After four more flights with the 1GT payload Atlant 01402 flew seven test flights with a mock 2GT payload between 15 March and 20 April 1982, revealing the need to fly this payload at a somewhat slower speed to prevent vibrations. This cleared the way for the first ferry flights of Energiya hardware (2GT and 1GT configurations) from Kuybyshev to Baykonur on 8 April and 11 June 1982.

Meanwhile, Atlant 01502 had begun its own autonomous test flights in March 1982 and flew the mock 1GT payload on 19 April. Both planes then underwent several months of modifications before 01502 flew to Baykonur in December 1982 for the first test flights with a 3GT payload. On 28 December the plane for the first time returned a 3GT from Baykonur to Kuybyshev.

In early 1983 Atlant 01502 was ready for the first test flights with a Buran test model. A total of eight test flights were flown between 1 March and 25 March. The final one ended with the VM-T skidding off the runway in an incident blamed on pilot error. Due to a mistake in the landing gear deployment sequence, the nose gear failed to lock and lost steering capability during the landing roll-out. High crosswinds and the aircraft’s own drag chute then pushed the combination off the runway, where it got stuck in the sand. Attempts to tow it back onto the runway caused serious damage to the aircraft’s fuselage, which took several months to fix. Eventually, the Buran model had to be removed from the aircraft with two big cranes before the aircraft could be pulled loose. The incident was apparently photographed by American reconnaissance satellites and reported by the American magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology less than a month after it happened.

In December 1983 and August 1984 the VM-T ferried the first orbiters from Zhukovskiy to Baykonur (the OK-ML1 and OK-MT full-scale models). The planes were declared operational by a government and party decree in November 1985, and the following month (on 11 December) one of them delivered the first flight vehicle to the cosmodrome. During delivery of the second flight vehicle on 23 March 1988, the aircraft had a close call during the final approach to the runway, when it lost both of its left engines because of a fuel leak and suffered a power blackout in the cabin. Increasing airspeed to compensate for the loss of the engines, pilot Anatoliy Kucherenko managed to safely land the VM-T on the runway, with the airplane coming to a stop after an unusually long landing roll-out.

In all, the VM-T Atlant planes flew more than 150 missions in support of the Energiya-Buran program. In the late 1980s and early 1990s they were also considered for other tasks, such as serving as a launch platform for experimental spaceplanes and rockets and performing ferry flights and drop tests of the European Hermes spaceplane, but these plans never came to fruition [7].

All cosmonauts mentioned so far were selected specifically to fly on Buran, even though a fair number were transferred to the Soyuz, Salyut, and Mir programs later. In addition to these, several other cosmonauts from both TsPK and NPO Energiya at one time or another conducted training either for flights aboard Buran itself or for Soyuz missions to Buran.

As the “prime contractor’’ for Buran, NPO Energiya assigned a number of engineers to the program. This was particularly the case for the 1978 class, for which possible flights on Buran were taken into consideration during the selection process, although this was not the sole purpose of their selection. Several of its members spent part of their initial time in the cosmonaut team studying and training for Buran.

Aleksandr Nikolayevich Balandin worked on and off on ergonomics and the design of Buran’s cockpit control panels between 1979 and March 1987. Aleksandr Ivanovich Laveykin was involved in Buran training from 1979 to 1984, accumulating 25 hours of flight time on L-29 aircraft and performing 46 parachute jumps. Musa Khiramanovich Manarov prepared for Buran flights from 1979 to 1982, clocking up more than 43 hours of flight time on L-39 aircraft.

There were also several NPO Energiya engineers from earlier and later selec­tions who became involved in the Buran program. They were Valentin Vitalyevich Lebedev (1972 class, assigned to Buran from 1983 to 1986), Aleksandr Sergeyevich Ivanchenkov (1973 class, assigned to Buran from 1983 to 1992), and Sergey Kon­stantinovich Krikalyov (1985 class, assigned to Buran from 1986 to 1988). Many of these engineers (plus Gennadiy Mikhaylovich Strekalov of the 1973 class) were even put forward by NPO Energiya to fly in the co-pilot seat on the very first piloted missions of Buran.

Also involved in the Buran program were several military engineers originally selected by TsPK in the 1960s and early 1970s. These were Yevgeniy Nikolayevich Khludeyev and Eduard Nikolayevich Stepanov of the 1965 TsPK intake and Nikolay Nikolayevich Fefelov and Valeriy Vasilyevich Illarionov of the 1970 class. All but Illarionov had spent most of their careers training for missions on Chelomey’s Almaz military space station and the TKS transport ships, but none of the four had ever flown in space or even received a back-up assignment.

Illarionov was active in the Buran program from 1984 until 1992, performing a multitude of engineering tests. These included tests of Buran equipment in simulated zero-g, pre-launch and post-landing evacuation exercises, vacuum tests of the airlock and the Docking Module, and tests of the Strizh pressure suit. The other three engineers were transferred to the Buran program in 1985/1986 after having been part of a training group to operate military instruments on the Kosmos-1686 TKS spacecraft. Khludeyev left the program in 1988, but Fefelov and Stepanov stayed until 1992 [28]. In 1990-1992 Illarionov, Fefelov, and Stepanov were in a training group for the aforementioned Soyuz mission to link up with an unmanned Buran in orbit.

Missing in the Buran cosmonaut team were people with scientific backgrounds. Although the Academy of Sciences had set up its own cadre of cosmonauts in 1967, their hopes of flying in space were soon dashed by the cancellation of the manned lunar program and also by the elimination of the third seat in the Soyuz spacecraft following the Soyuz-11 accident in 1971, limiting space station crews to a military commander and a military or civilian flight engineer. Then, when Soyuz regained a three-man capability with the introduction of Soyuz-T in the early 1980s, the third seat was usually reserved for brief visiting flights by foreign spacemen or other “guest cosmonauts”. All that could have changed if Buran had ever reached operational status. Especially, the long-duration Spacelab-type missions that were planned for Buran could have become a long-awaited blessing for Soviet scientists aspiring to fly in space. However, with the cancellation of the Soviet shuttle program, Russian scientist cosmonauts saw yet another opportunity to fly in space go up in smoke. Having said that, there were no significant additions to the Academy of Sciences team in the 1980s indicating that big numbers of scientists were going to fly on Buran anytime soon.

Finally, in the early 1990s French “spationauts” Jean-Foup Chretien, Michel Tognini, and Feopold Eyharts flew both the Tupolev Tu-154FF and MiG-25 Buran training aircraft in preparation for the European Hermes spaceplane program. There are no indications that they were considered to fly aboard Buran itself [29].

A further series of bench tests at the Energomash facilities in early 1985 finally paved the way for the first test flight of the Zenit rocket, which took place from the Baykonur cosmodrome on 13 April 1985 after a scrub the previous day. Although the second stage failed to place the mock-up payload into orbit, the RD-171 and the Zenit first stage performed brilliantly. Another launch with similar outcome was carried out on 21 June 1985. The first completely successful Zenit launch occurred on 22 October 1985, with the rocket placing into orbit a Tselina-2 electronic intelli­gence satellite, which would be its primary payload for many years to come. After another partial failure in December 1985 (not related to the first stage), the Zenit chalked up another five successful flights before Energiya’s maiden launch on 15 May 1987 (for the further history of the Zenit see Chapter 8).

By 1988, twelve years after the approval of the Energiya-Buran program, the stage was finally set for the Soviet space shuttle to make its orbital debut. While earlier test flights of piloted spacecraft had been prepared in utter secrecy and conveniently disguised under the all-embracing “Kosmos” label, the Russians no longer had the luxury of doing the same with Buran. Times had changed after General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachov’s rise to power in the spring of 1985. The new policy of glasnost was sweeping through all ranks of Soviet society, including the country’s space program.

Disclosing the existence of a Soviet equivalent to the US Space Shuttle in some ways must have been an embarrassing move for the Russians. Not only did the maiden flight of Buran come seven years after the first mission of the Space Shuttle, the Soviet media had always been very critical of the Shuttle program, portraying it as just another tool of the Pentagon to realize its ambition of militarizing space. This tradition began with the very first Shuttle launch on 12 April 1981, which entirely by coincidence overshadowed the 20th anniversary of the mission of Yuriy Gagarin. Reporting on the launch, Radio Moscow World Service said:

“The United States embarked on the Shuttle program some 10 years ago. Its military pin on the program far-reaching hopes for transferring the arms race to space. One of the main missions in the first few flights of the Shuttle will be testing a laser arms guidance system.’’

Even though the Shuttle eventually flew only a handful of dedicated Defense Depart­ment missions, no Shuttle flight went by without the Soviet media reminding the world of the ship’s military potential, the more so after President Ronald Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983. Even when Challenger exploded in January 1986, Radio Moscow warned its listeners that:

“a similar failure in the SDI system the American Administration is so anxious

to create would cause a global disaster” [1].

Many Soviet space officials and cosmonauts had also denounced the Space Shuttle program as a wasteful effort, emphasizing that a fleet of expendable rockets was a much more economical way of delivering payloads to orbit. At the same time, some also stopped short of flatly denying that reusable space transportation systems were being studied, although no technical details or timelines were given. Until 1987 the Energiya-Buran program was a closely guarded state secret, requiring a cover-up operation comparable in scale with that for the Soviet manned lunar program in the 1960s and early 1970s.

However, as had been the case with the N-1 Moon rocket, there was no way the Russians could conceal Buran-related construction work and tests from the all-seeing eyes of US reconnaissance satellites. Long before the Russians opened the informa­tion floodgates, US intelligence had a very good understanding of the system’s configuration and capabilities, although some serious misjudgments were made as well, at least based on what has been declassified so far. Significantly, the information was publicly released on a much wider scale than it had been during the Moon race in the 1960s.

Post-landing operations on the runway included removal of residual LOX from the ODU propulsion system. After that, Buran was wheeled back to the MZK building,

where—among other things—residual kerosene in the ODU system and hydrazine for the Auxiliary Power Units were drained from the vehicle’s tanks. Buran was still in the MZK at the end of the month, when a French delegation headed by President Francois Mitterand visited the cosmodrome to watch the launch of “spationaut” Jean-Loup Chretien aboard Soyuz TM-7 on 26 November.

After Buran was towed back to its MIK OK processing building, engineers got down to a close inspection of the vehicle. Much attention was focused on the ship’s heat shield. Several dozen tiles were damaged, showing cracks or signs of erosion or melting, and seven were lost altogether (compared with sixteen on Columbia during STS-1). These were one black tile each on the vertical stabilizer, rudder/speed brake, and body flap, three black tiles on the underside of the left wing and one white tile near one of the overhead windows. The three black tiles were in an area bordering on one of the reinforced carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the wing. This is the only area where the underlying surface suffered major damage, fortunately without catastrophic consequences. There were also two missing blankets of flexible thermal insulation on the upper left wing and several gapfillers were missing on the vehicle’s underside.

With the launch having taken place in cold and wet conditions, much of the damage sustained by the thermal protection system is believed to have been caused by chunks of ice falling from the launch tower, Energiya’s core stage, and the orbiter itself. There was also some significant scorching of tiles on the vertical stabilizer and the aft fuselage of the vehicle. This was attributed not only to the thermal effects of re­entry, but also to exhaust gases impinging on the vehicle from the separation motors of Energiya’s strap-on boosters [57].

Little more has been revealed about post-flight analysis of Buran. Before thorough checks could be completed, the orbiter had to be readied for a series of test flights atop the new Mriya carrier aircraft in May 1989 in preparation for a flight to the Paris Air Show in June 1989 (see Chapter 4). By the time Buran returned to its hangar in Baykonur, there were already growing doubts about the program’s future. Moreover, since the second mission was to be flown by the second orbiter, there was no urgency in preparing Buran for its next flight.