Category Energiya-Buran

Early work on the Space Shuttle in the late 1960s did not spark an immediate response from the Soviet side for a number of reasons. The only two design bureaus capable of building manned spacecraft had more pressing concerns. TsKBEM, the former Korolyov design bureau (now headed by Vasiliy Mishin), was preoccupied with Soyuz, the civilian DOS space station, and the N-1/L-3 manned lunar program. TsKBM, the Chelomey design bureau, was busy working on the military Almaz space station and its TKS transport ship, not to mention a variety of unmanned military satellites and anti-ship missile projects.

Not only would the development of a large reusable spacecraft place an extra burden on the already overtaxed design bureaus, there simply was no clear need for such a system in the near future. The Soyuz and TKS spacecraft could perfectly handle transportation tasks for the DOS and Almaz stations and the Soviet Union had a varied fleet of expendable rockets to satisfy satellite launch requirements for many years to come.

Looking at the more distant future, TsKBEM was studying a so-called Multi­purpose Orbital Complex (MOK), an entire orbital infrastructure aimed at lowering space transportation costs. Even here there was no immediate need for a large reusable shuttle system. The centerpiece of the MOK was to be a giant N-1 launched space station called MKBS (Multipurpose Space Base Station) that would serve as an orbiting garage. The idea was that satellites in the constellation would be serviced either at the MKBS or regularly be visited by MKBS-based crews flying light versions of the Soyuz outfitted with a manipulator arm. The satellites themselves would be orbited by expendable rockets or partially reusable rockets based on the N-1. In April 1972 Mishin and Chelomey got approval for a joint proposal to turn Almaz into a combined civilian/military space station serviced by Soyuz spacecraft, allowing TsKBEM to focus on the more distant goal of creating the MOK. The two chief designers agreed that Chelomey’s TKS would be the MOK’s key transportation

system during the program’s experimental phase. Reusable transportation systems were part of the MOK plans, but only at a later stage [2].

There were also other obstacles to the initiation of a Space Shuttle type project. Requiring a blend of aviation, rocket, and space technology, it would be an organ­izational nightmare. The leading missile and space design bureaus, including TsKBEM and TsKBM, came under the “space and missile industry’’ known as the Ministry of General Machine Building (MOM) (headed by Sergey Afanasyev), while the leading aviation design bureaus were under the Ministry of the Aviation Industry (MAP) (headed by Pyotr Dementyev). Although both were willing to participate in such an effort, neither was eager to take on prime responsibility for it, considering it to be “the other ministry’s field of business’’.

Finally, the atmosphere around the turn of the decade may not have been conducive to the start of a totally new program. It was a period marked by many spectacular failures in the Soviet space program, both launch vehicle mishaps (notably the Proton and the N-l) and spacecraft malfunctions (notably lunar and deep-space probes). The string of failures even led to the creation of an investigative commission, which concluded that one of the root causes for the numerous setbacks was the lack of proper ground-testing facilities such as engine test stands, vacuum chambers, and the like. Embarking on a completely new, costly, and technologically advanced project under such conditions would not have been a logical course of action.

However, while any final decision on a Soviet shuttle was still years away, some in the Soviet space community did think it was time to begin preliminary research on such a system. The initiative seems to have come from the Military Industrial Commission (VPK), a body under the Council of Ministers (the Soviet government) that oversaw all defense-related ministries (including MOM and MAP). Among its tasks was to formulate new proposals for military and space projects (with the necessary input from the design bureaus and the military community), which could then be officially approved in the form of joint decrees of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers. These decrees would set rough timelines for projects, outline their major goals, and also assign the main organiza­tions that would be involved. It was then again up to the VPK to implement those decrees by dividing the work among the design bureaus, setting concrete timetables, and convening meetings of the people in charge.

In a draft proposal for the Soviet Union’s next five-year space program dated 27 November 1970, the VPK suggested that both MOM and MAP as well as other organizations should work out a so-called “draft plan’’ for a “unified reusable transport ship’’ in 1972. This is the first known written evidence of the Soviet Union’s intention to respond to the Space Shuttle. Essentially, it was an order to produce nothing more than paperwork. The “draft plan’’ is just one of the preliminary stages that Soviet space projects went through before metal was actually cut.

Indications are that the phrase about the reusable transportation system was not included in the final government and party decree describing the country’s goals in space for the next five years. Clearly, the time was not quite ripe enough even for preliminary research on a shuttle system. There may have been opposition from

MOM and MAP but, perhaps more importantly, there was no urgent need to begin this work because the US Space Shuttle had not even been officially approved.

Even President Nixon’s go-ahead for the Space Shuttle project in January 1972 did not set in motion a concerted effort to develop a reusable spacecraft. The first high-level meeting in response to Nixon’s January 1972 announcement was organized by the VPK on 31 March 1972. It was attended by both industry and military officials, more particularly representatives of TsNIIMash (MOM’s leading space test and research facility), the TsNII-30 and TsNII-50 military research institutes, the Chief Directorate of Space Assets or GUKOS (the “space branch’’ of the Strategic Rocket Forces) and the Air Force, but no consensus was reached on the need for a response. At this stage the VPK once again formulated a draft proposal asking MOM, MAP, and other organizations to develop a draft plan for a shuttle system, but it met with stiff opposition from MOM minister Afanasyev and was not accepted.

In late April 1972 another meeting took place at TsNIIMash, attended by some of the chief designers (Mishin, Chelomey, Glushko), officials of MOM and TsNII-50. Their conclusion was that a reusable space transportation system was a less efficient and less cost-effective way of delivering payloads to orbit than expendable boosters. Also, they did not see an immediate need for using such a system to return satellites or other hardware back to Earth, certainly not after Mishin and Chelomey had received approval for the MOK/TKS plan that same month. Moreover, at this point the US Space Shuttle was not considered a military threat to the Soviet Union [3].

Although the decree of 17 February 1976 constituted the formal approval of the Soviet shuttle, it did not stipulate what type of design should be chosen. It merely endorsed the basic requirements for the system laid down earlier by the military (30 tons up, 20 tons down). By the time the decree was passed, the OS-120 and MTKVP concepts had been pretty much abandoned and engineers had settled on the January 1976 OK-92 plan, namely a winged orbiter strapped to the side of a massive launch vehicle consisting of a core stage with three RD-0120 cryogenic engines and four strap-on boosters with one RD-123 LOX/kerosene engine each.

A change made soon afterwards was to increase the number of main engines on the RLA-130 core stage to four and reduce their vacuum thrust from 250 to 190 tons. The additional engine provided extra redundancy in case of a main engine failure during the climb to orbit [59]. At the same time, the sea-level thrust of the LOX/ kerosene engines in the strap-on boosters was increased from 600 to 740 tons, resulting in an improved engine called the RD-170. The RLA-130 had now almost acquired the configuration that would eventually become known as Energiya.

Buran was covered with approximately 38,800 heat-resistant tiles (compared with nearly 31,000 tiles on Columbia for STS-1). Each tile consisted of a substrate and a coating. The substrate came in two types with different densities. One was called TZMK-10 (with a density of 0.15g/cm3) and the other TZMK-25 (density 0.25 g/cm3). These were more or less comparable in characteristics and performance with the two basic types of Shuttle tile substrate (Li-900 and Li-2200). They were used in regions where Buran was exposed to temperatures of anywhere between 700°C and 1,250°C. The tiles were made of high-purity 98-99 percent amorphous silica fibres derived from common sand (SiO2—silica) with minimum amounts of natrium, potassium, and calcium oxides to lower the melting point of the fibers. The thickness of the tiles depended on where they were attached to the aluminum skin and the temperatures and aerodynamic stresses that any particular part of Buran was exposed to.

Both the TZMK-10 and 25 had special 0.3 mm thick glass coatings to reject heat and protect the tiles against wind loads and moisture penetration. This was very

similar to the Reaction-Cured Glass (RCG) coating on the Shuttle’s tiles. Chemicals were added to the coating to give the tiles different colors and heat rejection cap­abilities. Black coating (both for TZMK-10 and 25) was mainly needed to protect the underside of Buran against the high temperatures of re-entry, with the higher-density TZMK-25 only being used in regions exposed to the highest stresses. The black – coated tiles on the belly could not be permanently exposed to sunlight for more than 6 hours. White coating (only applied to TZMK-10) mainly served the purpose of protecting the upper surfaces of the vehicle against solar radiation in orbit.

Although the coating provided some protection against moisture penetration, any cracks in the coating would easily let moisture through. Therefore, additional measures had to be taken to make the tiles waterproof. During manufacture the tiles were treated with a special silicon polymer solution, but that burned out during the first flight in all areas where temperatures exceeded +450° C. Therefore, the tiles would have needed to be rewaterproofed for any subsequent missions (had they been flown). For that purpose the Russians developed a varnish-like coating as well as a technique to permeate the tile with a substance known as hexamethyl disilazane. NASA uses a similar substance (dimethylethoxysilane) for rewaterproofing Shuttle tiles, but injects the material into the tiles, whereas the Russians planned to use a gas diffusion technique.

Since the fragile tiles could not withstand structural deflections and expansions of the aluminum skin, they were not attached directly to the skin, but to 4 mm thick felt

pads, which then in turn were bonded to the actual skin. Similar to the Shuttle’s Strain Isolation Pads, they were attached to the tiles as well as to the skin of Buran with an adhesive based on silicon rubber, ensuring a reliable bond in a temperature range of -130°C to +300°C.

Since the tiles thermally expanded or contracted very little, small gaps were left between them to permit relative motion and allow for the deformation of the alum­inum structure under them due to thermal effects. The gaps were filled with a special felt-type material based on organic fibers and capable of withstanding temperatures of up to 430° C.

Tests showed that, if a tile was lost but the underlying felt pad remained in place, the temperature of the aluminum skin would not reach its 500°C melting point, even in areas where temperatures reached 1,250° C. If the felt pad was also lost, there could be damage to the skin, but only in regions close to where carbon-carbon panels were used.

About 28,000 of the tiles were trapezoidal in shape with sizes ranging from about 150 x 150 mm to 200 x 200 mm. Approximately 6,000 tiles were irregular and formed complex patterns on the hatches, around the nozzles of the engines, and on certain edges. Approximately 4,800 tiles had even more complex shapes. Although the distribution of black and white tiles over Buran’s surface was very similar to that on the Orbiter, there were different layout patterns. A fan-type pattern was used on the nose section, elevons, and the vertical stabilizer to avoid the use of triangular and sharply angular tiles of low strength.

The heart of Buran’s flight control system were two Soviet-built redundant computer sets known as the Central Computing System and the Peripheral Computing System, each consisting of four identical computers called “Biser-4” (“Beads”). The US Space Shuttle has a single redundant set of four computers and a fifth back-up computer using different software. Weighing 33.6 kg and using 270 watts of power, each Biser was made up of a central processing unit to provide the central computational capability and an input-output processor to transmit commands to vehicle systems and validate response data from those systems. The computers ran in sync with each other, with the computations of each computer being verified by the other. If one of the computers failed, it was voted out by the others. Each redundant set remained fully operational with two computers down. If a third one failed, there was still at least a 75 percent chance of maintaining the same capacity as a full set. Rather than using program synchronization as was the case with the Shuttle’s General Purpose Computers, the Biser computers were synchronized by a single quartz clock generator that emitted 4Mhz clock pulses to all eight computers at intervals of 32.8 milli­seconds. The generator had five redundant channels.

Each Biser-4 was equipped with 131,072 32-bit words in random-access memory and 16,384 in read-only memory. The software was divided into system software to operate the computers themselves and applications software to perform the functions required to fly and operate the vehicle. While the operations system software perma­nently resided in the computer, the applications software was too big to fit in the available computer memory space. Therefore, it was divided into several memory groups corresponding to specific flight phases and stored on a magnetic tape mass memory unit with a capacity of 819,200 32-bit words. In that way, applications software needed for a specific phase of the flight could be loaded into the computers’ random-access memory from the mass memory unit when needed. The unit stored two versions of each memory group.

The lead organization for the development of the on-board computers was NPO AP, headed until 1982 by Nikolay Pilyugin, who was subsequently replaced by Vladimir Lapygin. Originally, the software was also to be written at NPO AP, but software development ran into major problems in the early 1980s, which is why several other organizations became involved in 1983. Two new specific software languages known as “PROL-2’’ (used by the on-board computers) and “DIPOL” (used by ground computers during vehicle testing) as well as a software language enabling those two to interact (“FLOKS”) were devised for Buran under the leadership of Mikhail Shura-Bura at the Institute of Applied Mathematics [22].

“Early Return” was a scenario giving the crew 3 to 24 hours to prepare for deorbit, with a much better chance of reaching one of the three runways. This would have required the same type of action on the part of the crew as “Immediate Return”, but only at a more relaxed pace. The most probable event leading to such a situation would have been a dangerous loss of redundancy in critical on-board systems such as the computers, the GSP gyro platforms, the fuel cells, etc. Even depressurization of the crew cabin was ranked as an anomaly that would give the crew several hours or more to prepare for deorbit, assuming that the loss of pressure was slow enough for the crew to have a chance to don their Strizh pressure suits and hook them up to the Personal Life Support System (the minimum time required for this was five minutes). Cabin systems were designed to operate in a vacuum and the suit’s life support systems could sustain the crew for 12 hours.

The MIK OK (also designated 11P592) was the biggest facility that had to be built from scratch in support of the Energiya-Buran project. Early plans to use reinforced concrete were abandoned in favor of lighter materials to speed up construction. Sources differ on the exact size of the building, with the width given between 112 and 132 m, length between 222 and 254 m, and height between 30 and 37 m. The actual processing area was surrounded on three sides by a multi-storey prefabricated concrete structure containing 4,800 m of laboratory and office space.

Whereas NASA’s Orbiters are processed in stationary mode in three separate, virtually identical Orbiter Processing Facilities, all Soviet vehicles were processed in one single building, progressively moving from one bay to another to undergo specific processing tasks. The MIK OK housed five bays:

– Transfer bay: this is where Buran arrived first after entering the building through large rolling doors. Having been transported to the MIK OK, the vehicle was transferred here to an internal transportation device, allowing it to be moved from one bay to the other. It was also possible to move the orbiters from one bay to another with the help of a bridge crane.

– Thermal protection system bay (“bay 102’’): a bay specifically equipped to further outfit Buran with tiles after arriving from the factory or to service the thermal protection system in between flights.

– Assembly bay (“bay 103’’): here Buran was fitted with parts that could not be installed in the factory either for technical reasons or because of weight

constraints imposed by the VM-T carrier aircraft. Among other things, the engines, the power supply system, additional life support systems, and various cables were installed here. This bay was also to be used for repair work in between flights, leak checks, and autonomous tests of various systems.

– Control and test bay (“bay 104”): this was used for electrical tests of individual systems and integrated electrical tests, some additional assembly work that could not be performed in the assembly bay, and also for final close-out work.

– Anechoic chamber (“bay 105”): this bay (measuring 60 x 40 x 30 m) was used for individual and integrated tests of the orbiter’s radio systems to make sure that they would not interfere with one another in flight.

The MIK OK would have been capable of supporting a launch rate of up to six missions per year [9].

Soviet planners envisaged an extensive orbital test flight program for Buran, which at one point included as many as 10 missions, both unmanned and manned. By comparison, the US Space Shuttle flew just four (manned) test flights in 1981— 1982 before being declared operational.

For safety reasons, crews for the initial Buran test flights would have been restricted to just two cosmonauts. First, it was not practical to install ejection seats for more than two crew members and, second, if a life-threatening emergency arose in orbit, a Soyuz would have to be able to come to the rescue. Since that Soyuz needed a “rescue commander”, only two seats would be left in the vehicle for the stranded Buran crew.

Throughout the 1980s, there was disagreement on the composition of the initial Buran crews. LII in Zhukovskiy, backed by the Air Force, argued that both seats should be occupied by its experienced test pilots. However, NPO Energiya, intent on not being sidelined, pushed to fly one of its engineers in the co-pilot seat rather than an LII test pilot. Therefore, two types of crews were considered for most of the duration of the program: crews consisting of two LII pilots, on the one hand, and crews composed of one LII pilot and one NPO Energiya flight engineer, on the other hand.

It should be stressed that as Buran never came anywhere close to flying a manned mission, none of the crews mentioned below was ever officially assigned. The flight plan for the first manned mission remained vague until the end of the program and none of these crews performed any dedicated mission training.

LII crews

From the very beginning LII had the following crews in mind for the first flight:

Prime crew Back-up crew

Igor Volk Anatoliy Levchenko

Rimantas Stankyavichus Aleksandr Shchukin

The preference for Volk-Stankyavichus and Levchenko-Shchukin was reflected in the fact that the two crews flew the bulk of the atmospheric Horizontal Flight Tests with the BTS-002 Buran analog. A total of 24 such flights were performed between November 1985 and April 1988. Volk and Stankyavichus were paired for 11 of the missions and Levchenko and Shchukin jointly flew 4 missions (see Chapter 6).

The original crewing plan was completely disrupted in August 1988, when in a bizarre twist of fate Buran lost its entire back-up crew with the deaths of both Levchenko and Shchukin. As a result, Volk and Stankyavichus were split up and both got new co-pilots from the LII ranks [41]. Volk has claimed that GKNII pilots Ivan Bachurin and Aleksey Boroday, veterans of six BTS-002 flights, were also considered as the back-up crew [42]. The new crews were:

Prime crew Back-up crew

Igor Volk Rimantas Stankyavichus

Magomed Tolboyev Viktor Zabolotskiy

Internal LII documents show that another option considered was to retain the Volk- Stankyavichus team, with Zabolotskiy and Tolboyev acting as back-ups. This plan assumed that Zabolotskiy would first fly a Soyuz mission to give him the necessary spaceflight experience to command Buran if the need arose [43].

When Stankyavichus was killed in a plane crash in September 1990, LII was forced once again to change the composition of the back-up crew [44]. The new crews were:

Prime crew Back-up crew

Igor Volk Viktor Zabolotskiy

Magomed Tolboyev Ural Sultanov

These are the last crews known to have been considered by LII for the first piloted Buran mission.

As early as 1979 crude full-scale mock-ups of the core stage and one of the strap-ons (“EUK-13”) were built in situ at Baykonur just to get a feel of things to come [5]. During that same year the Progress factory in Kuybyshev manufactured a core stage called 4M that was to be used for a variety of pad tests at Baykonur. However, the beginning of those pad tests hinged on the completion of the UKSS test stand as well as the availability of the VM-T Atlant carrier aircraft to fly elements of the core stage from Kuybyshev to the cosmodrome. After completing its test flights at Zhukovskiy, the VM-T delivered the 4M core stage to Baykonur in two ferry flights on 8 April and 11 June 1982. At about the same time KB Yuzhnoye shipped four mock-up modular sections of strap-on boosters to the launch site.

By the autumn of 1982 the Interdepartmental Coordinating Council (MVKS) set the goal of assembling the first Energiya rocket before the end of the year, which was expected to be a major morale-booster for cosmodrome personnel. This was easier said than done, because much of the equipment needed for this at the Energiya assembly building was not yet in place and NPO Energiya’s ZEM factory was running late in supplying the nose and tail sections for the mock-up boosters. In order to meet the deadline, tail sections for the mock-up boosters were quickly manufactured by the Atommash factory in Volgodonsk, which produced large-scale components for the Soviet Union’s nuclear power program. Mustering all their improvisation skills, workers managed to complete the assembly of the first so-called “packet’’ in the final days of 1982, using a specially ordered crane to mount the final two boosters on the stack.

A first demonstration roll-out took place in the late winter, but the exact date is unknown and it is not clear if the vehicle was actually placed on the UKSS. US reconnaissance satellites observed the rocket outside the assembly building in March 1983 [6]. The next step would have been to conduct fueling tests of the 4M’s LOX and LH2 tanks, but much of the 4M core stage’s internal plumbing had not yet been supplied by the Progress plant and the UKSS had not been completely finished either. However, engineers came up with an alternative plan to use the 4M stack for dynamic tests that would normally be done much later at the Dynamic Test Stand, the construction of which was running many years behind schedule. The purpose was to learn more about the effects of longitudinal and transverse vibrations on the core stage, the boosters, and the mechanical systems joining them. Another objective was to study the effects of an emergency shutdown of two RD-0120 engines. For the tests

the stack was equipped with a wide array of sensors capable of monitoring 85 different parameters.

For the longitudinal vibration tests, a cable would be suspended between the top and bottom sections of the core stage, where one of the engine nozzles was removed. Pyrotechnic bolts would then be fired to release the cable either at the bottom end or top end of the core stage, thereby creating longitudinal vibrations. Dubbed 4M-D (D for “dynamic”), the stack was rolled out to the UKSS for these tests on 7 May 1983. Dynamic tests were later continued with the same stack in horizontal position in the Energiya assembly building. Several months later the UKSS was finally ready for fit checks, and launch pad chief designer Vladimir Barmin insisted on doing another roll-out. In October 1983 the 4M stack once again slowly made its way to the UKSS and all its systems were hooked up to the pad, which had not been the case in the earlier tests [7].

Although the Energiya-Buran program remained shrouded in secrecy for much of the 1980s, US intelligence specialists had a fairly good idea of the system’s character­istics and capabilities, mainly thanks to detailed American reconnaissance satellite images of both Baykonur and the Flight Research Institute (LII) in Zhukovskiy. The latter was identified in the intelligence literature as Ramenskoye, which is the name of LII’s airfield in Zhukovskiy and (confusingly) also of a neighboring town and railway station.

The first clear evidence for the existence of a large shuttle came in the late 1970s, when construction of the runway and launch pads at Baykonur got underway. The Energiya-Buran pads were identified as “Complex J’’ (the same code name given to the N-1 pads) and the UKSS pad as “Complex W’’. By 1982 spy satellites had even spotted the construction of the back-up runway in the Soviet Far East. [14].

The first public assessment of the system’s capabilities was given in Soviet Military Power 1983, published in early 1983. Since the first test models of Energiya were yet to be rolled out to the pad, analysts still had a poor understanding of the system’s configuration and capabilities. Drawings showed the Soviet shuttle mounted on an external tank with two rocket boosters, with the main engines apparently on the orbiter itself. The lift-off weight of the system was estimated to be just 1,500 tons compared with the NASA Shuttle lift-off weight of 2,220 tons. Combined with an estimated lift-off thrust of between 1,800 and 2,700 tons (compared with roughly 3,000 tons for the Shuttle), this translated into a staggering payload capacity of 60 tons, twice that of the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The Soviet shuttle was believed to have a substantially different wing design with an 80-degree sweep. The heavy-lift launch vehicle (HLLV) was depicted as a 95 m high core vehicle with three 35 m high liquid propellant boosters and a top-mounted payload with a maximum mass of between 130 and 150 tons [15].

By the middle of 1983 several events led to a much better understanding of the Soviet shuttle system. Spy satellites had acquired detailed images of a test orbiter sitting atop a VM-T carrier aircraft during tests earlier in the year and had also spotted an incident in which the pair accidentally skidded off the runway in March 1983. Moreover, the first test versions of Energiya had been rolled out of the assembly building in the first half of the year. A CIA National Intelligence Estimate in July 1983 now correctly concluded that the orbiter had a configuration very similar to that of the US Space Shuttle Orbiter and that the main engines were on the core rather than on the orbiter. The report was wrong in stating that the rocket had only two strap-on boosters and that the core was outfitted with “at least two and probably three engines”. This may have been related to the fact that the Energiya rolled out in May 1983 had only three nozzles installed on the core stage {see Chapter 6). The report referred to the spherical sections above the core stage nozzles as “pod-like

US Defense Department representation of Soviet shuttle on the pad. Illustration from Soviet Military Power 1986 (source: US Department of Defense).

objects” that were erroneously interpreted as part of a recovery system for the LOX/LH2 engines [16]. In Soviet Military Power 1984 lift-off weight and thrust were now estimated at 2,000 tons and 3,000 tons, respectively, resulting in an orbiter payload capacity of 30 tons. The HLLV was still expected to be a nearly 100 m high rocket with six or more strap-on boosters and a payload capacity of 150 tons, a configuration that was actually more reminiscent of the Vulkan rocket.

It was not until the 1986 edition that Soviet Military Power published a drawing of a 100-ton capacity HLLV where the orbiter was replaced by a side-mounted cargo pod. This was also the first edition that got the dimensions of the rocket/orbiter stack more or less right, although the first Energiya-Buran combination did not make its appearance on the Baykonur launch pads until summer/autumn of 1986, after the report had been published. The following year potential payloads for the cargo version of the rocket were said to be modules for large space stations, components for a manned or unmanned interplanetary mission, and even directed-energy ASAT and ballistic missile defense weapons.

Reconnaissance satellite images of Baykonur also gave some idea of how the testing proceeded. In 1984 and early 1985 the SL-X-16 (“Zenit”) medium-lift booster had been observed being alternately removed from and erected on the pad, suggesting Soviet dissatisfaction with the ground test results. This in turn had implications for

the HLLV/shuttle program, which used common engines. Apparently, the belief at this time was that the SL-X-16 was powered by liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen engines and that these same engines were used both in the strap-ons and the core stage of the HLLV. The fact that no Energiya had yet been seen with an orbiter strapped to the side was also seen as an indication that the program was suffering delays [17]. When a test orbiter did finally undergo the first pad tests in August – October 1986, the news was reported only weeks later [18]. US reconnaissance assets apparently also picked up signs of the Energiya core stage test firings in the first half of 1986, but these were not openly reported until a year later [19].

Buran-related test activities were not always correctly interpreted, especially when the Soviet approach to testing was different than NASA’s. Just weeks before the first ground run of the BTS-002 atmospheric test bed at LII in late December 1984, Aviation Week correctly reported that approach and landing tests of the shuttle were imminent, but wrongly concluded that the vehicle would be dropped from the VM-T carrier aircraft in similar fashion to the test flights of Enterprise in 1977 [20]. In April 1986, by which time BTS-002 had performed numerous ground runs and two

landing tests, Aviation Week referred to reconnaissance photography showing jet engines mounted on either side of the tail, but still believed the vehicle was being dropped from the VM-T. The jet engines were thought to be on board only to test their ability to correct an orbiter’s flight path when returning from space and might or might not be lit prior to separation from the aircraft depending on test objectives [21].

Of course, the information that leaked out via Aviation Week did not necessarily reflect what the US intelligence community really knew. Other observers, taking into account the known capabilities of the VM-T, correctly concluded that it could hardly carry a full-size, full-weight orbiter to sufficient altitude for a safe free flight [22]. Aviation Week did not report the correct flight profile of the BTS-002 until late 1987 after having been informed by Soviet space officials at an international space congress in Moscow. The only mistake remaining was that the tests were said to take place at Baykonur [23].

Western observers had more to go on than just the intelligence community’s interpretation of reconnaissance satellite imagery. Pictures taken of Baykonur by civilian remote-sensing satellites such as the US Landsat and the French SPOT had sufficient resolution to show the construction work going on in support of the Energiya-Buran program. Unlike the spy satellite pictures, these were openly available to the public.

It is not clear how much information on the program leaked to the West through breaches in the Soviet censorship and security apparatus or via human intelligence. One piece of information that did slip through was that the name of the Soviet shuttle was Buran. The name first appeared in a 1983 CIA National Intelligence Estimate and also surfaced in several open Western publications the following years, well before the Russians officially announced it [24]. This information could not possibly have been gleaned from spy satellite photography, because the name was not on any of the test models and was not painted on the first flight vehicle until 1988. Actually, before 1988 Buran was not the name of a specific orbiter, but a generic name used by the Russians to refer to the combination of rocket and orbiter (see Chapter 2).

On 6 May 1989 the Energiya-Buran program was again on the agenda of the Defense Council, chaired by Gorbachov. Appearing before the Council, leaders of the Energiya-Buran program outlined future plans for the system, including the GK-199 mission, the creation of fully reusable versions of the Energiya rocket, and the development of derived launch vehicles such as Energiya-M, Groza, and Vulkan. While acknowledging the success of Buran’s mission and praising the work of the people involved, the Council expressed dissatisfaction with the progress made on devising payloads and missions for the Soviet shuttle. The Council also made some cost-cutting moves, ordering the number of operational shuttle vehicles to be reduced from five (as planned since 1977) to three and curtail Buran’s test flight program to just five missions by combining some of the objectives of the earlier planned missions. At the same time it called for speeding up work on Buran payloads and Energiya – derived launch vehicles.

The plan was now to fly Energiya 2L with the GK-199 payload in 1990, giving the team an extra opportunity to man-rate the rocket for future Buran missions. The second unmanned orbiter mission was now delayed to the first quarter of 1991 and apart from a docking with Mir would feature a link-up with a manned Soyuz “rescue vehicle’’ (see Chapter 5). This mission, designated 2K1 (the first flight of orbiter 2K) had already been approved by the Military Industrial Commission on 22 February 1989. The first manned Buran flight was now scheduled for the first half of 1992. LII internal planning documents drawn up around this time show the unmanned mission was scheduled for April/May 1991 and the manned flight for May 1992, with crew training to begin in December 1990. The decisions of the Council were consolidated by a government decree in June 1989, which laid out plans for the use of Buran until the year 2000 [5].