Category Energiya-Buran

MANAGEMENT

Unlike the American space program, whose military and civilian components were split with the formation of NASA in 1958, the Soviet space program remained firmly rooted in the missile program from which it originated in the 1950s and remained an institutional arm of the defense industry. Therefore, the distinction between military and civilian space projects was much more blurred than in the United States, which was also evident in the management of the Energiya-Buran program.

Communist Party level

At the Communist Party level, space was the responsibility of the Central Commit­tee’s Secretary for Defense Matters, a position established by Nikita Khrushchov in 1957 as the focus of power shifted from the USSR Council of Ministers to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The holder of the post was the most important figure in determining space policy in the USSR between 1957 and 1991, although it should be understood that space was only one of the numerous responsibilities resting on his shoulders.

Dmitriy F. Ustinov, who served as Secretary for Defense Matters from March 1965 until October 1976, was by many accounts the single most important man behind the decision to go ahead with Buran. Following in his footsteps were Yakob R. Ryabov (1976-1979), Andrey P. Kirilenko (1979-1983), Grigoriy V. Romanov (1983-1985), Lev N. Zaykov (1985-1988), and Oleg D. Baklanov (1988-1991).

The Assembly and Fueling Facility (11P593) was a building specifically constructed for the Energiya-Buran program. Height has been given between 70 and 80 m, length between 110 and 150 m, and width between 70 and 80 m. Contrary to what the name suggests, it was not really used for assembly work, but primarily for hazardous operations with the entire Energiya-Buran stack or Buran alone. The facility was built around a metal frame designed to withstand possible explosions during such operations. It has no equivalent at the Kennedy Space Center, being used for tasks that NASA performs either out on the pad or in the Orbiter Processing Facility.

The Energiya-Buran stack passed through the MZK before being rolled out to the pad for final launch preparations. Among the activities carried out with the orbiter in this building prior to flight were:

– loading the propulsion system tanks with kerosene;

– loading the Auxiliary Power Units with hydrazine and nitrogen gas;

– loading ammonia into the thermal control system;

– loading of nitrogen into the tanks of the Fire Protection System;

– filling the Pressurization and Depressurization System with air;

– installation of storage batteries and fuel cells;

– installation of cargo into Buran’s payload bay.

Another operation conducted at the MZK was the installation of pyrotechnic devices for the separation of the strap-on boosters and Buran from the core stage.

The MZK was also the first facility to receive Buran after landing for removal of any residual fuel and gas, for removal of storage batteries and fuel cells, unloading of cargo from the payload bay, and removal of flight recorders. Residual LOX for the ODU propulsion system and residual LOX and liquid hydrogen for the fuel cells were removed on a special platform near the runway, but residual kerosene in the ODU system and hydrazine for the Auxiliary Power Units were removed in the MZK.

Buran was also delivered to the MZK prior to and after test firings of the propulsion system engines and Auxiliary Power Units on the test-firing platform on Site 254. In the MZK the vehicle was equipped with a special support unit to enable ODU test firings and loaded with hydrazine for test firings of the Auxiliary Power System.

The MZK was also the facility where the Polyus spacecraft, the payload for the first Energiya mission in 1987, was mated with the launch vehicle. It is not clear, however, if future payloads other than Buran would also have been integrated with the launch vehicle in this facility [12].

Although seasoned test pilots, none of the LII Buran pilots had any spaceflight experience. Assuming Buran’s first manned mission would be flown by two LII pilots, both would be space rookies. This became problematic after events in October 1977, only a couple of months after the first LII pilots had been selected.

On 9 October 1977 cosmonauts Vladimir Kovalyonok and Valeriy Ryumin blasted off aboard the Soyuz-25 spacecraft to become the first crew to board the Salyut-6 space station. However, one day later, the cosmonauts, both first-time flyers, failed to dock their transport craft with the station and in the end were forced to abandon their attempts and return to Earth. Judging by what happened after the mission, the crew was at least partially blamed for the failure. Upon their return they were not awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, as was customary with cosmonauts who had completed their first mission. Even the crews of Soyuz-15 and Soyuz-23, who had also been unsuccessful in docking their transport ships to the stations they were supposed to occupy, had been awarded the prestigious title.

Besides denying Kovalyonok and Ryumin their Hero of the Soviet Union Gold Star medals, it was decided that from that moment on every Soviet space crew had to include at least one crew member with at least one space mission under his belt. This decision must have been made almost immediately after the landing of Soyuz-25, since Soyuz-26 was launched only three months later, carrying a new crew in accor­dance with the new rule (the original crew consisted of rookies Yuriy Romanenko and Aleksandr Ivanchenkov, but Ivanchenkov was replaced by veteran cosmonaut Georgiy Grechko).

The 1977 decision also had implications for the all-LII crews assigned to the first manned Buran mission. In preparation for that flight, it was necessary to give at least one of the crew members in both the prime and the back-up crews spaceflight experience. Therefore, the Council of Chief Designers decided on 10 March 1982 that both the prime and back-up crew commanders would occupy the third seat of a Soyuz that was scheduled to fly in the Soyuz-Salyut program [48].

Not only would that give the pilots a taste of the zero-g environment, they would also fly several types of aircraft immediately after landing in order to determine to what extent their flying abilities would be affected by their stay in weightlessness (a
research program known as Nevesomost or “Weightlessness”). Similar experiments (under the name Tonkost or “Precision”) had already been conducted by Vladimir Dzhanibekov after Soyuz-39 (March 1981) and Soyuz T-6 (June 1982), and by Leonid Popov after Soyuz-40 (May 1981) and Soyuz T-7 (August 1982). Both flew non-Buran landing profiles on a Tu-134 aircraft [49]. However, the LII pilots would be faced with a much more grueling flight schedule after landing. An additional reason for including Buran pilots in Soyuz crews was probably to acquaint them with the spacecraft in preparation for a possible Soyuz rescue mission during the early Buran test flights.

While the facilities of Nllkhimmash near Zagorsk allowed full-scale test firings of entire Blok-A modular sections to be carried out, there was no infrastructure at the site to do the same with the core stage. NASA’s method of testing the Space Shuttle Main Engines in a realistic structural environment was by mounting an Orbiter aft fuselage and a truss simulating the mid fuselage on an External Tank at the National Space Technology Laboratory (now the Stennis Space Center) in Mississippi and, ultimately, by firing the engines with the entire stack on the pad during the Flight Readiness Firings.

The Soviet approach to integrated testing of the RD-0120 was to fire all four engines with the core stage and strap-on boosters bolted to the UKSS test stand/ launch pad at Baykonur. For this purpose, two core stages were built, designated 5S and 6S. These were to undergo 17 test firings lasting a total of 3,700 seconds. All the engines involved in these tests had already been test-fired at the NIIMash test stands in Nizhnyaya Salda before being mounted on the rockets.

The 5S core stage, flanked by inert strap-on boosters, was rolled out to the UKSS on 23 January 1986. As the core stage was being prepared for the first test firing, other events were shaping the future of world space programs. America was in mourning following the loss of Challenger and its seven-person crew on 28 January 1986 and the Soviet Union successfully launched its Mir space station on 20 February. Two days after that landmark event, the 5S core stage was ready for an initial 17.8-second test firing of its four RD-0120 engines. However, just 2.58 seconds after ignition, as the engines were building up thrust, on-board automatic devices shut down all four engines due to high temperature readings in one of the gas generators.

Barely had ground controllers realized what had happened, when they found themselves faced with a problem of catastrophic potential. As the engines shut down, a leak occurred in the pneumatic lines that supplied helium to operate the rocket’s fill and drain valves, making it impossible to drain the core stage. Loaded with 600 tons of liquid oxygen and 100 tons of liquid hydrogen and with pressure in the cryogenic tanks gradually building, Energiya 5S was slowly turning into a bomb with an explosive potential of 450 tons of TNT. Ground controllers had no choice but to send a crew of volunteers out to the pad to hook up a back-up helium supply system to the rocket. Working in hazardous conditions under the launch table, they suc-

ceeded in finishing the job in just an hour’s time, allowing detanking operations to begin.

Subsequent analysis traced the cause of the helium leak to a damaged pipe measuring just 20 mm in diameter. As a result of the incident, back-up helium lines were introduced for future vehicles as well as additional means of controlling the valves electrically. The engine shutdown itself was blamed on a faulty low-pressure hydrogen pump in engine nr. 1, which had apparently been inadvertently damaged during repair work in the Energiya assembly building needed after the test firings in Nizhnyaya Salda. In the following weeks the pump was successfully swapped with

another one, an operation that had never been done on the pad before. On 25 April Energiya 5S was ready for another test firing, scheduled to last 390 seconds. This time all four engines operated flawlessly, throttling up and down as scheduled and going through a full gimbaling program. With Energiya virtually ready to fly, the focus shifted to pad tests of the entire Energiya-Buran system (see Chapter 7) [9].

Irrespective of whether the first Energiya should carry a flight-rated orbiter or not, the question also arose whether to fly the real orbiter unmanned or manned, whenever it was ready to go. All earlier Soviet piloted spacecraft (Vostok, Voskhod, and Soyuz) had flown unmanned test missions before being cleared to fly cosmonauts. NASA had done the same in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, but departed from the practice for the first Space Shuttle flight, flown by astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen in April 1981.

The Russians, on the other hand, decided to play it safe and fly their first mission unmanned. In fact, at least two unmanned flights were envisaged in the test flight schedules known to have been drawn up in the late 1980s. While this came as a surprise to many in the West (simply because NASA had done it the other way), it was a completely logical decision in light of what had happened in earlier Soviet manned space projects.

Not only had it always been a tradition to put new piloted spacecraft through their paces in the unmanned mode, even when cosmonauts were on board, their role was often secondary to that of automatic systems. Vostok, the Soviet Union’s first piloted spacecraft, was a highly automated vehicle, partly because of early concerns over the effects of zero-g and other factors on a cosmonaut’s ability to control a spacecraft, but also because its design was unified with that of an unmanned spy satellite. While the same can be said of America’s Mercury spacecraft, mission success increasingly depended on human involvement as NASA moved on to the Gemini and Apollo programs, in no small part due to pressure from the astronauts themselves. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, the high degree of spacecraft automation continued in the Voskhod and Soyuz programs, even though experience had shown by that time that people could perfectly operate in weightlessness.

All this regularly resulted in fierce man-vs.-machine debates between Air Force officials, on the one hand (in favor of manual control), and the design and industry teams, on the other hand (in favor of automatic control), especially when it came to deciding whether Soyuz dockings should be performed in manual or automatic mode. However, the Air Force and its cosmonaut team had little say in the design of piloted spacecraft. This was considered the exclusive domain of the design bureaus themselves and of the space branch of the Strategic Rocket Forces, which officially placed orders for both manned and unmanned space vehicles (including Buran) and lacked the Air Force tradition of emphasizing the need to have a man in the loop. The results of this policy are still evident today. Dockings of Soyuz spacecraft with the International Space Station continue to take place in automatic mode, with the commander allowed to take over manual control only in emergency situations.

When the Russians were faced with the decision whether to fly Buran manned or unmanned, launch and orbital operations were probably not a major issue in the discussion. Launch is a highly automated process anyway with little or no crew involvement (as it is in the Space Shuttle program) and orbital operations could be limited to an absolute minimum if a very conservative test flight were planned.

The biggest difference with earlier ballistic spacecraft was that Buran would land like an airplane, an operation usually entrusted to pilots. Indeed, Space Shuttle pilots have so far always taken control of the Orbiter for the final approach and landing, although autoland capability has been present from the beginning of the program. However, for Buran, automatic landings would have been the preferred technique even for manned missions, meaning there was little point in risking the lives of cosmonauts on a first-flight vehicle.

Among the official reasons given was that with the limited amount of landing opportunities the ship would have to be able to land in adverse weather conditions such as snow and fog. Also, there was a need to safely bring the vehicle down if the pilots suffered from the effects of zero-g or became incapacitated for some reason [27]. Another factor may have been that, by the time Buran flew, there was more con­fidence in the ability of microwave landing systems to ensure safe hands-off landings than there had been almost a decade earlier when the Space Shuttle was gearing up for its test flights [28]. However, the real underlying reason appears to have been a preference in the space industry for highly automated spacecraft that was firmly rooted in the history of the Soviet space program.

Cosmonaut Oleg Makarov, one of the more outspoken members of the cosmo­naut corps, voiced his view on the matter in an interview shortly after Buran’s flight. He said the country’s space program had been built primarily on expendable launch vehicle technology, whereas the US program had evolved from both launcher and winged vehicle experience, and had included significant participation of personnel with aviation backgrounds. He said:

“The aviation industry is strong in the US, but it is just the opposite in my country. While the US places more confidence in the crew, the Soviet space program places full reliance on totally automatic missions for initial tests, such as the first launch of Buran. The [most important role] in the Soviet space program is [played] by launch vehicle engineers’’ [29].

Despite the industry’s preference for dead stick landings, there can be little doubt that the man-vs.-machine debate would have flared up again if Buran had ever got to the point where it was ready to carry a crew. Actually, there was skepticism in the cosmonaut corps not only about automatic landings, but also about the wisdom of flying Buran unmanned at all. According to the official history of NPO Energiya a number of cosmonauts, including Igor Volk and Aleksey Leonov, sent a collective letter to the government several months before the launch, saying that Buran could not reliably fly in unmanned mode and should be manned on its first mission.

However, a special commission set up to investigate this matter concluded that Buran should fly unmanned. One concession that was apparently made as a result of the discussion was to fly a conservative two-orbit mission rather than a more ambitious three-day flight considered earlier [30].

The formation of the commission may have been a symbolic move more than anything else. Speaking after the flight, Igor Volk stated that there had never really been an option to fly the first mission of Buran with a crew. He called the timing of the flight political, saying it had been demanded by management to demonstrate the vehicle in competition with the return to flight of the Space Shuttle after the Challenger accident in 1986. Volk rated the system’s maturity for the first flight as “near-zero”, saying the two-orbit mission was flown because that was all the ship’s computers could handle at the time [31].

While Gorbachov’s policy of openness or glasnost had enabled unprecedented media coverage of Buran’s maiden flight, it also exposed the program to severe and often sound criticism, especially as the launch date for the next mission kept slipping and few realistic missions for the Soviet shuttle were announced. All this was against the backdrop of increasing public skepticism about the cost and purpose of the space program in general.

As in the US, much of the criticism came from space scientists, who saw little scientific value in Buran. In a rarely seen op-ed on the space program published in the official Communist Party newspaper Pravda in March 1989, the Institute of Space Research’s K. Gringauz called Energiya-Buran a remarkable engineering feat, but pointed out that just like the Space Shuttle in the US it had caused significant cuts in scientific space research, the difference being that the USSR had a smaller economic potential and—unlike the US—already had a permanently manned space station and adequate space transportation systems available. Gringauz continued:

“Rockets of the Energiya type can apparently be used not only to launch Buran, but also for manned flights to Mars. However, the beginning of such flights is planned for 2015, and in a quarter century’s time the control systems and all its special components will have become obsolete. In my opinion, it cannot be ruled out that the main reason for developing the Energiya-Buran system was the industry’s striving for self-confirmation and not the real needs of the country and science’’ [8].

The following month Pravda’s science editor lamented the lack of progress in the program and its high cost:

“Much has been said and written about Buran and all kinds of hopes were pinned on it. But after its unmanned test flight it has got stuck in the hangars of Baykonur. Can’t it be incorporated into the well-established system of space stations and expendable spacecraft? Have technical difficulties been discovered? As usual, one can only guess, because no news is leaking out from those hangars. But even without such news, it is clear that billions of rubles so badly needed for the national economy have been withdrawn from circulation for a long time to come’’ [9].

In late 1991 Yaroslav Golovanov, one of the country’s most respected space journalists, published a damning analysis of Buran’s intended missions in the pres­tigious Izvestiya newspaper. For one, he said, Buran was not an effective satellite launcher:

“The cost of a single [Space Shuttle] flight is some 10-20 times higher than people initially thought it would be. Of course, our Buran… is infected with the same disease… The Buran launch cost roughly 170 million rubles. Calcula­tions show that that puts the cost of lifting one kilogram of payload on Buran at 6,000 rubles. If that payload were launched on a Soyuz rocket, it would cost only one-sixth of that.”

As for returning satellites from space, Golovanov wrote that “not a single of our puny satellites is so valuable that its return via Buran wouldn’t be wasteful,” adding that no such satellites were going to appear in the foreseeable future either. He also questioned the need to use Buran for servicing space stations, quoting Soviet space officials themselves as saying that their expendable transport ships were more effec­tive. Turning to the military uses of Buran, Golovanov noted its ineffectiveness as a quick-response weapon because of the lengthy launch preparations and the limited number of launch azimuths. Concluding his analysis, Golovanov wrote:

“Who can explain to me and to the millions of my countrymen—whose money has been used to build that star plane—why we need it if none of the space systems that has been created or is actually under development has been adapted to be put into orbit by Buran or Energiya or brought back down from orbit [by Buran]?’’ [10]

Faced with ever more penetrating questions from journalists relishing their newly found freedom, Soviet space officials had little choice but to disclose the true motives behind the creation of Energiya-Buran. In a television interview on 12 April 1991 Yuriy Semyonov said:

“I have to say frankly that Buran was developed to counter the Shuttle. It’s only now that everyone, including [Defense Minister] Marshal Yazov, is repudiating it: they say Buran is unnecessary… The project was originated by the Defense Ministry, although they are now disowning it. All this took place before my very eyes. It was designed to counter or parry, as it were, the work that was being done in the United States’’ [11].

Responding to criticism about the lack of payloads, officials were quick to point out that Buran should not be primarily seen as a system to launch and retrieve ordinary satellites. In an interview in late 1989 Aleksandr Dunayev, the head of Glavkosmos, said:

“The irony is that we have always said that the Energiya-Buran system should not be regarded as a transportation system (what will it carry?); it will be considerably more costly than conventional launch vehicles, and now these very arguments are being used against us: We have made a mistake, they say. We have made no mistake. The Energiya-Buran system was conceived primarily for defense purposes and it was deemed quite essential, and all other issues … were to be secondary. Does this mean that the system has no peaceful applica­tions? It is impossible to imagine that’’ [12].

When elaborating on those “peaceful applications”, Buran’s designers were hardly able to make a convincing case. Speaking in an interview shortly after Buran’s flight, Semyonov said Buran’s primary task would be:

“to launch costly facilities outfitted with unique scientific instruments, for example, large optical telescopes, with sophisticated electronic equipment. Other uses could include the creation in orbit of big radio telescopes, aerial systems, solar power stations, and interplanetary complexes. These are ex­tremely expensive constructions, each of which is the only one of its kind and needs to be serviced by manipulators, robots, and qualified personnel.’’ [13].

However, as Semyonov was probably all too well aware himself, such plans existed only on paper and would take many years if not decades to come to fruition. The harsh truth was that Buran was slowly turning into a relic of the Cold War and its developers were having a difficult time concealing it.

Although Energiya never came anywhere close to flying in the Buran-T configura­tion, there was no lack of ideas for payloads. As mentioned earlier, in September 1989

The Globis communications satellite (source: RKK Energiya).

NPO Energiya’s new chief Yuriy Semyonov canceled plans to launch two Proton payloads on the Energiya 2L vehicle and ordered the use of that rocket instead to orbit a heavy geostationary communications platform called Globis. The idea to build these heavy communications satellites had originated in 1988 as a result of efforts to find useful payloads for Energiya, the existence of which could no longer be justified on the basis of Buran alone. Studies showed that a small network of such platforms could vastly improve communication links over the vast territory of the Soviet Union and eliminate the need to regularly launch smaller communications satellites, thereby preventing overcrowding of the geostationary belt. It was estimated that three such satellites could replace 32 conventional communications satellites. The Globis satellites, sometimes referred to in the Soviet press as the “czar satellites”,
were to use a heavy bus called a Universal Space Platform (UKP) that could also be adapted for other missions.

Semyonov showed himself a staunch supporter of the idea even before being assigned to the top post at NPO Energiya, defending the need to build such satellites at the May 1989 meeting of the Defense Council and several days later at the Council of Ministers. This resulted in a decision to hold a competition on developing future communications satellite systems, which also involved NPO PM in Krasnoyarsk, which had had a monopoly in the field until then and naturally was vigorously opposed to the Globis concept, which it saw as a case of inventing a payload to fit a rocket.

The original plan was to launch a prototype satellite weighing 13-15 tons on the Energiya 2L rocket in late 1992-1993. It would be delivered to geostationary orbit by a duo of modified Blok-DM stages (10R and 20R) known together as 204GK. The first generation of operational satellites, weighing 16-18 tons, would be launched using the same 204GK upper-stage combination in 1994-1995 and the second gen­eration, weighing 21-23 tons, would be launched beginning in 1996 using a cryogenic upper stage. Several profiles were studied to place the satellites into geostationary orbit, including one using a circumnavigation of the Moon.

After much lobbying the project was sanctioned by a decree of Gorbachov signed on 5 February 1991. In May of that year Semyonov approved a new deployment plan, with the first-generation satellites (mainly serving the Soviet Union) to fly in 1996-1998 and the second generation (to be used for global communications) to follow in 1999-2000. The satellites would use at least some tried-and-tested technol­ogy, such as the retractable solar panels developed for Mir’s Kristall module.

After the failed August 1991 coup and the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union, work on the project slowed down as the money ran out. On 1 July 1992 the govern­ment of the Russian Federation approved a plan to continue work on Globis on a commercial basis, but the necessary financial support was not found and the project was closed down along with Energiya in mid-1993 [58].

The Assembly and Fueling Facility (MZK) and Dynamic Test Stand (SDI) on Site 112A, both turned over to RKK Energiya, are no longer being used and have not been refurbished for years. The MZK now serves a storage facility for two full-scale orbiters (the 2K flight vehicle and the OK-MT engineering test model). The SDI still houses a mock-up of the Energiya-M launch vehicle. The Russian Space Agency is considering dismantling these facilities [81].

Energiya-Buran launch pads

The two Energiya-Buran launch pads 37 and 38 on Site 110 of the cosmodrome (the former N-1 pads), now owned by the Nllkhimmash organization, are in poor shape. Maintenance work was discontinued in 1993 and many parts were stolen by mar­auders. The underground levels of the pads are flooded with an estimated 50,000 m3 of water. All that Nllkhimmash does is to guard the pads and ensure that any useful remaining parts can be used in other programs. Six boxcars’ worth of equipment was dismantled for use in the Sea Launch program. If this site is ever reactivated, the cheapest option will probably be to tear down the existing infrastructure and build new launch pads from scratch [82].

Most of the SSTO designs studied thus far require the use of air-breathing hypersonic scramjets, thereby limiting the amount of fuel that needs to be carried on board. The Russians did extensive research on such scramjets, which have applications not only in aerospace planes but also in aviation and long-range missiles. They were the first to test hypersonic scramjets in flight under a research program called Kholod (“Cold”). Initiated by the Military Industrial Commission in March 1979, Kholod was actually a wide-ranging research program to study the use of cryogenic fuels such as hydrogen and methane in aviation. This included studies of efficient ways of producing such

propellants, but also the study of hydrogen-fueled scramjets. The latter component of the Kholod program was entrusted to the Baranov Central Institute of Aviation Engine Building (TsIAM), while actual construction of the scramjet took place at the Soyuz design bureau (the former OKB-300), already involved earlier in developing propulsion systems for Spiral’s hypersonic aircraft.

The 1 m long scramjet was configured with an asymmetrical three-shock fixed intake and a coaxial combustion chamber. It was launched by the S200 surface-to-air missile from the Saryshagan test site near Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan and remained attached to the rocket throughout the flight, although at least some of the vehicles were recovered. Five missions were flown with mixed success between November 1991 and February 1998. The French space agency CNES took part in missions 2 and 3 and NASA was involved in the final two missions. The last mission, using a modified version of the scramjet developed at KBKhA in Voronezh, reached a record velocity of Mach 6.47 [29].

NASA used the acquired experience for its own hypersonic scramjet test program called Hyper-X, in which small X-43A experimental research aircraft with an airframe-integrated scramjet were launched from a B-52 bomber using modified single-stage Pegasus rockets. After an initial launch failure in 2001, the X-43A reached record speeds of Mach 6.83 and Mach 9.6 during two test flights in 2004. In Russia, the Soyuz design bureau also had plans for an air-launched, hydrogen – powered scramjet test bed (GLL-31) capable of reaching Mach 10. This would be launched from the belly of a MiG-31 jet with the help of a modified S-300 surface-to – air missile and be separated from the missile for later parachute recovery (unlike the

non-recoverable X-43A). Soyuz also worked on a ground-launched, kerosene-fueled scramjet capable of reaching Mach 4.5, but the status of the latter two projects is unclear [30].

In 1993 TsIAM together with the Flight Research Institute (LII) and NPO Mashinostroyeniya (the former Chelomey bureau) started work on a new hypersonic scramjet test effort under the Oryol program, more specifically under the propulsion component of the program designated Oryol-2-1. This resulted in a new scramjet test bed called Igla (“Needle”), intended to conduct free-flight tests with the scramjet configured to operate in a usable flight vehicle. Measuring 8 m long, the vehicle has a three-module scramjet engine powered by liquid hydrogen and is launched by a UR-100N (SS-19 “Stiletto”) intercontinental ballistic missile (also used as the basis for the Rokot launch vehicle). Capable of operating up to Mach 14.0, it parachutes down back to Earth after separation from the launch vehicle [31].

There is some speculation that Igla may have made its first test flight as part of a major military exercise staged by Russia’s armed forces on 18 February 2004. This saw the launch of several rockets from Plesetsk and Baykonur, with President Vladimir Putin on hand at Plesetsk to witness the launches there. After the Baykonur launch, which involved a UR-100N, Putin said:

“An experiment has been conducted and successfully concluded. Very soon we will have in service the most up-to-date technical systems, which are able to hit intercontinental targets at hypersonic speed and with great precision and have the ability to carry out a deep maneuver both in altitude and direction.’’

Putin was apparently referring to maneuverable hypersonic warheads that are extremely difficult to counter with missile defense systems. NPO Mashinostroyeniya started work on such a system under the name Albatros in 1987, which was then abandoned at the end of the Cold War but may have been resurrected after the United States’ withdrawal from the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002 [32].

All indications are that scramjet research in Russia is now mainly being per­formed in the interests of the military, but the experience will still come in handy if Russia ever decides to build an SSTO aerospace plane in the distant future.

By mid-1975 the reusable spacecraft had moved to the foreground as the next major step in the Soviet manned space program. Based on the evidence currently available, it would seem this decision was made mainly under pressure from the Soviet military community, which was becoming increasingly worried about the military potential of the US Space Shuttle. These concerns seem to have been triggered by several studies made at Soviet research institutes, including TsNIIMash. TsNIIMash specialists came to the conclusion that the Space Shuttle would never become economically viable if it was only used for the goals that NASA officially announced. As TsNIIMash director Yuriy Mozzhorin later said:

“[The Space Shuttle] was announced as a national program, aimed at 60 launches per year… All this was very unusual: the mass they had been putting into orbit with their expendable rockets hadn’t even reached 150 tons per year, and now they were planning to launch 1,770 tons per year. Nothing was being returned from space and now they were planning to bring down 820 tons per year. This was not simply a program to develop some space system… to lower transportation costs (they promised they would lower those costs tenfold, but the studies done at our institute showed that in actual fact there would be no cost savings at all). It clearly had a focused military goal.’’

In their opinion the Shuttle’s 30-ton payload-to-orbit capacity and, more signifi­cantly, its 15-ton payload return capacity, were a clear indication that one of its main objectives would be to place massive experimental laser weapons into orbit that could destroy enemy missiles from a distance of several thousands of kilometers. Their reasoning was that such weapons could only be effectively tested in actual space conditions and that in order to cut their development time and save costs it would be necessary to regularly bring them back to Earth for modifications and fine-tuning [13].

A study often cited with respect to the origins of the Soviet shuttle program was performed at the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Applied Mathematics (IPM). Headed since 1953 by Mstislav Keldysh (President of the Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 1975), this institute had been involved in mission modeling and ballistics computations since the early days of the space program. The IPM studies were conducted under the leadership of Yuriy Sikharulidze and Dmitriy Okhotsimskiy, two of its leading scientists.

The IPM studies focused on the Shuttle’s possible use as a bomber, more par­ticularly its capability to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States. Efraim Akin, one of the institute’s scientists, later recalled:

“When the US Shuttle was announced we started investigating the logic of that approach. Very early our calculations showed that the cost figures being used by NASA were unrealistic. It would be better to use a series of expendable launch vehicles. Then, when we learned of the decision to build a Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg for military purposes, we noted that the trajectories from Vandenberg allowed an overflight of the main centers of the USSR on the first orbit. So our hypothesis was that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes. Because of our suspicion and distrust we decided to replicate the Shuttle without a full understanding of its mission.

When we analysed the trajectories from Vandenberg we saw that it was possible for any military payload to re-enter from orbit in three and a half minutes to the main centers of the USSR, a much shorter time than [a sub­marine-launched ballistic missile] could make possible (ten minutes from off the coast). You might feel that this is ridiculous but you must understand how our leadership, provided with that information, would react. Scientists have a dif­ferent psychology than the military. The military, very sensitive to the variety of possible means of delivering the first strike, suspecting that a first-strike cap­ability might be the Vandenberg Shuttle’s objective, and knowing that a first strike would be decisive in a war, responded predictably’’ [14].

The report produced by the IPM scientists has never been made public, leaving unanswered many questions about the technical details of such a mission. Appar­ently, the Russians believed the Shuttle could drop bombs on Soviet territory while re-entering from a single-orbit mission from Vandenberg or by briefly “diving’’ into the atmosphere and then returning to orbit. As Energiya-Buran chief designer Boris Gubanov writes in his memoirs:

“The studies… showed that the Space Shuttle could carry out a return man­euver from a half or single orbit…, approach Moscow and Leningrad from the south, and then, performing… a “dive”, drop in this region a nuclear charge, and in combination with other means paralyze the military command system of the Soviet Union.” [15]

What lent this scenario particular credibility from the Russians’ perspective was the Shuttle’s 2,000 km cross-range capability, demanded by the Air Force to enable the Shuttle to return to Vandenberg after a single orbit around the Earth. However, such single-orbit missions from Vandenberg were not considered for a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, but to quickly service polar-orbiting US spy satellites or even pluck enemy satellites from orbit, barely giving the Russians a chance to detect such operations with their space-tracking means [16]. Leaving aside the ques­tion whether such missions were feasible, the capability to return to Vandenberg after a single revolution was needed anyway to allow the Shuttle to perform a so-called “Abort Once Around’’ in case it ended up in an unacceptably low orbit after a main engine failure.

One can only guess what led the Russians to believe that the Shuttle had a nuclear first-strike capability. Possibly, they were “inspired” by their own plans for a so – called Fractional Orbit Bombardment System, an orbital nuclear weapons system designed to attack the US via the South Pole rather than passing through the net of radar systems at the northern approach corridor. The Soviet Union worked on three such systems in the 1960s, one of which (using Yangel’s R-36 missile) actually reached operational status by the end of the decade.

Even though it bordered on paranoia, IPM’s assessment of the Shuttle’s first-strike capability is said by many to have been a decisive factor in convincing the Soviet leadership of the need to build an equivalent system (although a more rational reaction would probably have been to upgrade anti-missile defense systems). Gubanov writes:

“On the basis of the results of the analysis, M. V. Keldysh sent a report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as a result of which L. I. Brezhnev, actively supported by D. F. Ustinov, took the decision to work out a set of alternative measures to guarantee the safety of the country.’’ [17]

However, new evidence shows that Keldysh put his signature under the IPM report on 26 March 1976, which was more than a month after the official party and government decree that sanctioned the Soviet shuttle program [18]. Still, it cannot be ruled out that the studies began well before that time and that preliminary results did play some role in the Soviet decision to move forward with a Space Shuttle equivalent.

Keldysh, an influential figure in the Soviet space program until his death in 1978, seems to have been a major supporter of a Soviet shuttle system, which may seem surprising given his background as a scientist. However, rather than being a stereo­typical armchair scientist, Keldysh had always been keen on putting his mathematical talents to practical use, making major contributions to Soviet strategic programs in his capacity as head of NII-1 (1946-1955) and IPM (1953-1978). His appointment as President of the Academy of Sciences in 1961 was seen as symbolizing the marriage of the Academy as the headquarters of fundamental science to the military-industrial complex. One joke that reportedly circulated among scientists was that “instead of representing the Academy in the Central Committee, Keldysh represented the Central Committee in the Academy” [19]. Roald Sagdeyev, the former head of the Academy’s Institute of Space Sciences, recalls how Keldysh reacted when an Acad­emy workshop was asked to formulate an opinion on the need to develop a shuttle:

“Though we tried very hard, the workshop was unable to find even one single scenario in which the shuttle could provide a comparative advantage. Finally, I drafted a negative response to the government’s request for the Academy of Sciences’ opinion, in which I stated that the Academy did not see any sensible way to use this Russian version of the shuttle. Cautious Keldysh, however, did not want to get into conflict with the military, so he modified my wording, saying: ‘We do not see any sensible scenario that would support the shuttle for scientific uses [author’s stress]’.” [20]