WHAT’S IN A NAME?

The system

The term used for the Soviet shuttle program in the February 1976 party/government decree was Reusable Space System (Mnogorazovaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema or MKS). This covered not only the rocket and orbiter, but extended to the interorbital space tug mentioned in the decree as well as the cosmodrome infrastructure needed to prepare, launch, and land the vehicle. MKS is probably the closest equivalent to “(National) Space Transportation System” ((N)STS) in the United States (officially changed into “Space Shuttle Program” in 1990).

On 27 May 1976 chief designer Igor Sadovskiy approved an MKS structure consisting of 13 elements, each of which got its own Ministry of Defense designator beginning with the number 11. Others were added later in the program. The flight hardware was given the following designators:

– the orbiter: 11F35;

– the core stage: 11K25Ts;

– the strap-on boosters: 11K25A;

– the interorbital space tug: 11F45.

The MKS itself received the designator 1K11K25. Combinations of individual elements got their own designators. The most important ones were [73]:

– core stage + strap-on boosters: 11K25;

– core stage + strap-on boosters + orbiter: 11F36.

Another term used later in the program was Universal Rocket and Space Trans­portation System (Universalnaya Raketno-Kosmicheskaya Transportnaya Sistema or URKTS), which seems to have referred more specifically to the rocket family, reflecting the fact that Energiya could also fly with two or eight strap-on boosters and carry other payloads than the orbiter. The word “reusable” was reportedly not included because the reusability of the strap-on boosters had not yet been demon­strated, nor would it ever be [74].

The combination of orbiter and rocket was also known as the Reusable Rocket Space Complex (Mnogorazovyy Raketno-Kosmicheskiy Kompleks or MRKK). A general word for the spaceplane, comparable with Orbiter in the US, was “Orbital Ship” (Orbitalnyy Korabl or OK). The core stage was called “Central Block” (Blok-Ts in Russian spelling) and the strap-on boosters “Block-A” (Blok-A). “Block” is a commonly used word in Russian to designate rocket stages. It also appears in the names of famous upper stages such as the Blok-D and Blok-L.

Of course, the orbiter and rocket became known to the world in the late 1980s by the less prosaic names Buran and Energiya. While the name Energiya was specifically invented for public consumption late in the program, the name Buran was used in internal documentation from the very beginning, long before the program entered the public domain.

The word buran, imported into Russian from the Turkish language family, refers to a violent, cold northeast wind in the Central Asian steppes that lifts snow from the ground, usually during the winter. The same wind also occurs, but less frequently, in summer, when it darkens the skies by raising dust clouds and is then called karaburan (“black buran”). Although usually translated simply as “snowstorm”, buran is not the general Russian word for a snowstorm, but a much more specific term that could better be defined as “a blizzard in the steppes”.

The name Buran had already been applied to a canceled cruise missile designed by the OKB-23 Myasishchev bureau in the 1950s (see Chapter 1). Of course, Myasishchev later became closely involved in the shuttle program as head of the Experimental Machine Building Factory (EMZ) and one might speculate that the suggestion to recycle the name came from him.

The first use of the name Buran in connection with the Soviet shuttle seems to have come in NPO Energiya’s proposals for the OS-120 design in 1975. Since this was the Space Shuttle type integrated configuration with an external tank and the main engines on the orbiter, it referred to the whole stack, not the orbiter individually. Even after the final decision had been made to turn the external tank into the second stage, the name Buran continued to be used for the combination of the now engineless orbiter and its launch vehicle (and therefore denoted the same as “11F36” and “MRKK”). For some reason, NPO Energiya’s internal RLA-130 designator for the rocket did not become established. The configuration in which the orbiter was replaced by an unmanned cargo canister was known as Buran-T. The common name for orbiter and rocket caused quite some confusion in the space community and was sometimes conveniently misused by opponents to criticize the system as a whole while reacting to problems with one of the two elements [75].

The name Energiya was not coined until May 1987, when the Russians needed to make a public announcement about the rocket’s first launch. In contrast to earlier plans this was not flown with a shuttle, but with a quickly improvised payload called Polyus. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov visited the Baykonur cosmodrome in the final days prior to the launch, Glushko proposed the name Energiya, mainly because this was one of the buzzwords of Gorbachov’s policy of perestroyka. The fact that it was also the name of Glushko’s design bureau was probably less convincing to Gorbachov [76]. By giving the rocket an individual name, the Russians also under­lined that this was a launch vehicle in its own right, capable of launching not only shuttles, but other heavy payloads as well [77]. Of course, not enough time was left to paint the new name on the rocket as there was for the second launch.