Orbiter names and mission designators

The name Buran was first publicly applied to the orbiter individually when the TASS news agency announced the launch date for the first mission on 23 October 1988. Actually, the name originally painted on the first flight vehicle had been “Baykal” (after the famous Siberian lake), but this was later erased. Strictly speaking, Buran had now become the name of the vehicle that made the one and only Soviet shuttle flight on 15 November 1988, placing it on an equal footing with NASA’s Shuttle Orbiter names Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. However, since Buran was the only vehicle ever flown, the name later also began to be used for Soviet orbiters in general, as it will be in this book.

It is not known what official names the other vehicles would have been given had they ever flown. The only other ship that came close to flying was sometimes referred to in the press as “Buran-2’’, but it is unclear if this would have become its official name. A persistent myth is that it was called Ptichka (“Birdie”), which actually was a general nickname for Soviet orbiters that somehow got misinterpreted by Western journalists as being the name of the second orbiter. There is some speculation that it was to be dubbed Burya (“Storm”), continuing a tradition of naming orbiters and some heavy-lift launch vehicles and their upper stages after violent natural phenom­ena. Burya, incidentally, had also been the name of the Lavochkin bureau’s cruise missile that won the competition from Myasishchev’s Buran back in the 1950s. Presumably, the Russians would have given this matter serious thought only if the second orbiter had entered final launch preparations, which it never did. No name was ever painted on this vehicle and therefore it can be said that it was never officially named.

The individual vehicles did have designators comparable with the OV designators of the US Shuttle Orbiters (OV-099, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105). Buran was 1K, the second orbiter was 2K, the third one 3K, etc. These designators also appeared in the mission designations. The first flight of orbiter 1K was 1K1, the (planned) first flight of orbiter 2K was 2K1, etc. In documentation these numbers were also used to refer to the vehicles themselves, so “vehicle 1K1’’ would be “flight vehicle 1 as configured for its first mission’’. Some Western publications claimed the first flight was desig­nated “VKK-1”, but this is not true. VKK (Vozduzhno-Kosmicheskiy Korabl) literally means “aerospace ship’’, a general term for winged spacecraft, although it is most often used for single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes. Within NPO Molniya the airframes of the flight articles had designators such as 1.01, 1.02 (for the first two orbiters) and 2.01 (for the third orbiter).

Even though the word “Buran” has been used to refer to different things at different times and the name “Energiya” was not introduced until 1987, for the sake of clarity the two names will be used further in this book to refer to the orbiter and the rocket, respectively, irrespective of when the events discussed took place.