Soyuz rescue

A rescue option unique to the Soviet space program was the ability to send a Soyuz spacecraft to an incapacitated orbiter. That plan could have been set in motion in any scenario where Buran would have been unable to return to Earth, such as a propulsion system failure, major damage to the thermal protection system, etc. In any given situation, it would have taken the Soyuz at least several days to reach Buran, making it necessary for the crew to conserve power and consumables until the rescue craft arrived. After crew evacuation, Buran could then either have been sent on a destructive re-entry over unpopulated regions or—if deemed feasible—safely brought back to Earth unmanned.

Of course, a Soyuz rescue could only have been conducted in certain well-defined circumstances. First, it assumed that Buran was equipped with an APAS docking adapter. Second, the ship needed to have at least some level of control (navigation systems and steering thrusters) enabling it to be positioned for the active Soyuz vehicle to dock with it. Third, the crew should have numbered no more than two cosmonauts, since the three-man Soyuz had to be launched with a “rescue com­mander” to assist the stranded pilots in boarding the Soyuz. In the late 1980s/early 1990s the Russians had a cadre of “rescue commanders’’ for emergency flights to Mir who could quite easily have been cross-trained for Buran rescue missions. The Soyuz rescue scenario seems to have been worked out specifically for the early two-man test flights.

Even if Buran carried more than two crew members, a Soyuz rescue was not entirely out of the question, at least if the ship was on a space station mission. Fuel reserves permitting, the Soyuz could have evacuated all crew members by making repeated flights between the stricken Buran and the space station. This was only in the very unlikely event that the vehicle had a problem preventing it from landing and could not reach the station or return to it. Otherwise, the Buran crew could simply

have stayed aboard the space station until rescue arrived. Taking into account the fact that the bulk of Buran missions would have been to Mir and Mir-2, this is a luxury that most Buran cosmonauts would have had long before NASA even began thinking about the “safe haven” concept in the wake of the 2003 Columbia accident.

The Russians took the Soyuz rescue option very seriously. They were even planning to simulate it during the second mission, in which the ship would have launched and landed unmanned but would have been temporarily boarded by a Soyuz crew while in orbit (see Chapter 5). If Buran had ever flown its two-man test flights, a Soyuz vehicle would very probably have been on stand-by at the Baykonur cosmodrome to come to the rescue. The early Buran pilots would have needed some limited Soyuz training, even if the Soyuz would be piloted by a rescue commander. This is probably one of the reasons Buran pilots Igor Volk and Anatoliy Levchenko made Soyuz flights in 1984 and 1987, although the primary goal of these flights was to test their ability to fly aircraft after a week in zero gravity (see Chapter 5).

Of course, it should be understood that, while all these abort scenarios were theoretically possible, it is far from certain that all of the situations described above would have been survivable. Much would have depended on the exact circumstances. Also, at least several of them were only feasible with a limited number of crew members on board (two to four). On the whole, though, it can be said that Buran crews would have stood a better chance of surviving in-flight emergencies than any Space Shuttle crew to date [32].