OTHER COSMONAUTS INVOLVED IN BURAN

All cosmonauts mentioned so far were selected specifically to fly on Buran, even though a fair number were transferred to the Soyuz, Salyut, and Mir programs later. In addition to these, several other cosmonauts from both TsPK and NPO Energiya at one time or another conducted training either for flights aboard Buran itself or for Soyuz missions to Buran.

As the “prime contractor’’ for Buran, NPO Energiya assigned a number of engineers to the program. This was particularly the case for the 1978 class, for which possible flights on Buran were taken into consideration during the selection process, although this was not the sole purpose of their selection. Several of its members spent part of their initial time in the cosmonaut team studying and training for Buran.

Aleksandr Nikolayevich Balandin worked on and off on ergonomics and the design of Buran’s cockpit control panels between 1979 and March 1987. Aleksandr Ivanovich Laveykin was involved in Buran training from 1979 to 1984, accumulating 25 hours of flight time on L-29 aircraft and performing 46 parachute jumps. Musa Khiramanovich Manarov prepared for Buran flights from 1979 to 1982, clocking up more than 43 hours of flight time on L-39 aircraft.

There were also several NPO Energiya engineers from earlier and later selec­tions who became involved in the Buran program. They were Valentin Vitalyevich Lebedev (1972 class, assigned to Buran from 1983 to 1986), Aleksandr Sergeyevich Ivanchenkov (1973 class, assigned to Buran from 1983 to 1992), and Sergey Kon­stantinovich Krikalyov (1985 class, assigned to Buran from 1986 to 1988). Many of these engineers (plus Gennadiy Mikhaylovich Strekalov of the 1973 class) were even put forward by NPO Energiya to fly in the co-pilot seat on the very first piloted missions of Buran.

Also involved in the Buran program were several military engineers originally selected by TsPK in the 1960s and early 1970s. These were Yevgeniy Nikolayevich Khludeyev and Eduard Nikolayevich Stepanov of the 1965 TsPK intake and Nikolay Nikolayevich Fefelov and Valeriy Vasilyevich Illarionov of the 1970 class. All but Illarionov had spent most of their careers training for missions on Chelomey’s Almaz military space station and the TKS transport ships, but none of the four had ever flown in space or even received a back-up assignment.

Illarionov was active in the Buran program from 1984 until 1992, performing a multitude of engineering tests. These included tests of Buran equipment in simulated zero-g, pre-launch and post-landing evacuation exercises, vacuum tests of the airlock and the Docking Module, and tests of the Strizh pressure suit. The other three engineers were transferred to the Buran program in 1985/1986 after having been part of a training group to operate military instruments on the Kosmos-1686 TKS spacecraft. Khludeyev left the program in 1988, but Fefelov and Stepanov stayed until 1992 [28]. In 1990-1992 Illarionov, Fefelov, and Stepanov were in a training group for the aforementioned Soyuz mission to link up with an unmanned Buran in orbit.

Missing in the Buran cosmonaut team were people with scientific backgrounds. Although the Academy of Sciences had set up its own cadre of cosmonauts in 1967, their hopes of flying in space were soon dashed by the cancellation of the manned lunar program and also by the elimination of the third seat in the Soyuz spacecraft following the Soyuz-11 accident in 1971, limiting space station crews to a military commander and a military or civilian flight engineer. Then, when Soyuz regained a three-man capability with the introduction of Soyuz-T in the early 1980s, the third seat was usually reserved for brief visiting flights by foreign spacemen or other “guest cosmonauts”. All that could have changed if Buran had ever reached operational status. Especially, the long-duration Spacelab-type missions that were planned for Buran could have become a long-awaited blessing for Soviet scientists aspiring to fly in space. However, with the cancellation of the Soviet shuttle program, Russian scientist cosmonauts saw yet another opportunity to fly in space go up in smoke. Having said that, there were no significant additions to the Academy of Sciences team in the 1980s indicating that big numbers of scientists were going to fly on Buran anytime soon.

Finally, in the early 1990s French “spationauts” Jean-Foup Chretien, Michel Tognini, and Feopold Eyharts flew both the Tupolev Tu-154FF and MiG-25 Buran training aircraft in preparation for the European Hermes spaceplane program. There are no indications that they were considered to fly aboard Buran itself [29].