Buran in the spotlight

By 1988, twelve years after the approval of the Energiya-Buran program, the stage was finally set for the Soviet space shuttle to make its orbital debut. While earlier test flights of piloted spacecraft had been prepared in utter secrecy and conveniently disguised under the all-embracing “Kosmos” label, the Russians no longer had the luxury of doing the same with Buran. Times had changed after General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachov’s rise to power in the spring of 1985. The new policy of glasnost was sweeping through all ranks of Soviet society, including the country’s space program.

Disclosing the existence of a Soviet equivalent to the US Space Shuttle in some ways must have been an embarrassing move for the Russians. Not only did the maiden flight of Buran come seven years after the first mission of the Space Shuttle, the Soviet media had always been very critical of the Shuttle program, portraying it as just another tool of the Pentagon to realize its ambition of militarizing space. This tradition began with the very first Shuttle launch on 12 April 1981, which entirely by coincidence overshadowed the 20th anniversary of the mission of Yuriy Gagarin. Reporting on the launch, Radio Moscow World Service said:

“The United States embarked on the Shuttle program some 10 years ago. Its military pin on the program far-reaching hopes for transferring the arms race to space. One of the main missions in the first few flights of the Shuttle will be testing a laser arms guidance system.’’

Even though the Shuttle eventually flew only a handful of dedicated Defense Depart­ment missions, no Shuttle flight went by without the Soviet media reminding the world of the ship’s military potential, the more so after President Ronald Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983. Even when Challenger exploded in January 1986, Radio Moscow warned its listeners that:

“a similar failure in the SDI system the American Administration is so anxious

to create would cause a global disaster” [1].

Many Soviet space officials and cosmonauts had also denounced the Space Shuttle program as a wasteful effort, emphasizing that a fleet of expendable rockets was a much more economical way of delivering payloads to orbit. At the same time, some also stopped short of flatly denying that reusable space transportation systems were being studied, although no technical details or timelines were given. Until 1987 the Energiya-Buran program was a closely guarded state secret, requiring a cover-up operation comparable in scale with that for the Soviet manned lunar program in the 1960s and early 1970s.

However, as had been the case with the N-1 Moon rocket, there was no way the Russians could conceal Buran-related construction work and tests from the all-seeing eyes of US reconnaissance satellites. Long before the Russians opened the informa­tion floodgates, US intelligence had a very good understanding of the system’s configuration and capabilities, although some serious misjudgments were made as well, at least based on what has been declassified so far. Significantly, the information was publicly released on a much wider scale than it had been during the Moon race in the 1960s.