Defense Council meeting

On 6 May 1989 the Energiya-Buran program was again on the agenda of the Defense Council, chaired by Gorbachov. Appearing before the Council, leaders of the Energiya-Buran program outlined future plans for the system, including the GK-199 mission, the creation of fully reusable versions of the Energiya rocket, and the development of derived launch vehicles such as Energiya-M, Groza, and Vulkan. While acknowledging the success of Buran’s mission and praising the work of the people involved, the Council expressed dissatisfaction with the progress made on devising payloads and missions for the Soviet shuttle. The Council also made some cost-cutting moves, ordering the number of operational shuttle vehicles to be reduced from five (as planned since 1977) to three and curtail Buran’s test flight program to just five missions by combining some of the objectives of the earlier planned missions. At the same time it called for speeding up work on Buran payloads and Energiya – derived launch vehicles.

The plan was now to fly Energiya 2L with the GK-199 payload in 1990, giving the team an extra opportunity to man-rate the rocket for future Buran missions. The second unmanned orbiter mission was now delayed to the first quarter of 1991 and apart from a docking with Mir would feature a link-up with a manned Soyuz “rescue vehicle’’ (see Chapter 5). This mission, designated 2K1 (the first flight of orbiter 2K) had already been approved by the Military Industrial Commission on 22 February 1989. The first manned Buran flight was now scheduled for the first half of 1992. LII internal planning documents drawn up around this time show the unmanned mission was scheduled for April/May 1991 and the manned flight for May 1992, with crew training to begin in December 1990. The decisions of the Council were consolidated by a government decree in June 1989, which laid out plans for the use of Buran until the year 2000 [5].