THE USSR BREAKS UP

Despite all the criticism, preparations continued at Baykonur for future Buran missions. In the summer of 1990 the OK-MT full-scale test orbiter spent a month on pad 37 (6 July-7 August) for crew boarding and evacuation exercises and also for tests in which the fuel cells were loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

By the first half of 1991 more than two years had elapsed since the first flight, making many wonder if a second flight was going to take place at all. Space officials kept stressing that the 2K1 mission to Mir was still on and would be flown sometime in 1992. One glimmer of hope was a test roll-out of the 2K orbiter to the launch pad in May 1991.

However, it wasn’t long before Buran’s future was further thrown into doubt by events that shook the very foundations of the Soviet Union. On 19 August 1991 tanks rolled into Moscow as a group of Communist Party hardliners calling themselves the State Emergency Committee attempted to take control of the country while Gorbachov was vacationing in the Crimea. The coup was timed to prevent the signing of a new Union Treaty which would have fundamentally recast the relationship between the center and the republics in favor of the latter. Although the putsch collapsed in only three days, it accelerated the events that would lead to the dis­integration of the USSR at the end of the year. Adding to the growing unpopularity of the space program was the fact that one of the coup plotters had been Oleg Baklanov, who had been a strong supporter of the Energiya-Buran program in particular.

In the wake of the failed coup the Russian government took over the union government, ministry by ministry. In the autumn of 1991 the Ministry of General Machine Building was dissolved. The rocket and space enterprises located on Russian territory were transferred to the Russian Ministry of the Industry. Many of the enterprises were expected to merge into specialized conglomerates that would be

subordinate to an organization called Rosobshchemash. Established in October 1991 on the vestiges of the Ministry of General Machine Building, it would act as a middleman between the Russian government and other nations for space and defense project orders. It was headed by outgoing MOM minister Oleg Shishkin, with Yuriy Koptev acting as his deputy for space matters. However, several leading companies, including NPO Energiya, refused to join Rosobshchemash. As Koptev later recalled, the organization was ineffective in bringing together the Russian space industry. In December 1991 leading space officials requested the government to set up a Russian Space Agency, in response to which a special commission was created led by Yegor Gaydar, the Minister of Economy and Finance [14].

The committee’s findings were presented to President Boris Yeltsin during a key meeting at the Kremlin on 18 February 1992. It was attended among others by Yuriy Semyonov, Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy, TsNIIMash director Vladimir Utkin, Vice-President of the Academy of Sciences Yevgeniy Velikhov and Koptev, who had been Gaydar’s deputy in the committee and was the leading candidate to head the new agency. While the formation of the agency topped the agenda, the meeting also addressed the future of specific programs. Opening the meeting, Yeltsin spoke out against the continuation of the Energiya-Buran program. Semyonov countered the President by saying that its cancellation would be a repeat of the flawed decision to terminate the N-l program in the 1970s and would deal an irreparable blow to the country’s scientific, technical, military, and industrial potential. Semyonov was sup­ported by Koptev and Utkin, while Velikhov echoed Yeltsin’s sentiments, calling for an immediate shutdown of the program. The official minutes of the meeting said the future of the Energiya-Buran program would require further analysis, but according to the official history of NPO Energiya “all present at the meeting felt that the fate of the program had been sealed.’’ On 25 February 1992 Yeltsin issued an edict approv­ing the establishment of the Russian Space Agency (RKA) [15].