MISSIONS FOR BURAN

The goals outlined for Buran in the original February 1976 government and party decree were primarily military in nature, although civilian satellite deployment and retrieval missions as well as space station servicing missions were seen as additional objectives (see Chapter 2). At any rate, unlike the Space Shuttle in the US, Buran was not supposed to replace the entire expendable launch vehicle fleet, but merely complement that fleet by flying missions that it was uniquely designed to perform. However, strange as it may seem, all indications are that the primary emphasis throughout the history of the program was on the development of the rocket and orbiter themselves, not so much on the type of missions they would eventually fulfill. The Russians were so blindly focused on building a system matching the capabilities of the Space Shuttle that this became almost a goal in itself.

This is not to say that no thought was given to payloads at all. Specific orders to design payloads and work out flight programs for the Soviet orbiter came in party and government decrees issued in December 1981, August 1985, and August 1987. In 1981-1982 the military space R&D institute TsNII-50 conducted studies of possible military uses of Buran until 1995 under the name “Complex”. In January 1984 the Ministry of Defense, MOM, and the Academy of Sciences jointly approved a program of Buran missions until the year 1995, and a concrete program of Buran operations up until 2000 seems to have been included in the earlier mentioned government/party decree of June 1989. Unfortunately, details of all those decrees and studies remain classified.

What is known is that all the major Soviet space design bureaus were asked to come up with ideas: NPO Energiya in Kaliningrad (manned spacecraft), NPO Mashinostroyeniya in Reutov (manned spacecraft, military satellites), KB Salyut in Fili (manned spacecraft, space combat means), KB Yuzhnoye in Dnepropetrovsk (military/scientific satellites), TsSKB in Kuybyshev (photoreconnaissance, remote sensing, materials-processing spacecraft), NPO Lavochkin in Moscow (deep-space probes and early-warning satellites), and NPO PM in Krasnoyarsk (communications and navigation satellites). The chief designers of those organizations were asked to take into account not only the significant payload capacity of the Soviet orbiter, but also its ability to repair satellites in orbit and return them back to Earth.

Despite the repeated calls to formulate ideas for Buran payloads, the response was meager. Presumably, all the new satellites being designed at those organizations could easily be accommodated by existing launch vehicles, and their chief designers must have felt as if they were asked to invent payloads to fit a space transportation system with which they had little affinity. It also made little sense to launch existing satellites on Buran, because (unlike the Space Shuttle) the intention of the Buran program had never been to replace the expendable launch vehicle fleet. Moreover, there had always been a tradition in the Soviet space industry that the design bureaus that developed rockets also needed to design payloads tailored to fly on those rockets. As far as the chief designers were concerned, Buran would be no exception and it was up to NPO Energiya to think up missions for its shuttle system.

Another factor that probably discouraged the satellite chief designers from becoming involved in Buran was that there was little confidence that the Soviet shuttle would ever fly. Already made wary by the N-1 debacle, they became even more skeptical when the RD-170 development problems brought the Energiya – Buran program to the verge of collapse in the early 1980s, and the original 1983 launch date kept slipping ever further. It wasn’t really until the first missions of the Zenit rocket in 1985 and, ultimately, the first flight of Energiya in 1987 that the program to many became a credible undertaking, but by that time the political constellation that would eventually lead to its downfall was already beginning to take shape [29].

The result of all this was that Buran was never seriously considered for routine satellite deployment missions. NPO Energiya’s predecessor OKB-1 had moved out of satellite construction back in the early 1960s, farming out the development of communications satellites, photoreconnaissance satellites, and deep-space probes to other organizations. Instead, Buran’s primary mission would be to support NPO Energiya’s core business—namely, space station operations. Unlike the situation in the US, where the Space Shuttle had to wait until the mid-1990s to perform its originally planned role of a space station ferry, the Russians had space stations readily available from the outset. Most of the missions that were seriously planned beyond the first flight were related either to Mir or its planned successor Mir-2, with the primary payload (the 37KB modules) being developed by KB Salyut, a branch of NPO Energiya between 1981 and 1988.

While military missions were expected to become Buran’s main goal, few such missions have ever been identified. Ironically, by the time Buran was ready to fly, the Pentagon was withdrawing from the Shuttle program in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, reorienting its heavy payloads to unmanned rockets.

In the end, the relative dearth of payloads and missions backfired on the program as the Soviet empire collapsed and became one of the main arguments to justify its cancellation.

The Buran/Mir/Soyuz mission

The only other Buran mission that ever came close to flying was 2K1, in which vehicle 2K would have been launched unmanned to the Mir complex, and after undocking would have been briefly boarded by a Soyuz crew before returning to Earth unmanned. This mission, along with crew assignments, has been described in detail in Chapter 5.