FATE OF THE SOVIET ORBITERS BTS-002

After the completion of the Horizontal Flight Test program in December 1989, BTS – 002 was kept in storage at the Flight Research Institute in Zhukovskiy, where it was put on display during the biennial MAKS aerospace shows in 1997 and 1999.

In 1999 the vehicle was leased to an Australian company called Buran Space Corporation. Chaired by Australian-born astronaut Paul Scully-Power, it planned to put the vehicle on display during the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. Since the VM-T and Mriya carrier aircraft were no longer available, BTS-002 had to be transported to Australia by water. In order to ease the transport, the vehicle was stripped of its landing gear, vertical stabilizer, wings, and the two side-mounted AL-31F turbojet engines, which would then later be reassembled after arrival in Sydney.

The first leg of the cumbersome journey took BTS-002 from Zhukovskiy to St. Petersburg. The vehicle left Zhukovskiy on 30 October 1999 on a submersible flat pontoon owned by the British company Brambles Project Services. Later that day Muscovites were treated to the unusual view of two orbiters side by side, when

BTS-002 sailed past a full-scale Buran test model serving as an attraction in Gorkiy Park on the banks of the Moscow River. After arriving in St. Petersburg, it took BTS-002 two weeks to be cleared by customs and continue its journey to Goteborg in Sweden, where it remained stuck for another six weeks until an appro­priate container ship (the Tampa) was found for the long trip to Australia. The atmospheric shuttle made a stop in New Brunswick, Canada, before proceeding through the Panama Canal on to its final destination “down under”. BTS-002 arrived at Darling Harbor on 9 February 2000, where it was welcomed with much fanfare in a ceremony broadcast live by several Australian television stations and attended among others by Andrew Thomas, another Australian-born NASA astronaut.

BTS-002 was on display in Sydney under a temporary structure for several months. BSC, which had taken out a nine-year lease on the vehicle, had ambitious plans to take the BTS-002 on an extensive tour of cities throughout Australia and Southeast Asia, but poor ticket sales forced the company into bankruptcy. BTS-002 then spent the following months in a fenced-in parking lot in Sydney, protected by nothing more than a large tarp. It was subject to repeated vandalism, with some sections becoming covered in graffiti.

With Buran Space Corporation unable to complete its payments, ownership of the vehicle reverted back to NPO Molniya, which then sought a new owner because it lacked the resources to bring the craft back home. NPO Molniya approached an American company called First FX that arranged for the auction of BTS-002 through a radio station in Los Angeles in May 2002, but the $6 million minimum asking price turned out to be too high. Somewhat later NPO Molniya did find a buyer for the vehicle, a Singapore-based company called Space Shuttle World Tours (SSWT), which shipped it to Bahrain to be displayed at the 2002 Summer Festival. With that exhibition not successful either, SSWT planned to move the vehicle to Thailand as a tourist attraction. However, the company had apparently defaulted on its payments to Molniya, which then brought a lawsuit against SSWT to prevent the transfer to Thailand. Pending the outcome of the legal dispute, SSWT negotiated to place BTS-002 at a junkyard in Bahrain.

BTS-002 finally seemed to have a lucky break in 2004, when a group of German journalists stumbled on it while covering a Formula-1 Grand Prix race in Bahrain. Their articles generated quite some interest back in Germany, where the Auto & Technik Museum in Sinsheim offered a large sum to NPO Molniya to add the vehicle to its collection. Unfortunately, ongoing legal battles between Molniya and SSWT have so far blocked the potential deal and BTS-002 remains stuck in Bahrain [44].