Other flight vehicles

In the mid-1980s NPO Molniya began building three more airframes intended for use in spaceflight-qualified vehicles (3K, 4K, and 5K). Talking about vehicle 3K in early 1990, Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy said it would be lighter and more reliable than the earlier orbiters thanks to the use of composite materials and an improved thermal protection system. He expected the spacecraft to be ready in 1992 [52].

Actually, vehicle 3K (airframe nr. 2.01) was only about 30 percent ready when the Buran program was canceled in 1993. It consisted of a complete fuselage, but apparently had very few internal systems installed. Pictures of the vehicle show that the crew compartment and the aft compartment were virtually empty. The fuselage was only partly covered with tiles and the payload bay doors were missing. Vehicle 3K remained at the Tushino Machine Building Factory near Moscow until October 2004, when the fuselage, wings, and vertical stabilizer were transported separately to a nearby berth on the Moscow River, the same one where earlier orbiters were loaded onto a barge for transportation to Zhukovskiy. It will either be turned into scrap metal or sold to a museum if anyone displays interest [53].

The airframes for vehicles 4K and 5K (nrs. 2.02 and 2.03) never reached com­pletion. Construction work was presumably halted after the Defense Council’s May 1989 decision to reduce the orbiter fleet from five to three vehicles. One report

suggests there were plans to turn one of the airframes into an underwater training mock-up for the neutral buoyancy facility at Star City, but that never happened [54]. Some elements of these airframes still lie in storage at the Tushino Machine Building Factory, but most parts have been turned to scrap.