Planetary scientist, Roald Sagdeev, who had led the Soviet’s vigorous exploration of Venus, too, expressed his disapproval of the program as one that would undercut Soviet expenditures in the space sciences. In his letter, he pointed out that the expense for the reusable shuttle would sap the budget for existing programs. Engineers, such as Konstantin Feoktistov, who had designed the Vostok spacecraft, wrote Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a 19-page critique of the program. The response to the Buran program from within the Soviet aerospace community was immediately and resoundingly negative. This allowed for more open and vocal objections in the public arena. His policy of glasnost, or openness, allowed for public debate of policies. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika called for a tighter accounting of state expenditures. The country was struggling to recover from the grim legacy of two decades of the Brezhnev regime, which placed international prestige and military expenditures ahead of the comfort of its citizens. Through espionage, the Soviets obtained the design specifications of the US shuttle.Ī model of the Buran and its launch vehicle, the Energia, which Russian President Boris Yeltsin donated to the Museum.īuran’s launch occurred during a critical time in Soviet history. It resembled the American shuttle quite closely - not by coincidence.
The Buran launched strapped onto the Energia launch vehicle, the largest among Soviet launch vehicles. Although they tested the Buran extensively in the Earth's atmosphere with trained pilots, the maiden, and only, orbital launch was made without a crew. Amid much international speculation and after many delays, the Soviet Union launched the Buran (Snowstorm), its first full-scale reusable space shuttle, on November 15, 1988. These reports began speculation that the Soviet Union was trying to build a shuttle to match the U.S. Although the program had been secret, Australian fishermen caught sight of a Soviet ship pulling a small scale model form the ocean.
#Race into space mini shuttle series#
This was a series of 1:3 and 1:2 scale models of the planned spacecraft. At the time of the early US space shuttle launches, the soviet Ministry of Defense took a renewed interest in the project and began testing an unpiloted scale model of the Buran, called the Bor. Among test pilots was the second man to orbit the Earth, German Titov, who left his career as a cosmonaut to become a test pilot for the program. After the dawn of the space age, Soviet rocket designers and cosmonauts continued work on a space plane then called Spiral, during the 1960s. Also known as the MiG-105, the craft employed a ramjet engine that required an assisted launch to gain orbit. Their first effort, known as the Burya, was developed by engineers in at the Mikoyan Gurevich aircraft design plant.
Designers and managers believed that such a craft ultimately would provide more reliable and efficient access to space than single-use rockets. For 30 years several programs overlapped. Official Soviet interest in a reusable space plane revived in the 1950s. A commemorative medal of the Soviet Buran shuttle in the Museum’s collection.
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