The outer design of the Soviet vessel, Buran (right), strongly resembles NASA's shuttles, such as Challenger (left).
Credit: Russian Space Agency/NASA
IN THE EARLY 1970S, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet space officials cast a concerned eye towards NASA's new Space Shuttle Program. From all they could tell, it looked like an expensive boondoggle, so why on Earth were the Americans planning to pour so much money into it?
"They figured there were other reasons for doing this," they just didn't know what they were, says Asif Siddiqi, a historian of the Soviet space program at Fordham University, in New York City.
Roger Launius agrees. Chair of Space History at Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, he thinks the Soviet reasoning probably went like this: the Americans have either lost their minds; or know something we don't; therefore we'd better find out what it is by building our own one.
The great fear, of course, was that the 'something' was military. And so the Soviets embarked on the most ambitious space program they ever attempted. It was a mad, money-sucking plan that included not only the Soviet shuttle, called the Buran (Russian for snowstorm or blizzard), but an expanded military presence in space, including what Siddiqi describes as, "laser battle stations and all kinds of crazy things."
The program would never succeed in launching a human into space, and today, the abortive shuttles and their prototypes are scattered around the globe. So for all the billions it siphoned from the struggling Soviet economy, the program can only be described as a masterful failure.
Built under a veil of secrecy that involved, by one count, more than 50 factories and 150,000 workers, the Buran did eventually get into orbit. But unlike the U.S. shuttle, whose first orbital hop was manned, the Buran was crewless because its life support system hadn't been completed yet. Flown by autopilot, it circled the globe twice, then – more like a snowflake than a snowstorm – settled on a specially designed runway within metres of its target, despite a tricky crosswind.
The date was 15 November 1988. A year later, the Berlin Wall was crumbling, money was in short supply, and the program was officially mothballed in 1993. "They proved they could do it, and ended the program," Launius says.
In addition to the main shuttle, eight prototypes were also built – all of which bear a superficial, yet uncanny resemblance to NASA's design. To this day, one resides in Gorky Park, Moscow, where it serves as an amusement park, giving wistful simulations of missions it could have flown.
An even sadder fate befell the Buran that flew. Consigned to a hangar in the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, it was crushed by debris when the hangar collapsed in 2002.
The Buran shows tremendous similarities to the U.S. Shuttles, and while some parts were designed by deliberate copying, other features weren't. "Don't ever mistake it for the U.S. version," says Launius. "A lot of people think it was reverse-engineered, but it wasn't."
While the Soviets likely drew on the same publicly available aerodynamic studies as the Americans, they didn't know what was inside the U.S. Shuttles, so they made their own design. Thus, the Buran was modelled a little more closely on conventional aircraft, using typical Soviet know-how.
Most significantly, the Buran launch system was different. NASA's design uses a throwaway external fuel tank which feeds engines mounted on the Shuttle itself. By comparison, the Russians used a complete external rocket, the Energia – a heavy-lifter intended not only for the Buran, but for other projects, including possible missions to the Moon and Mars.
This decision gave their shuttle a larger payload capacity of 30 tons (27 tonnes) instead of 25 tons (23 tonnes) despite being very similar to the American Shuttle in size. To ferry the vehicle around, they had to build one of the world's largest airplanes, the Antonov An-225, with a wingspan of 88 metres. Since then, the aircraft has been used for purposes as diverse as carrying locomotive engines to delivering huge quantities of disaster relief supplies.
The Soviets tried to keep their project a secret, but by the mid-1980s, the Americans were well aware of it. In fact, Aviation Week published an artist's rendition of the shuttle with "Buran" in Cyrillic, on its side. "It was an indication of how good the U.S. intelligence was," because it was before anyone had even heard of the Soviet plan for a shuttle, Siddiqi says.
Not that the Americans had any idea what the Soviets intended for their shuttle. "There were all sorts of rumours," Siddiqi says. "One was that it was designed to carry nuclear warheads, each shaped like a little Buran." In reality, though, the Soviets' goals were similar to those of the Americans: carrying payloads and cosmonauts to orbit (both civilian and military), technology development and keeping up with their Cold War rivals.
In addition to sucking up roubles, the Buran sucked up cosmonauts. Belgian space historian Bart Hendrickx counts 37 that were part of the Buran program in his book Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle. Like the program they worked for, a startling number died before their time: four in air crashes, five of cancer, heart attacks or other illnesses.
It sounds like a jinx. But there's also a wonderful irony. One of the cosmonauts, Leonid Konstantinovich Kadenyuk, had started his space training in 1976, a dozen years before the Buran made its single unmanned flight. When the Buran was retired, some people might have given up. But not Kadenyuk – he finally made it into space, 21 years after his training began.
The irony? Kadenyuk flew as a payload specialist on one of the U.S. shuttles with which the Buran was designed to compete.
Richard A. Lovett is a regular contributor to Cosmos based in the U.S. city of Portland, Oregon.
