#BURAN SHUTTLE LOCATIONS FULL#
#BURAN SHUTTLE LOCATIONS SOFTWARE#

Craft equipped with life-support system and with two ejection seats. Orbital maneuvers and space station approach test.ġ993 - Shuttle Buran unmanned second flight, duration 15–20 days.ġ994 - Shuttle 2.01 first manned space test flight, duration of 24 hours. The planned flights for the shuttles in 1989, before the downsizing of the project and eventual cancellation, were:ġ991 - Shuttle Ptichka unmanned first flight, duration 1–2 days.ġ992 - Shuttle Ptichka unmanned second flight, duration 7–8 days. On its return, it performed an automated landing on the shuttle runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome. The shuttle orbited the Earth twice in 206 minutes of flight.

#BURAN SHUTTLE LOCATIONS SOFTWARE#

The life support system was not installed and no software was installed on the CRT displays. It was lifted into orbit by the specially designed Energia booster rocket. The only orbital launch of the (unmanned) Buran shuttle 1.01 was at 3:00 UTC on 15 November 1988. Twenty-four test flights of OK-GLI were performed after which the shuttle was 'worn out'. This provided invaluable information about the handling characteristics of the Buran design, and significantly differed from the carrier plane/air drop method used by the USA and the Enterprise test craft. The jets were used to take off from a normal landing strip, and once it reached a designated point, the engines were cut and OK-GLI glided back to land. A test vehicle was constructed with four jet engines mounted at the rear this vehicle is usually referred to as OK-GLI, or as the 'Buran aerodynamic analogue'. As the project progressed, five additional scale-model flights were performed. The first suborbital test flight of a scale-model (BOR-5) took place as early as July 1983. The construction of the shuttles began in 1980, and by 1984 the first full-scale Buran was rolled out. NPO Molniya conducted all development under the lead of Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy.

#BURAN SHUTTLE LOCATIONS FULL#

While the Soviet engineers favoured a smaller, lighter lifting body vehicle, the military leadership pushed for a direct, full scale copy of the double-delta wing Space Shuttle, in an effort to maintain the strategic parity between the superpowers. Soviet officials were also concerned that the US Space Shuttle could make a sudden dive into the atmosphere to drop bombs on Moscow, despite the fact that such a scenario was physically impossible. Their reasoning was that such weapons could only be effectively tested in actual space conditions and that in order to cut their development time and save costs it would be necessary to regularly bring them back to Earth for modifications and fine-tuning. In their opinion, the Shuttle's 30-ton payload-to-orbit capacity and, more significantly, its 15-ton payload return capacity, were a clear indication that one of its main objectives would be to place massive experimental laser weapons into orbit that could destroy enemy missiles from a distance of several thousands of kilometers. Soviet officials were concerned about a perceived military threat posed by the US Space Shuttle. The development of the Buran began in the early 1970s as a response to the U.S. After Zvezda, there was a hiatus in reusable projects until Buran. Decades later, another project with the same name was used as a service module for the International Space Station. The next iteration of the idea was Zvezda from the early 1960s, which also reached a prototype stage.

The cancellation was based on a final decision to develop ICBMs. The Burya had the goal of delivering a nuclear payload, presumably to the United States, and then returning to base. Several test flights are known, before it was cancelled by order of the Central Committee. The idea saw its first iteration in the Burya high-altitude jet aircraft, which reached the prototype stage. Before Buran, no project of the program reached production. The idea of Soviet reusable space flight is very old, though it was neither continuous, nor consistently organized. The Soviet reusable space-craft program has its roots in the very beginning of the space age, the late 1950s. The Buran spacecraft was similar in appearance to the NASA Space Shuttle, and was destroyed in the Buran hangar collapse on May 12, 2002. The Buran completed one unmanned spaceflight in 1988 before its cancellation in 1993. The project was the largest and the most expensive in the history of Soviet space exploration. The Soviet reusable spacecraft program Buran ('Бура́н' meaning 'Snowstorm' or 'Blizzard' in Russian) began in 1974 at TsAGI as a response to the United States Space Shuttle program.

Buran shuttle locations