Buran-Energia

After the collapse of the USSR the Russia suffered of a huge economic crise. To make easy money some design bureaus and research centers, now privates, sold some of their pieces to people. Unfortunatly, the Buran project was not a exception of the rule.

So, an hospital of the Moscow’s suburbs bought a cockpit of the Buran space shuttle, to transform it into a pressurized room. Unfortunatly, the new owners saw rapidly that work will be too enormous and then decided to re-sell it to a scrap merchant. But in that case too the price to move it was too important to make a good financial transaction, so they decided to put the cockpit on a pedestal to expose it like a monument, after having blocked up the trap (air lock to the payload bay) to avoid deterioration.

Thanks to the stainless alloy the cockpit doesn’t need any care and it is hard to believe that it has been here for years.

If you want to make a ride, it’s here.

This week was the centenary of the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget. Indeed it was in 1909 that the first edition took place, it was at the Grand Palais in Paris and was named « International Exposition of the Aerial Locomotion ».

But this year is also an anniversary, the one of the coming of Buran in Paris. After its first flight in 1988 the space shuttle Buran OK-1.01 was bring to Paris piggybacked on top of the Antonov 225. This was the first time Buran was shown to the public and the first time westerners could admire the Mriya (it was presented to the medias at Kiev in February 1989). The Antonov took off with Buran from Baikonur on March 21, 1989 to Kiev, 2 days later it brought Buran to Moscow at the Zhukovski airbase before returning to Kiev. On June 7 Mriya-Buran flew a non-stop flight of 3.5 hours to Paris to land at Le Bourget and become the main attraction of the show. The observers were amazed to see Buran transported through lite rain. The American shuttle piggybacked on top of the Boeing 747 never flight during rainy weather nor through clouds, moreover it is preceded by 150km by a fighter plane to inform it of weather conditions. Such plan wasn’t set up for Mriya-Buran even if French Mirages escorted it from the border.

At le Bourget:

At Zhukovski:

Other pictures of Mriya-Buran at Le Bourget and at Zhukovski in the gallery.

This reporting (in russian) was filmed in the LII company, it shows almost unheard pictures of tests of the BOR 2. This project began 40 years ago, during the 60s, at the same period of time of the American DynaSoar.

Other videos on BOR here.

Here is some pictures taken inside the Mriya.
There is some pictures of the cockpit and one more uncommon of the machineries room.

Other pictures of the Mriya.

The information feed of this website is now available on Twitter. I will also use it to keep you up to date during my travels.
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Good reading !

Here is the pictures I took of the Baikonur’s museum. This museum is really impressive and should be more known.
For the visit it’s here.

This reporting was broadcasted on russian television (zvezda). This video shortly recount the story of rocket planes and orbital planes, then focused of the Spiral project and the many usage of the EPOS plane.
Reporting in Russian.

Other videos are available about the Spiral project in the video gallery.

Source: Zvezda.

I published the pictures of the Energia museum which is in the Korolev city. This museum is located in the NPO Energia company and has a lot of very interesting pieces (like the Gagarin’s spacecraft).