Buran-Energia

The test shuttle OK-TVA stands in the Gorky park, along the Moskva river. This shuttle has been laid out into an attraction for many years but is exhibited without protection and is thrown to the bad weathers, especially hards in Moscow, which ended to destroy the false thermal shield.

Works began during summer 2009 to restore it. We can see on the next picture that the heat shield is being torn off.

Here are some pictures taken this summer. The heat shield is almost completely removed from the shuttle (workers are busy on the wing) and the tiles pattern is painted directly on the fuselage. I understand this only in a manner to simplify the maintenance of the shuttle. Indeed, it’s easier to look after painting that tens of thousands of false wooden tiles which ended to decay.

Other pictures here.

The Mriya landed yesterday at the Hahn airport (Germany) to carry an Alstom generator of 190t.

This generator is the heaviest indivisible piece of hardware ever transported by air and shows again the superiority of the AN-225 in heavy loads transports. This piece will be use in an Armenian gas factory. In total six travels will be necessary, the first four was accomplished by AN-124 (lighter version) and the last two will be by the Mriya.

I created a new part on the website that I nammed « Others« , this area will group differents chapters about Soviet spacecrafts, more or less linked to the Buran-Energia program. Indeed, even if the projects seems differents numerous elements and technics are reused which gave some continuity in the timeline.

I added today a chapter on the Kliper shuttle, which is the evolution between Buran space shuttle and BOR models. This shuttle should have been the replacement for the Soyuz spacecraft but unfortunatly the project is stopped.

Antonov Airline gave a youth bath of the Mriya. Indeed, during the last weeks the company renewed the pattern on the fuselage, the previous, inherited from the soviet time and a little bit austere, was replaced by a new one more in the spirit of the time.

The colors used are the ones of the Ukrainian flag. This last, located on the tail, was replaced by the company logo.

Former pattern:

New pattern:

Other pictures of the Mriya in the gallery.

Here are some pictures of the renovation of the OK-M shuttle at the Baikonur’s museum. Those pictures were taken during the begining of 2007.

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.