25th anniversary of the Buran’s flight
Today we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Buran’s flight.
The start was given at 6 o’clock AM (Moscow time) under a thick cloud cover. The flight went through without specifics troubles and the shuttle landed smoothly on the runway of the Yubileyniy’s airport, specially designed for this purpose.
This flight is a first in the history of space exploration because it’s the first automatic flight of a space shuttle. Only the de-orbit command was transmitted from the ground.
Unfortunately, the financial and political situation of the USSR at that time was disastrous, the program was expensive and priorities has changed. The Energia-Buran program is slowly paused. There will be no further launches, despite the many opportunities that allowed the shuttle. Even the launcher Energia is abandoned.
Since then, no manned shuttle has reiterated the achievement of being driven solely by the on-board computer.
This program has been the swansong of the Soviet Cosmonautics.
Posted on:
2013-11-15 under
Baikonur, Buran, Energia.
1 comment
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Comment from Jonathan Trautman
Time: 2013-12-02, 6.28
Given the close proximity of the news I had thought you would have covered this article:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Russia_starts_ambitious_super_heavy_space_rocket_project_999.html
that appeared during the same anniversary of the flight of the buran I dont know if there is exaggeration in the translation (they are claiming it is coming from roscosmos itself) but it names Energia directly(!) this is pretty exciting news if Ukraine and Russia have a new agreement (the other thing I thought is perhaps they would utilise the angara rockets and/or at least the russian derivative RD-190 engines to replace the Zenits if there isnt an agreement) that would be the fastest path to getting a woefully underused heavy weight contender back before the american SLS has even done a dry run!
At any rate I figured you might have some insight on this issue and hope you would share with all the fans of this excellent website!