Buran-Energia

During my recent trip in Moscow I had the occasion to visit the MAI museum, here are the pictures I took.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Here is some pictures of the rusting OK-2.01 shuttle. This shuttle was in assembling when the program was stopped in 1993. It should have some modifications in the cabin, in comparison of the model which flew.

Pictures I took at Tushino in April 2008: