Buran-Energia

The renovation of the EPOS plane finished on last August 20 in the Monino museum.

The museum’s employees had, for the occasion, organised a little expostion about the history of this plane and a photo session for children.

Another pictures.

The EPOS plane is beeing restaured for some days now at the Monino museum. This museum had a lot of unique planes such as the prototype of the space combat plane, EPOS. This plane was part of the SPIRAL project, which was an horizontal launcher, which preceded Buran.

Those works are to restore the landing skid, the air speed sensor, and other mechanicals elements. But also to restore the inside of the cockpit. This restoration work is an important task and was began in 2000.

Other pictures.

Update of July 21:

Here is other pictures of the restauration.

In August 2007 I went to the Monino museum, at 40km of Moscow, here are the pictures I took.

Menitsky Valery, passed away on Wednesday 16, January 2008 at Moscow.

Valery Menitsky was born on February 8, 1944, in 1965 he was graduated from the Tambov Military Flight School, in 1969 he entered a school of test-pilots, and in 1975 – the Moscow Aviation Institute.

In 1969 he integrated the A.I.Mikojan design bureau as test pilot, in 1984-1995 he was chief-pilot of the design bureau.

He flied and tested MiG-27, MiG -25PD, MiG -29M, took part in the test programs of MiG-21,-23,-25,-27,-29,-31 aircraft, and EPOS (space plane combat).

Since some years he was chairman of the board of the Open Joint-Stock Company Atlant-Soyuz Airlines, Adviser to the Moscow mayor.

During his carrier he received lots of awards, test pilot of the USSR, Hero of Soviet Union (1982), Awarded with Big Gold medal of IAF (International aviation federation), the winner of the Lenin premium, the winner of the International premium « Pilot of the year ». Awarded with the state and government awards. The author of the book « My heavenly life ».

Update: Here is an interview about the SPIRAL project (in russian).

This 2 new modelisations are in-touch with the SPIRAL project.

The first one is a detailed model of a BOR-4 (orbital plane without pilot), we can see the different on-board equipment, actuators and engines.

The second picture is one of an orbital plane mounted on top of a Soyouz rocket. This combat plane was part of the SPIRAL program and could put into orbit by a launching plane GSR or simply by a semiorka rocket.

When I went to Moscow this summer, I went to the military airfield of Monino. This airfield is near Moscow (only few kilometers) and has a really beautiful assortment of planes. Their is all the main soviet planes (Sukhoï, Mig, Lisunov, Mikoyan, Myasischev, …) which distinguished them-self at their time.

In this assortment their is the EPOS 105.11 plane, full-size model test, which was part of the SPIRAL project in the 60s-70s.

The other pictures are here.

Here is a little animation on SPIRAL, to download it’s in the video gallery.

Even if the launcher plane and the auxiliary rocket have differences in comparison with the originals blueprints, this animation is very well done.

I put on-line a complete chapter on the SPIRAL project. Project which began in the 60s, it had to goal to make a horizontal thrower to put into orbit combat spaceplanes (before the project Star Wars).

At the moment there is only the French part, the translation into English will be on-line soon.

Good reading.

Update of May 23:

The english translation is now available.