![]() The New York Times wrote: “Even the paint job, white with black trim, is much the same.” Many Russian engineers say that the laws of aerodynamics left little room for other designs, but that’s hard to defend.” When the Buran was finally unveiled, in 1988, the similarities hitherto hidden by the shroud of secrecy of the Cold War became apparent. No doubt, that time was spent also studying NASA’s designs: “There was an urge in the Soviet defense industry to blindly copy whatever the Americans built. The first shuttle, Enterprise, had been completed for four years when the Soviets started building the inaugural Buran in 1980. To them it was just another part of the arms race,” said Hendrickx. If the Americans hadn’t developed the shuttle, the Russians wouldn’t have developed Buran. The USSR wanted a clone with the same ability: “The decision to build Buran was a response to the perceived military threat posed by the space shuttle. NASA’s shuttle was basically a space truck, designed to haul large cargo into orbit at the request of the Pentagon, which planned to use it to deploy military satellites. ![]() That’s no coincidence: “The Russians needed a vehicle of similar dimensions because they wanted to match the payload capacity of the space shuttle,” said Soviet space historian Bart Hendrickx in an email interview. The design of the Buran (“blizzard” in Russian) was remarkably similar to that of the US shuttle. The revolutionary design of communist currencies This place is unreal,” he said in an email interview. Getting there was an epic adventure, we didn’t know if we would make it because the Kazakh steppe is a hostile environment. The site is not open to the public, but a few adventurers have mustered the courage to sneak in and take a look.Īmong them is French photographer David de Rueda, who visited the site three times between 20: “The space shuttles are only a few hundred meters from active facilities. It’s an active spaceport about 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow, still used today to send and retrieve astronauts from the International Space Station. ![]() ![]() Two shuttles and a rocket lie in disused hangars, not far from the launchpad of that first flight, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Now, the ruins of what was called the Buran program are left to rust in the steppe of Kazakhstan. But after just one flight, it was mothballed. It was the Soviet response to the space shuttle, designed to take the Cold War into space. ![]()
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