Inside the hangar. Just standing on top of a Buran. Exploring the Unbeaten Path
The Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union conceived of its own orbiter program, the eerily similar looking Buran shuttle. Ultimately, the vehicle made just one flight, an uncrewed mission in 1988. The Soviet Union’s collapsing economy doomed the program.
The Buran orbiter that made the initial three-hour flight was destroyed in 2002, when the roof of the hangar where it was stored in Kazakhstan collapsed. Like the United States, the Soviet Union didn’t make just one Buran, they made several with the intention of eventually having a fleet of orbital vehicles. When the program was canceled, those vehicles, from mock-ups to nearly flight ready articles, were mothballed.
When I visited Russia and Kazakhstan in 2014, one of the Buran mock-ups was on display in Moscow, and a second vehicle could be toured on the grounds of a museum at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This is the spaceport where Yuri Gagarin launched from more than half a century ago and where Russian and US astronauts still fly to the International Space Station today. During our visit, we saw a hangar where additional Burans were rumored to exist from a distance and asked to go inside. We were given a perfunctory no, so we didn’t.