Buran new home, is now in Germany Options

[djellison]

No, they're not. A torrent to legally available stuff - fine. A torrent to rips etc, no.

Doug

[Ulysses]

No, they're not. A torrent to legally available stuff - fine. A torrent to rips etc, no.

Okay Doug, clear enough then, didn't want to start my 'career' here by simply dumping one!

[Ulysses]

What I know is, that one of the Buran Orbiters (finished or unfinished, I don't know) now is a home for 4-5 families. I've seen it in a german documentation about Baikonur.

Having just watched the documentary, I'd say you've fallen victim to a language barrier. No such claim is made at all, all that's said is 'the shuttle is rotting away'.

[Tesheiner]

Yesterday I finally scanned some old photos I have from a business trip I did to the Le Bourget exhibition in 1989. I had this idea on mind since the news about the test article being moved to Germany but it took some time to find the right album inside some boxes which were left unpacked since 10 years ago (!!!) when we moved to our current house. But at the end I succeeded.
That trip was the one and only time I saw the soviet shuttle Buran. Now, if I knew by then what would be the outcome of this bird I would have taken dozens and dozens of pictures of it from all allowed angles instead of the few I actually shot. Buran aside, another highlight of that year’s show was an accident with a MIG-29. I have no pictures of the accident itself because I came the day after…

The Buran on top of the An-225


The same, with the camera cord in the fov.


The cord again... and the Mriya's main landing gear. That was really impressive.


The stack and myself.



Mockups of the Energia / Buran stack and the RD-170 engine used on the strap-on boosters.


The MIG-29 which was left intact. There were two at the beginning of the exhibition.

[nprev]

Thanks, Tesh!

I'll be damned. I never realized that the strap-ons were liquid-fueled; just assumed that they were SRBs like the Shuttle. How much of the Energia stack other then Buran was intended for reuse, if any?

[ugordan]

Not only are they liquid-powered, but each of the 4 boosters with its single chamber turbopump, 4 nozzle engine produces more thrust than a Saturn V F-1 engine. The Russians preferred liquid propulsion I believe and they never really sought to master really huge solid boosters.

Apart from the shuttle, only the boosters were meant to be reusable, equipped with elaborate parachute, landing legs (skis?) and retrorockets designed for a soft landing on land. There's an image dating back two years somewhere here in the UMSF forums showing the booster flight path to landing, complete with cyrillic labels.

[lyford]

Thanks Tesh! Great pix and reminder of that crash - amazingly no one killed.