The Space Shuttle. It’s always the Space Shuttle, never a Space Shuttle. You could almost be forgiven for thinking there was only ever a single Orbiter that had visited space. But in fact there were six. And one of them was Russian. Her existence was an example of keeping up with the Joneses on a spectacular scale. And it was born out of fear.
In the mid-1970s, the Soviet military had concluded that the American Shuttle was being developed as a means of dropping first-strike nuclear weapons on Moscow and Leningrad. The generals imagined the US machine would dive into the atmosphere, release its bombs, and return to orbit. On the back of this fantasy, any hope scientists had of directing the Soviet manned space program toward building a permanent moon base went out of the window and, in February 1976, the Kremlin initiated its own shuttle program. The scientists were dismissive. “We do not,” wrote the president of the Academy of Sciences, “see any sensible scenario that would support the shuttle for scientific purposes.”
Uncertain about the nature of the military threat posed by the American Shuttle, but driven by a need to counter whatever it was, the Buran (Blizzard)—as the Soviet shuttle was named—ended up looking almost identical. Unlike its American counterpart, though, Buran lacked three powerful rocket engines in its tail. Instead, she was hauled into space on a massive cluster of rockets, the proverbial butterfly strapped to a bullet. But it all worked, and in 1988 an unmanned Buran shuttle was launched, orbited twice, then returned safely to Earth. It was, however, to be the Buran’s first and last venture into space.
With the end of the Cold War following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, any conceivable strategic military requirement for Buran fell too.
She would never carry cosmonauts into orbit. And, as if a single orbit of Earth wasn’t enough of a disappointment for the team of engineers, scientists, and technicians who had built her, the real kick in the teeth was yet to come. In 2002 the hangar housing her collapsed and she was destroyed.
Designed and built for no good reason, the Buran never amounted to anything more than an exhibition of what the Soviet aerospace industry could do. If only, back in the 1970s, the Kremlin had opted for that moon base instead.
