To many the Soviet space shuttle or Buran was just a copy of the NASA one, it
looked surprisingly similar and was meant to do similar things but beyond
the looks the two were really quite different, not only in the shuttle
vehicles themselves but also the way they got into space. In many ways the
Buran could be seen as space shuttle 2.0. To build big things in space you have to
have an affordable way to get off the ground.
As spectacular as the american apollo era rockets were on camera they were
hardly efficient the Titan IIIC cost around $4500 in
1972's currency to deliver each kilogram of hardware into low-earth orbit the
Saturn 1b could lift a larger payload but it cost around $6800 per kilogram adjusted for inflation that's around
$40,000 per kilogram in today's money or $40M dollars per ton.
NASA aimed to solve this problem with a space truck the STS or the space
transport system but eventually became known as Space Shuttle. Originally
the shuttle was designed to fly up to sixty missions per year to low-earth
orbit at a cost of around just $453 per
kilogram less than a tenth of the cost of rocket launches at the time. This
would enable NASA to construct space stations or large modular spacecraft
from manned missions to other planets more worryingly for the Soviets they
believed it would have a greater military role like capturing and
returning satellites from orbit or deploying space weapons. When the STS was
announced in 1972 Soviet rocket engineers were hardly concerned with
efficiencies, they were still working on Sergey Korolev's
giant N1 rocket. Korolev had died six years earlier and his deputy Vasily
Mishin had taken his place. The N1 still carried the Soviet dream to land
cosmonauts on the moon but after four failures in four test launches the N1
program was suspended. In 1974 the Soviet leadership replaced the now disgraced
chief designer Vasily Mishin with a rocket engineer Valentin
Glushko who went to work on an alternative program of lunar missions
using the smaller proton rocket. However in early 1976
Glushko received instructions to develop a symmetrical response to the American
shuttle. Over 600 Soviet institutions were enlisted to work on the huge
project the new spacecraft will be called Buran which translates into
english a "snowstorm" or "blizzard" on the outside Buran looked like a copy of
NASA's shuttle which wasn't surprising as much of the non-confidential plans
have been on public view for years. This allowed the Soviets to adapt a proven
airframe which saved the engineers precious time and allowed them to
improve on the American design. Buran would allow the Soviets to leapfrog to
shuttle 2.0 with greater payload capacity mission, flexibility and better
crew safety. The major difference between the US shuttle and the Buran was that
the Buran was unpowered, it didn't have main engines attached to it like the
US shuttle. Instead it will be attached to a giant heavy lift rocket. Doing this
meant that Buran not only had a larger payload of 30 tons to the US shuttles 24
but it can also be turned around much quicker he also did away with the need
for the solid rocket boosters that the US shuttle had used. These were part a
low cost fixed to get extra thrust and a political move to keep ballistic missile
makers in the space program. Powerful as the thrusters were they were not
controllable once ignited and due to a sub-zero temperature launch the o-rings
of one booster failed which led to the loss of a space shuttle Challenger. One
of the biggest problems slowing down the US shuttle launches was that the main
engines had to be removed and refurbished after each mission this was
a major job which took months to complete. The Buran on the other hand had
just thrusters which it used for maneuvering in orbit and which were
rated for 66 flights without replacement. It was also going to use two turbojet
engines the same ones that were used in the Sukhoi 27 fighter.
The original idea was that these would give it a much greater range if it
couldn't land at the designated air base or it could make several attempts at our
landing if it detected a problem. It could also take off and fly around like
a normal plane from any air base originally these turbo jets were to be
placed at the base of the tailfin, it was then realized that two or not enough so
two more were added below the first two but difficulties in protecting them from
the heat of reentry along with the extra fuel equipment and weight which they
added caused delays and cost overruns which meant that they were not ready for
the first flight and the Buran had to operate in glider mode without them. The
US shuttle on the other hand could not use its main engines for landing so it
was always going to be an unpowered glider and therefore could only have one
chance to get its landing right. The Buran was also designed from the outset
to be flown completely automatically without any crew if required, if the crew
were on board the pilot and the copilot had ejection seats something which had
been ditched in the u.s. shuttle. But if Buran was the headline main Glushko was
interested in the fine print too. He was determined to keep the soviet route open
to the moon with this in mind he tasked his design bureau with building an
independent rocket to launch Buran as a payload this way the Soviet shuttle
would be much closer to the design goals of the original american STS shuttle.
this new rocket called Energia weighed almost as much as the scrapped in one at
2500 tons on the launch pad to the N1's 2,750 tons.
Energia had enough power to either launch four Buran into orbit with a 30 ton
payload or launch up to a 100 tons without the orbiter even more than he
N1's planned 95 tons. Energia achieved its incredible power by staging for
booster segments separating from a central core during launch
with each booster carrying an RD 170 the most powerful rocket engine in the world.
Now many will say that the Saturn V F1 engines made by Rocketdyne were the most
powerful. Well they were the most powerful single combustion chamber
engines but the RD-170 is still a single engine but it used four chambers
instead of one to get around the issue of combustion instability a problem that
gets worse as the chamber size increases and can literally blow the engines apart. The Americans used baffles in the rocket nozzle which allowed them to keep the
large single chamber but at the expense of power because they took up space that
would have otherwise been filled with more injector holes for fuel and liquid
oxygen. The four chambers of the RD-170 supplied 7900 kilonewtons of thrust in a
vacuum even more powerful than the 7700 kilonewtons for the F1. Soviet engineers
also achieved higher chamber pressures in the RD-170 than the equivalent
American engines resulting in greater fuel efficiency from the ground. In 1986
after 10 years of development and testing Energia was ready for launch
but as the rocket neared completion they remained a problem, Buran was still years
away from being ready. To test the new Soviet launcher, a repurposed TKS module
was loaded with science experiments including elements of the skiff CO2
laser weapon. The 80 ton payload was given an ominous black coat of paint and
named Polyus. when the Energia rocket lifted off for the first time on 15th of
May 1987 the huge rocket set off at an angle
fortunately 3 seconds later of a guidance system correcting the
trajectory continuing a path into the skies as planned. Energia's first launch
was a success the payload separated at its target altitude ready to carry out a
brief orbital insertion burn however due to a sensor malfunction Polyus rotated
further than intended before its burn falling back into the Pacific Ocean.
Still Glushko's monster rocket had shown that it could do what the N1
could not. The USSR now had a proven super heavy lift vehicle and the next
task was to use the Energia to launch Buran. On November 15th 1988, one year
before the fall of the Berlin Wall the pride of the Soviet space industry was
prepared on a pad for the long awaited maiden launch. The first test flight of
the Buran was to be an unmanned mission operated entirely by its onboard
computers at 8 a.m. local time Energia lifted its orbiter to an altitude of
just over 250 kilometers, Buran orbited the earth twice in a little over three
hours then slow to re-enter the atmosphere there its automatic systems
detected that there were high crosswinds and therefore made a second approach at
the airfield at biakonour even battling a strong crosswind the Buran touched down
just 10 meters from the target mark on the runway.
Images of Buran's maiden flight shocked and impressed the world who hadn't
imagined that the USSR could build their own Space Shuttle but plans were already
in place to go further with a second orbiter the K2 Ptichka or "little bird"
scheduled to launch in 1991 a third orbiter K3 baikal named after world's
deepest lake in Siberia was to make the first manned flight in 1994. An improved
Energia rocket system was also planned which would have been fully
reusable and capable of launching a payload of a 175
tons to the moon or beyond. The center core booster would use Sangers 1933
antipodal aircraft method to skip off the upper atmosphere and make its way
around the world and back to the launch area. Also the detachable boosters would
fall away and open their folding wings and be able to glide like a plane back
to an airfield. But sadly both Buran and its huge rocket would never fly again by
1989 the USSR was already beginning to unravel when the Soviet Union broke up
two years later Buran and Energia gathered dust in long term
storage. In many ways the Buran and Energia were a solution to a problem that
no longer existed and something that the new russia could no longer afford. As the
new Russian space agency struggled to raise funds Buran and Energia were
displayed as a gargantuan exhibit to impress tourists and media who visited
the Baikonur cosmodrome. However by 2001 poor maintenance had led to water
leaking through the roof of building 112 onto the spacecraft 75 metres
below. On the 12th of May 2002 a repair team climbed onto roof after heavy rains
at 9:20 a.m. in the morning with a huge crash the roof collapsed completely
destroying the K1 Buran and the Energia and also killing eight workers. Athough
the vast costs of developing the Buran might appear to have been a tragic waste
But the technological legacy of Energia lives on. Variants of the RD-170 engine
are currently in use on the current family of the Zenit Rockets the American
Atlas V first stage is powered by the RD-180, another adaptation of a remarkable
design. After the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 and for grounding of
all the u.s. shuttles it was wondered whether Buran could be brought back
but by then both the vehicles and the equipment had fallen into disrepair or
had been used for other projects. In 2011 when the US shuttles were retired the
idea was floated once again as a cheaper way to gain a shuttle service instead of
designing a new vehicle from scratch but again it came to nothing and the dream
of a Russian space shuttle went the same way as the US one. So thanks watching
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