An Overview of the Buran Spacecraft

The Buran orbital vehicle program was developed in response to the US Space Shuttle program, which in 1980s raised considerable concerns among Soviet military and especially Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, Minister of Defense of the Soviet Union from 1976 until his death.

An authoritative biographer of the Russian space program, academic Boris Chertok, a prominent Soviet and Russian rocket designer, responsible for control systems of a number of ballistic missiles and spacecraft, recounts how the program came into being. According to Chertok, after the US developed its Space Shuttle program, by NASA, officially called “Space Transportation System” (“STS”), the United States government's manned launch vehicle from 1981 to 2011, the Soviet military became suspicious that it could be used for military purposes, due to its enormous payload, several times that of previous US spaceships. The Soviet government asked the TsNIIMash (ЦНИИМАШ, Central Institute of Machine-building, a major player in defense analysis), an initialism for the Central Research Institute of Machine Building, which is the institute of the Russian aeronautics and space agency and specialized in the development of long range ballistic missiles, air defense, and propulsion units for defense sectors, for an expert opinion. Institute director, Yuri Mozzohorin, recalls that for as long time the institute could not envisage a civilian payload large enough to require a vehicle of that capacity. Based on this, as well as on US profitability analyses of that time, which showed that the Space Shuttle would be economically efficient only a large number of launches (one every week or so), Mozzohorin concluded that the vehicle had a military purpose, although he was unable to say exactly what. The Soviet program was further boosted after Defense Minister Ustinov received a report from analysts showing that, at least in theory, the Space Shuttle could be used to deploy nuclear bombs over Soviet territory. Chertok recounts that Ustinov was so worried by the possibility that he made the Soviet response program a top priority.

Officially, the Buran spacecraft was designed for the delivery to orbit and return to Earth of spacecraft, cosmonauts, and supplies. Both Chertok and Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy suggest that from the beginning, the program was military in nature; however, the exact military capabilities, or intended capabilities, of the Buran program remain classified. Commenting on the discontinuation of the program in his interview to “New Scientist,” a weekly non-peer-reviewed English-language international science magazine, which since 1996 has also run a website, covering recent developments in science and technology for a general audience, Russian cosmonaut/astronaut, or a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft, Olet Kotov, born October 27, 1965, in Simferopol, Crimean oblast in Ukrainian SSR, confirms their accounts:

“We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed. It was originally designed as a military system for weapon delivery, maybe even nuclear weapons. The American shuttle also has military uses.”
Like its American counterpart, The “Buran,” when in transit from its landing sites back to the launch complex, was transported on the back of a large jet aeroplane--the Antonov An-225 “Mriya transport aircraft, a strategic airlift cargo aircraft, designed by the Soviet Union’s Antonov Design Bureau in the 1980s, which was designed in part for this task and remains the largest aircraft in the world to fly multiple times.

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The Buran spacecraft

The Buran spacecraft, GRAU index--the “Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, a department of the Russian (ex-Soviet) Ministry of Defense--”11F35 K1” was a Soviet orbital vehicle analogous in function and design to the US Space Shuttle, a partially reusable launch system and orbital spacecraft operated by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for human spaceflight missions. It is developed by Chief Designer Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy, a Russian and Ukrainian engineer, General Director and General Designer of the JSC NPO Molniya, Doctor Science, Hero of Socialist Labour, laureate of Lenin Prize (1962) and State Prizes (!950 1952), and also the lead developer of the Russian Spiral programme; of RSC Energia/RKK Energia, also known as  “OAO S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia,” a Russian manufacturer of spacecraft and space station components.  

Buran complete unmanned spaceflight in 1988 and remains the only Soviet space shuttle that was launched into space, as the Buran programme, a Soviet and later Russian reusable spacecraft project that began in 1974 at TsAGI, was formally cancelled in 1993. The shuttle Buran was destroyed in 2002 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, also called “Tyuratam,” the world’s first and largest operational space launch facility, when the hangar in which it was stored collapsed.

In addition to the shuttle “Buran,” four other space shuttles were being built in the Buran programme before its cancellation: OK-1K2 “Ptichka” (95-97% complete), an informal nickname for the second space shuttle to be produced as part of the Buran program; “Shuttle 2.01”/OK-2K1 “Baikal” (30-50% complete), the third space shuttle vehicle of the Soviet Buran program, serial number “11F35 K3”; Shuttle 2.02 (10-20% complete), the number of the fourth built Soviet Shuttle Buran reusable space vehicles; Shuttle 2.03 (dismantled), the designation of the fifth Soviet Shuttle Buran reusable space vehicle.

More than a dozen test models, mock-ups or scale models were built, of which the “analogue aero test model” OK-GLI, a test vehicle (“buran aerodynamic analogue”) in the Buran program, flew atmospheric and the 1/8 scale model BOR-5 flight vehicle, used to test the main aerodynamic characteristics, thermal and acoustic loads and stability for the Shuttle Buran program, made suborbital test flights.

See: What is military intelligence (MI)?