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Soviet Space Shuttle Found In Bahrain?
An anonymous reader writes "German news source Spiegel are reporting (english babelfish translation) that some TV journalists have found a seemingly abandoned Russian space shuttle in the Persian Gulf. It looks like it could be the atmospheric test demonstrator Buran OK-GLI which was in Sydney, Australia. Pictures here (external) and here (internal). Boy, what I would give to be able to sit in that seat and flip those switches!" Another reader, grm_wnr writes "German tabloid newspaper Bild reports that a russian Buran shuttle has been found in the Bahrain desert. Here is the story (in german, Google translation here). What's funny is that noone knows how it ended up there. At least the fate of one of the four Buran prototypes is now confirmed." There is not much confirmation on this, outside of a few pictures... let the reader beware.
I'm am definitely sceptical. I live in Bahrain and it is about three times the size of Washington DC. I think I would have heard of this. I do not see an exact location in the story. If I can find one I will go check it out.
Folks remember the pics back in the 80's of one of the prototypes sitting bogged in mud at the end of a runway taxi test?
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What's funny is that noone knows how it ended up there
You ever tried to parallel park one of those things... trust me its easier just to park it in the desert.
...Noah's space shuttle.
"So which one of these buttons turns on the hyperdrive? I need to get the hell out of Tatooine... /watched way too much Star Wars the past few days :)
I heard a former Russian engineer respond to a thought like that once... that the shape was governed by aerodynamics, that there are only so many configurations a functioning craft like that could take and they too independently came up with a similar one to the Americans.
I had also heard a NASA engineer respond a little later saying that if the Russians asked for the plans for the shuttle, that he doubted that NASA would have said no.
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How could it be "lost"? Bahrain is only about 650km squared in size.
I read with great interest the history of Buran on astronautix.com. Man, once I found that site I burned several hours reading about the N1 program, Buran, just tons of Soviet-era information that I had no idea was out there. Amazing that the N1 engines were bought by an American company and will end up being used; great story about how they were squirreled away after being ordered destroyed.
I was amazed to learn that Buran flew into space completely by remote control. Kudos to the Russians for this feat.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
It looks like the US shuttle on the outside, but inside it is totally different. Interestingly enough, in many ways it is superior to the US space shuttle - for example if could do everything automated - including the landing.
Some cosmonauts left it idling in front of a convenience store while they ran in for some smokes and carbs. When they came out it was gone. Apparently it ended up in a Bahrain chop shop and the parts ended up on eBay. The pictures tell the rest of the story.
Just like Concorde and the Soviet TU144 aka Concordski!
--
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In an old defense industry job I had, they still had cold war era security warnings around the buildings. They were printed two-tone on posterboard with war propaganda cartoons and obnoxious fonts... one had pictures comparing our shuttle to theirs, and the F-15 to the Mig-29, etc, with the heading "Somebody Talked!" Since they were propaganda sheets, I don't know if there was any truth behind the idea that the Russians actually spied to get ideas for their shuttle, or just copied the basic airframe by looking at it. Looks pretty damning superficially, at least.
For that matter how did a coconut get to england? Are you suggesting that coconuts are migratory?
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Christ, haven't you guys ever watched Close Encounter Of The Third Kind?
How do I buy it for $5 (10000000 rubles) and bring it home? It would make a cool yard ornament, definately a sort of "I'm a better redneck than you -- instead of cars on blocks, I have a RUSSIAN SPACE SHUTTLE, BIAOTCH!!!".. *sigh* oh well...Guess not..
= Grow a brain...
Also at the Spiegel, the shuttle in question appears to have been bought by a German Museum and the reason why it's in Bahrain is because it was supposed to be shown at an exhibition in 2002. However that never happened and a legal struggle resulted, which is apparently still going on and left the shuttle stranded in Bahrain, the exact location being kept secret.
Lets see how long this takes before it ends up on Ebay.
1 slightly used space shuttle prototype.....
This find is likely similar to the STS structural test article vehicle--an engineering-exact duplicate of an Orbiter vehicle used for tests in the early days of the Space Shuttle program in America. The Russians needed something similar, obviously.
Our STA, STA-099, was retrofitted after it was clear that retrofitting the test Orbiter Enterprise would be too costly. So, STA-099 become OV-099, Challenger. There might have been much gnashing of teeth to have seen Enterprise destroyed on that cold January day in 1986 for some fanboys than Challenger, I would think--not to belittle that death of a vehicle or its crew would seem any more or less important based on its name.
Everything you want to know about the Buran program in Russian, amongst many other space information, can be found at this popular and comprehensive web site.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I just told a coworker who grew up in Romania under the Soviet influence about this. He said that it was sort of common knowledge that Yuri Gagarin was by far not the first human in space. Rather, he was the first one to come back.
Of course, there's no way to prove that one way or the other but it does illustrate the fact that the soviets didn't have the "burden" of a free press to publicize when things went really haywire as this shuttle seems to have.
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What scares me is that if they lost such a huge spacecarft can you imagine what else they could have easily "misplaced" without anyone knowing???
We toured the Buran in Sydney when it was an ill-fated tourist attraction. It was a very nice exhibit, video on Soviet space accomplishments and it included sitting in the actual cockpit.
The Buran in Sydney lacked the navigation avionics, leaving a rather large empty space in the deck below the cockpit. The Russians removed that before they exported the shuttle. The guide claimed the avionics were heavily borrowed from Russian ICBMs and had even included targeting data for U.S. sites.
It's sad that Buran failed as a tourist attraction.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This article (in german) reports that the Technik Museum Sinsheim has bought the shuttle for an undisclosed six figure sum.
:-)
The Technik Museum Sinsheim already has a Concorde, the Tupolev TU144 (soviet counterpart of the Concorde), and a Porsche 959, "The blue Flame" and a lot of others tech stuff.
The shuttle will be kept in good company
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yeah, then you could go watch spongebob in your footie-pajamas, and drink hi-c from your sippie-cup!
actually, that sounds kind of fun.
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All the things that fly require a great deal of design "inside" to work well with what "outside". Similarities in COncorde and Tu144 and in Buran and "classic" shuttle are caused by aerodynamics. Both machines had to perform in identical environments so no wonder they come out looking the same. Kind of mechanical darvinism at work.
The only exception I know of is the B-29. Soviets got hold of several shut down over Europe and replicated it bolt-by-bolt (Tu-4?).
on the lower right corner of that Bild.de link. ;-)
/.
Now you can see all those small details Nasa doesnt want you to know about. Geez, this must be the lamest incarnation of digital zoom I ever saw. But then again, Bild is germanies most unreliable newssource anyway so I have to wonder why it was linked to on
The shuttle not being able to land was a conscious decision. Opening the landing gear doors is one of those actions that cannot be undone except in the service bay. When the Shuttle was being designed, they were quite frightened about the way computers had to be integrated, and their dependence on them. Hence the fabled 5-way, multiple fail system. The thing was designed to be recoverable from just about *any* computer glitch. But a glitch that opened the doors too early would cause a bad day, with no chance of recovery. They left the decision to open the landing gear up to a human.
Other than that, the shuttle can land automatically, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
A minor correction; the B-29s that the Soviets used to create the Tu-4 came into their hands because they performed an emergency landing in the USSR after a raid on Japan. The B-29 never performed any missions in Europe. It was indeed as close to an exact copy as you could reasonably expect.
The OP's examples (F-15/MiG-29 and Shuttle/Buran) are pretty poor; they look similar only to one who is not familiar with them.
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Given that there were no western witnesses, nor videos nor pictures of Buran in the process of being launched, it is widely assumed that buran never achieved orbit & that the pictures being presented as the return from orbit are actually those of one of the atmospheric tests (like Enterprise).
Corrections welcome of course, but it's been 20 years & you'd have thought that someone would have turned up a picture if buran had really made it to orbit.
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Here's a manual translation of the article. It may not be very elegant; I didn't have much time ...
Soviet space shuttle: Curious discovery at the persian gulf
While shooting footage for the formula 1 race in Bahrain, a TV crew from Düsseldorf by chance stumbled over a rumour about a russian space shuttle, said to be located since some time in that region, without anybody taking an interest in it. A little while later, the Germans were standing in front of a relic of the soviet space shuttle program of the eighties: A vehicle strongly resembling the US shuttles. It may be a prototype version of the space shuttle "Buran" ("Snowstorm".
With this shuttle project, at times employing up to 30'000 people, the soviets wanted to catch up with the americans in manned space flight. But the project was not under a good sign. Already at its inception in the late seventies it was clear that the Soviet union actually had no use for a re-usable space craft. "Buran", the name of the sole soviet shuttle ever to make it into space, was a pure prestige project - and an extremely expensive one at that.
November 15 1988, after more than ten years of development, Buran took off for the first and last orbital flight, without crew. This flight ended according to plan after two orbits of the earth. One year later, the iron curtain came down - and with it, the major part of funding for soviet space exploration.
[CAPTION]: TV producer Maier in the cockpit of the shuttle: Relic from the soviet union
While the "Buran" shuttle was able to carry more payload than US shuttles and could be controlled remotely, neither its on-board computer nor its life support system ever worked satisfactory. The space ship was decomissioned, and was destroyed in May 2002, when the ceiling of a hangar in the Baikonur space center crashed. A second shuttle named "Ptitchka" ("Little bird"), which was completed in 1990, was never used: The program was stopped officially in 1993.
Besides the two soviet shuttles that were ready to fly, there were said to be three more, unfinished, shuttles, and a series of test versions. Today, one is being used as a restaurant in Moscow, another was sold by Russia to Sydney as an exhibition piece for the 2000 olympic games. "Ptitchka" is said to be in Baikonur still.
It is not clear which model was found at the persian gulf by the TV crew from Düsseldorf. Nobody knows, how this museum piece ended up there. According to TV producer Chris Maier, this could be the model once located in Sydney. This notion is supported by the fact that the shuttle supposedly performed 25 atmospheric test flights. Various reports claim that the Russians delivered the aerodynamic test plane "Buran OK-GLI" to Australia, which was used to test the automatic landing system of the space shuttles. For this reason, the shuttle was the only test variant equipped with engines.
"We need to get confirmation on which version this is", concedes Maier. However, the shuttle has already attracted a potential buyer: According to Volker Hartmann, a member of the TV crew, German enterpreneur Kai Niedermeier, who is doing business in the gulf states, wants to do a world tour with the space shuttle - and auction parts of its hull on the internet.
A poorly translated summary of the dialogue regarding the shuttle's untimely disappearance...
Slava: Zutroy, what is red light?
Zutroy: Red light is bad.
Slava: Was it last vector?
Zutroy: Last vector, yes. Last vector is bad.
Slava: Light is bad, vector is bad, what is good?
Zutroy: Chance of hit desert is good.
Slava: Pass the Stolchinaya.
Zutroy: Yes, Stochinaya also good.
stuff |
Interestingly enough, in many ways it is superior to the US space shuttle - for example if could do everything automated - including the landing.
This is true. The Russians has NASA's 10+ years of experience behind them when they were working on the Buran. As such, they avoided several points which made the shuttle such a difficult craft. A few items:
- The Buran had no launch engines. All lift power was provided by the Energia it was strapped to.
- The Buran had more advanced computers with real-time control abilities instead of the "key in the program" design of the shuttle.
- The Buran stack was lighter due to the single-booster design.
- The complexity lost in the single-booster design meant that turn-around times would have been far faster than the shuttle.
- Future versions of the design would have made the Energia booster able to fly back to Earth and be reused.
All of this did come at a price, however. IIRC, the Russian program was about twice as expensive in R&D as the US program. As for the aerodynamics, my understanding is that the Russians did have stolen shuttle specs as a reference. Even if they didn't, they still had a large collection of photographs from which they could divine the areo-shell design. As a result, the Buran was nearly an exact aerodynamic copy of the space shuttle.
And for anyone who thinks that may have been a coincidence, think again. There was no need for the Russians to have built a large cargo craft. They already had excellent cargo boosters, so they could have built a man rated vehicle for much less. They built the Buran to compete with the shuttle on every point, but did it in such a way as to show that Russian design was "better".
That being said, I'd love to see the Energia program revitalized. With those rockets, we could have cut the costs of ISS construction several fold!
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I'm aware of the Zenit strap-on boosters reuse. In addition, the Protons are still launched by Lockheed-Martin IIRC. But none of them compare to the amazing launch power of an Energia. Over a hundred metric tons could be put up in the Buran configuration. The Vulkan configuration could have done 150 metric tons. The Hercules configuration could have done a whopping 175 metric tons!!! That's only about a dozen tons shy of the current weight of the ISS! One launch!
Wow.
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Just to continue the funny discussions.
The size of the US Space Shuttle was actually determined by the limitations imposed by the Solid Rocket Boosters. --> The size of the SRB's was determined by the fact that the plant which made them was in Utah and there was a Rail Road tunnel in the way to the cape. --> The size of the tunnel was determined by the construction of the Transcontinental Rail Road in the 1860's and by the width of a Standard Gage Train Track. --> The width of a train track owes its history to the width of a standard mine cart or wagon from the old English days. --> The width of the wagon from old English days was determined by the width of the ruts in the old English roads from antiquity. --> The width of the ruts in old English roads was determined by the width of a Roman Chariot which by no coincidence was determined by the width of the two horses that pulled the chariots.
So the Roman Standards for War Chariots determined by the width of two horses rumps was a determining factor in the NASA and Russian Space Shuttles dimensions. The reason the Russion one was larger even by increments was it was intended to be bigger.
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The shape is the same, but not too much else.
The American (US and Canada) shuttle had integrated engines. Fuel fed from the big external tank into those engines during lift off. Buran was not designed with those engines. Buran was to use a modified Energia rocket to lift into space. This is a major design difference that does not show in the shots here.
This design by the soviets lowered the cost of developing their shuttle, and would give Buran more cargo space and load capacity. However the soviet design would need new engines for each launch. The American design reuses the engines for several launches.
The Soviets could have copied the general shape of the shuttle in order to implement a known working aerodynamic design. This is not the same thing the first poster is saying. They could have spent money developing a completely new working aerodynamic design, but chose to copy instead of innovate. The USSR wasn't exactly swimming in cash during this period, so I can see why they chose the cheaper route.
Most jetliners too. Humans are there just to make the passengers warm and fuzzy.
Then why do we get so upset when we catch them drinking?
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
The Soviet system places the main engines on the Energia booster because the system is powerful enough to do this. That reduces some complexity in the orbiter due to it not having to carry the main propulsion system and it also increases the maximum payload capacity. The Buran orbiter only carries the engines required for achieving the final orbit, on-orbit maneuvering, and retrofire (for the US system, these are the OMS and RCS engines -- two OMS engines and 44 RCS jets.)
See Buran - In Depth History for more info.
i am a soviet space shuttle
All urban legends. Check snopes.com.
The boosters are made in Louisiana, and shipped by barge to Florida. No trains at all.
And the implicit stupidity of putting the SSME's in the Shuttle when there was no provision for engine restart, especially since that great fuel tank was already falling into the ocean. Yeah, the Soviets did it better in that regard.
As to tile technology, well that has matured some, but the fragility of the entire system is keeping NASA from any major overhauls in that regard. Had the Soviets actually continued with the program, they might just have built a flyback booster, aka, what the STS was supposed to be.
Ah, the perils of money...
IAAA (astrophysicist) and I've personally seen the launch and landing videos and some of the telemetry from the flight. I'm convinced they launched, orbited and landed sucessfully. There are some videos are on the net if you look for them, but I'm not going to subject the already flakey server to /. . You can find them if you spend a little time looking. :)