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Soviet Shuttle Buran Found In a Junk Heap
gruenz noted the somewhat sad photo slideshow showing what appears to be the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran, lying in a Moscow suburb junk heap. Of course I don't read Russian, so it might also be a carnival ride rusting.
That they did not spend a crazy amount of money on what ended up in the U.S. as a net negative to what we COULD of had. The shuttle had some success and worked but it was way more expensive than it was sold to be and ended up tethering the U.S. to low earth orbit for decades instead of moving on like we should have to a permanent moon settlement and Mars.
I remember seeing pictures of Buran on the junk heap about 10 years ago. Why is this news today?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I did take a year of Russian in college, and it is a bit (well, very, very rusty), but it seems to say that it is Buran and it has been "sacrificed" and it laments the fact that it was once a symbol of the Soviet power in space but is now junk. That is no where near an exact translation, but a rough translation of parts of the caption.
"" is buran in Russian
"" is essentially "Soviet" (some variation)
This page contains a list of the Buran airframes and their locations. This page has a photo of the OK-1K2 unfinished orbiter, this is the closest match to the photos shown in TFA. Aerospaceweb lists this orbiter as having been sold to the Technikmuseum Speyer in 2004, but I've recently been there and they have the OK-GLI atmospheric test bed on display, not OK-1K2.
slashdot having problems... target website holding fine... "In Soviet Russia, Buran slashdots you..."
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well, it's not newspaper analogue of Fox News, but still very close - well-known "yellow paper" tabloid. So it's not _the_ "Buran", it's just some model / unfinished project, as it was said above. Still, it's not much worse than fate of original "Buran", which now just serves as a cheap attraction in local theme park.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
I've heard good things about this small, obscure start-up that's done a lot of work on machine translation and has a pretty good site available. Maybe you should give them a shot ;)
wikipedia lists 5 russian orbiters at least partially constructed:
- Buran, destroyed in hangar collapse
- Ptichka, 95% completed, stored at the baikonur facility in kazachstan
- Baikal, incomplete, located at baikonur
- 11F35K4, partially dismantled, located outside the Tushino machine building plant near Moscow
- 11F35K5, dismantled
i'd say this might be 11F35K4
i didnt know about Buran being destroyed though, such a shame
People, what a bunch of bastards
If we had done the same and gone back to the Apollo program, 14 people would still be alive.
Right, because no one died in the Apollo 1 fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 . And because no one almost died on Apollo 13. And because no Soviets died in craft similar to the Apollo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11 .
If we had stayed with Apollo type craft there would have almost certainly been more fatalities. Space travel is very dangerous. This isn't going to change anytime soon and wouldn't be different if we had used Apollo-like vehicles. Indeed, I'd tentatively guess that the reduced expense of such vehicles might mean many more launches and thus likely even more fatalities.
i have to agree after doing some reading that this is k4 and not Buran. i was confused by the headline as well because i knew that Buran was destroyed. i guess when you come across a FREAKING SPACE SHUTTLE and you know that Russia only had one successful one then its the first thing to think.
Wikipedia says that it is "Partially dismantled, remains outside Tushino Machine Building Plant, near Moscow." It is sad to know that something pretty much as awesome as that is just sitting outside, but if thats how things are then i guess the only thing i could hope for would be to get to Russia so i can crawl around inside of it.
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
For me, as a space enthusiast and aerospace professional, the sad part is that *anyone* would get a shuttle orbiter project so close to operational that they could launch, orbit, and land a fully-automated prototype -- and then just lose that entire program. The physical remnant is, as you say, just "stuff," and not really important in itself. What I (and, I believe, others) mourn is the loss of a manned space-launch program that came THAT close to being operational, regardless of just whose program it was. I, for one, still believe that the more different parties we have with active space programs, the better it is for humanity as a whole; there's a big solar system out there, with both resources and hazards aplenty, and the long-term benefit of the species definitely includes being active in space.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
yup, i knew they had two (buran and ptichka), but i just found out they had three more orbiters in various stages on construction (among which this K4), and about a dozen static full scale models for structural testing etc...
So yeah, if i had tripped over that thing in moscow, i would have screamed "buran" too (and crawled inside to pretend to be a cosmonaut)
It is a bleeding shame to see these historical artifacts left in the junk-yard like they are, Ptichka apparently is stored at baikonur together with K3, i wonder if they are tourist-viewable (although i dont really like the idea of a trip to kazachstan)
People, what a bunch of bastards
I see a much more enjoyable ride on that web page.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!