We had no choice but to respond.” So Buran, which means “snowstorm,” was born. began developing the space shuttle, naturally we assumed it would be used to deliver nuclear weapons, or as a sort of space pirate ship for shooting or stealing Soviet satellites. “With two countries pointing thousands of ballistic missiles at one another, every move made toward developing space technology was regarded by the other as having military meaning,” recalls Alexander Bashilov, a 52-year-old aerospace engineer who is today Molniya’s director general. But it wasn’t until the United States decided in 1972 to build a spaceplane that its cold war rival took serious interest. Soviet space engineers had played with designs for mini-shuttles as far back as the 1960s. Like NASA’s space shuttle, Buran had its predecessors. I wonder if the numbers mislead passengers for reasons of secrecy, or if this is just one more thing in Russia that doesn’t work. Someone whispers, “Amerikanski journalist, it feels weird having you here.” I look up at the red numbers flashing enigmatically above the door-3…8…8…9-then back to 3 as the door opens on the 5th floor. We are ascending in a dimly lit elevator inside the Moscow headquarters of the Molniya Research and Industrial Corporation, once the Buran’s ultra-secret design bureau. In fact, you could say the Soviet spaceplane, which reached Earth orbit just once in 1988 and never returned to space, succeeded beyond all expectations and failed dismally-both on the same day. vehicle for no reason other than to keep up with the competition.īut seen another way, Buran was an impressive technical accomplishment. It became for them the perfect symbol of a space program that had lost so much confidence that, at the behest of the Soviet military, it copied a U.S. Pilots, scientists, engineers, and the technicians who built the vehicle all speak candidly, if a little diffidently, about what they see as a sophisticated, spectacular failure. Like most Russians who worked on the Buran, Zabolotsky is still indignant about the experience. So the Buran may have kept me alive, and it helped my daughter find a career with a future.” “And after what she observed-my distrust of the bosses and the way they treated me-she declined to join the cosmonaut corps. “My daughter, Margarita, was recruited to be a cosmonaut,” he continues. Before and after his years training for the Buran, Zabolotsky flew more than 70 kinds of aircraft. “We lose three or four test pilots every year, so wasting all that time probably helped me survive that career,” Zabolotsky says wryly. WHEN VICTOR ZABOLOTSKY, A TEST PILOT WHO ONCE TRAINED TO FLY the Soviet Buran space shuttle, thinks back on the project that dominated his working life for nearly a decade, he figures some good came of it despite Buran’s cancellation.
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