Abandoned Shuttle

It was the Soviet response to the space shuttle, designed to take the Cold War into space. But after just one flight, it was mothballed. Now, the ruins of what was called the Buran program are left to rust in the steppe of Kazakhstan.

Two shuttles and a rocket lie in disused hangars, not far from the launchpad of that first flight, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It's an active spaceport about 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow, still used today to send and retrieve astronauts from the International Space Station.
The design of the Buran ("blizzard" in Russian) was remarkably similar to that of the US shuttle. That's no coincidence: "The Russians needed a vehicle of similar dimensions because they wanted to match the payload capacity of the space shuttle," said Soviet space historian Bart Hendrickx in an email interview.

NASA's shuttle was basically a space truck, designed to haul large cargo into orbit at the request of the Pentagon, which planned to use it to deploy military satellites. The USSR wanted a clone with the same ability: "The decision to build Buran was a response to the perceived military threat posed by the space shuttle. If the Americans hadn't developed the shuttle, the Russians wouldn't have developed Buran. To them it was just another part of the arms race," said Hendrickx.

The first shuttle, Enterprise, had been completed for four years when the Soviets started building the inaugural Buran in 1980. No doubt, that time was spent also studying NASA's designs: "There was an urge in the Soviet defense industry to blindly copy whatever the Americans built. Many Russian engineers say that the laws of aerodynamics left little room for other designs, but that's hard to defend."

Text: edition.cnn.com
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