Buran and its Energia launch vehicle would be the most expensive space project in Soviet history. It was originally scheduled to fly in 1979 but problems developed at every stage of the project.
Unlike the American shuttle program the Buran would be the beneficiary of several unmanned orbital flights by smaller test vehicles. The unpiloted orbital rocket-plane program built upon the lessons learned from Spiral and its predecessors. Flying under the acronym BOR the vehicle looked much like an early version of the American X-38 but scaled down to about three meters in length. BOR-4 flew one suborbital flight and flew four times into orbit between June 4 1982 and December I 9 1984. Apparently it became reliable enough that on the last two flights it was programmed to splash down into the Black Sea. These tests were used to perfect the heat shield and tiling necessary for Buran. BOR-4 was launched on one of Yangel’s Kos mos C-I/3M boosters. Since BOR-4 was a different shape to the proposed Buran (it was a half scale Spiral), a further series of tests were carried out with a one-eighth scale Buran which was called BOR-5. Again BOR-5 was launched on a Kosmos from Kapustin Yar and flew sub-orbitally five times between July 1984 and June of 1988.
BOR-4 (top & center) BaR-S (bottom).
The booster to carry the Buran was an entirely separate story. Glushko knew that he couldn’t continue to rely solely on storable propellants for such an enormous vehicle and so he finally gave Kosberg the go-ahead to develop the large RD-0120 LH2 engine. After several years of struggle the design of the final booster was resolved. Since the orbiter didn’t have any large engines aboard, all of the lift had to be in the main booster. It would, in a superficial way, resemble the R-7.A central core surrounded by four strap-on second stage boosters. The central core, which aerodynamically looked suspiciously like the US space shuttle’s main tank, used Kosberg’s 200 ton thrust RD-0I20.The four strap-ons would use LOX/kerosene and would be powered by Glushko’s four-chamber RD- 170 engines, with one on each strap-on. The development of these strap-on boosters would ultimately lead to an entirely new family of large space launchers known, somewhat confusingly, as Zenit (I). This new family of boosters would be developed at Yangel’s (Yuzhnoye) OKB-586, starting in the 1970’s, with the first launch of the Zenit-2 in April of 1985. In the 1990’s another version, the Zenit-3SL would become the backbone of the commercial Sea Launch venture which provided an equatorial launch plat form for satellites. Meanwhile, the mammoth, Zenit-powered, Energia stack would be capable of placing Buran into orbit or of sending 32 tons to the moon. The Energia booster stood over 58 meters tall and at its widest was 20 meters in diameter.
Delays continued to mount. The orbiter itself was too large to transport to Baikonur in one piece so it had to be dismantled and then reassembled after arrival. It would not be until 11 May 1987 that the Energia booster would finally fly successfully. Its payload (an anti-satellite weapon station called Polyus) didn’t reach orbit but the huge booster was not to blame. However, although the booster was complete, the orbiter would have to wait for more than another year before it was finally readied for flight. On November I 1988 the fully automated Buran shuttle was placed into a 257 km orbit by the Energia booster where it remained for over two hours. It then fired its de-orbit engine and re-entered successfully before cruising to a perfect landing exactly on target at the Yubileiniy air strip at Baikonur. There can be little doubt that this was an unprecedented accomplishment, made all the more poignant by the fact that it would be the one and only time the Buran would fly in space. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, many variations of the giant Energia may have flown, The original configuration known as Vulkan or Hercules would have used eight Zenit strap-ons and an upper stage. This titanic rocket would have been capable of lifting 175 tonnes and could have lifted much of the infrastructure for a Mars or moon base in one go. A smaller version called Energia-M was built in mockup; it used two strap-ons and was designed to compete with the Proton.
Energia with the Polyus anti satellite weapon.
While the Energia Buran program was consuming unprecedented resources another more public program had begun to take shape. After the flight of Soyuz T-14 on September of 1985 the next major launch in the Soviet manned program would be the first module for a new, much larger, space station. It was to be called Mir and the first module entered orbit on February 20, 1986, just three weeks after the catastrophic loss of the space shuttle Challenger. The Mir was to be the core habitation module of this new ambitious project which, when complete, was to weigh 135 tons, When it was finished it contained a pressurized volume of over 90 cubic meters. Three weeks after the Mir module arrived on station, Soyuz T-15 carrying Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyev arrived to set up shop. Their mission would prove to be one of the most spectacular of any space mission ever conducted.
After spending several weeks aboard the brand new Mir module, the station and its docked Soyuz and crew were given instructions to change orbit so that they could catch up with the now dormant Salyut 7 station. This was possible because Mir’s initial orbit was elliptical (172 x 301) while Salyut 7 was stabilized at 281 km in almost exactly the same plane (52 degrees). It was mostly a case of catching up, which was achieved by early May of 1986. On May St the two cosmonauts undocked Soyuz T-15 and piloted it across the void to a successful docking with Salyut 7.This incredible accomplishment still stands as the only time that a single spacecraft had moved from one space station to another. The crew successfully reactivated the Salyut and were able to recover experiments left behind by the last crew.
Unbelievably, Solovyev and Kizim were able to live aboard Salyut 7 for 52 days before undocking once more and returning to Mir with no less than 400 kg of equipment. They then remained onboard Mir for a further 20 days before returning to Earth. The odyssey of Soyuz T15 was without doubt one of the great voyages of the space age, demonstrating an almost brazen nonchalance as the crew skipped from one space station to another, changing orbits, ferrying equipment, performing multiple dockings and generally behaving like Buck Rogers.
The MIR module, principal segment of the much larger MIR space
station.
Next: Part 15
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