Wednesday 26 January 2011

Abandoned Remains Of The Russian Space Shuttle


The Buran 1.01 spacecraft was the only finished and operational vehicle from the Soviet Buran program. The Buran completed one unmanned spaceflight in 1988 before the cancellation of the program in 1993. The Buran was subsequently destroyed by a hangar collapse in 2002.

In 1989, it was projected that Buran would have an unmanned second flight in 1993. Due to the cancellation of the project after the break up of the Soviet Union, this never took place.
Space Shuttle 2.02 (seen in the picture above) was 10%-20% complete at the end of the program. It was put outside of the factory near Moscow and vandals have stripped it of most of the heat tiles.

2 comment(s):

Anonymous said...

In fact there are many interesting informations about this shuttle on this website: Buran.

Gerard said...

Thanks for the additional information.