Keeping Up With The Americans: The Story of Buran, the Soviet Space Shuttle
The comedy of errors that led to the Soviets building their own version of the Space Shuttle, its tragic ending, and the odd silver lining to the entire saga.
It’s safe to say that we’ve all had a bit of FOMO, or the fear of missing out. Whether it’s wondering what fun things your friends are getting up to in your absence, or worrying about missing a massive economic opportunity if you don’t invest in whatever the latest fad is, or buying a product you didn’t really need because it was on a limited-time-only sale, everyone has probably fallen victim to this belief at some point.
And this fear isn’t just limited to us average folks. Entire organizations — up to, and including, governments and space agencies — can make irrational decisions under the belief that not doing so will leave them in the dust, only to realize that they severely over-reacted after the fact. Sometimes, those in charge realize their folly before anything too extreme happens, but other times, this fear drives urgent — but ultimately pointless — innovation, and ends with the disappointment of realizing that all of that effort was for naught. This story is an example of the latter, of the time that the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War led to the Soviets copying the Americans’ homework, only to realize that they weren’t even in the same class.
“I get a window from glass, he must get a window from glass. I get a step, he must get a step. I get a clock radio, he cannot afford. Great success!”
~Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat
In the mid-1970s, NASA was working on something radical: A spacecraft that would take off like a rocket, deploy satellites in orbit, and land back on Earth like an airplane. On top of this, the system would be fully reusable, could be easily turned around to launch again in a few weeks, and would carry a much greater payload than any previous spacecraft. This “Space Shuttle” promised to lower costs and increase the frequency of launches, with the ultimate hope that the new program would be something like an orbital airline service — astronauts could simply hop on the Shuttle as if they were catching a normal flight.
The rest of the world eagerly looked forward to this new revolution in spaceflight. Everyone, that is, except for the Soviets.
The Soviets believed that all of this talk about reducing costs and making space more accessible was just a smokescreen for a devious plot. According to their engineers, there was a massive mismatch between the stated goals of the Shuttle and what the Americans were actually building. For one, the sheer complexity of designing a spacecraft that could operate in such a wide range of environments would negate any cost savings, and the time needed to refurbish components like rocket motors, engines, and life support systems was far greater than what NASA was suggesting. This left the Soviet government with one logical conclusion: that the Shuttle was secretly a new wonder-weapon.
In the minds of the Soviet military brass, the Space Shuttle was the ultimate testing and first-strike platform. Its high payload capacity and reusability meant that it could carry a new weapon into space, test it, then bring it back to Earth for modifications and refinement. They also feared that the Shuttle could carry nuclear warheads into orbit, dive into the atmosphere to release them over the Soviet Union in a decapitation strike, then ascend back into space before any interception or retaliation could be attempted. This would also explain why the Americans seemed unconcerned as the cost of developing the Shuttle started to mount and the challenges of building a reusable spacecraft became apparent — they simply didn’t care. After all, what did a few budget overruns matter if you could gain a permanent advantage over your foes?
And so, the choice was made. In order to preserve the safety of the motherland, the Soviets would build their own Space Shuttle.
Initial design work began in 1975, and by the following year, the design, code-named “OK-92,” had largely been finalized, aided in no small part by a KGB operation to steal data about the Space Shuttle from the United States (this was, incidentally, fairly easy, since most information on the Shuttle was unclassified and available to the public). The design bureau OKB 1 (later NPO Energia) was tapped to build the new orbiter, and the program appeared to be moving smoothly.
However, the project started to hit some setbacks. For one, it was abundantly clear that the orbiter would require a much higher degree of automation than any previous Soviet launch vehicle, and unlike the Americans, the Soviets lacked a single coding language or computer system that could handle this task. In order to accomplish this, a new coding language, called DRAKON, was literally created from the ground up to handle the millions of required calculations and and create a fly-by-wire system that could control the orbiter during all phases of flight.
Additionally, there was no convenient way to move the orbiter from its construction site at the NPO Energia factory to the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome; the orbiter was too large to transport by train, and tests using a pair of helicopters to lift the orbiter found this method to be too unsafe. To remedy this, the Kyiv-based Antonov Design Bureau was tasked with creating an airplane large enough to transport the spacecraft. Using the existing An-124 military transport plane as a basis, Antonov designed the monstrous An-225 to carry the orbiter to and from Baikonur.
Despite these issues, by 1988, the orbiter, christened Buran — Russian for “snowstorm” or “blizzard” — was ready for flight. At long last, the Soviets had their own Space Shuttle to rival the Americans.
While Buran superficially seemed identical to the American Space Shuttle, the Soviets had made a number of changes to improve what they saw as issues with the Shuttle’s design. Instead of being an integral part of the “stack” like the Space Shuttle was, Buran would essentially be launched as the payload of a larger rocket, called the Energia. As a result of this, Buran lacked the three rear-mounted main engines that the Shuttle had; instead, a pair of small orbital maneuvering engines were the only propulsive systems on board the orbiter. This meant that the space occupied by the engines on the Shuttle was repurposed into additional payload space; Buran therefore had a marginally higher payload capacity than the Shuttle. Additionally, Buran was capable of fully automated flight from launch to landing, while the Shuttle required at least one human pilot to operate. Later Buran-class orbiters were slated to be fitted with jet engines in the tail to allow them to abort a landing should weather conditions deteriorate; the Shuttle was never built with this capability in mind.
By all accounts, Buran was a marvel of Soviet engineering, and easily the most complex — and most expensive — spacecraft ever assembled in the Soviet Union.
And on November 15, 1988, she was about to fly.
Early that morning, the Energia/Buran combination lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on an unmanned test flight. After entering orbit and verifying that all systems were performing normally, Buran initated an automatic de-orbit burn and landed safely on the specially constructed runway at Baikonur, having orbited the Earth twice, and spent about three-and-a-half hours in space.
The test flight was a resounding success, and it spurred dreams that a fleet of Buran-class orbiters could be used to assemble larger and more expansive Soviet space stations in orbit, launch more powerful reconnaissance satellites, and even test out new space weapons to counter the American Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”) space-based anti-ballistic missile program.
But all of these dreams were nipped in the bud.
A year after Buran’s flight, the Berlin Wall crumbled, marking the end of the Cold War, and creating massive internal strife in the Soviet Union, which ultimately dissolved on December 25, 1991, breaking into fifteen independent republics.
And almost instantly, the former Soviet Union, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, found itself in the throes of a massive economic crisis. With any excesses on the chopping block, Russia — the successor state to the Soviet Union and the heir to the Buran program — began to review its spaceflight budget, and came to a startling realization: Buran had been a white elephant since before it was ever built.
Buran’s initial purpose — to counter the perceived military threat of the American Space Shuttle — had never actually been necessary. The Americans had been telling the truth the entire time; the Shuttle was a purely civilian research vehicle, with little to no military viability. While it did occasionally deploy satellites on behalf of the Department of Defense, that was the extent of the Shuttle’s use for military purposes. As for the arguments over cost-effectiveness, it turned out that the Soviets simply had a better picture of the realities of operating a reusable, highly complex spacecraft than NASA did. Despite operating for over thirty years, the Shuttle never met its goal of more frequent and cheaper spaceflight, and was, in fact, more expensive than other rockets.
And Buran was no different. The cost of launching a twenty-ton payload into orbit using Buran was estimated at 270 million rubles; the same payload could be placed in orbit by a more conventional Proton-M rocket for just 5.5 million rubles.
Between the exorbitant cost of operating Buran and its distinct lack of purpose, the entire program was scrapped in 1993, having operated a grand total of one flight.
And, as if to rub salt in the wound for the thousands of engineers and workers who designed and built her, instead of being retired to a museum and preserved, like the remaining Space Shuttles were upon the termination of the Shuttle program, Buran was left to rot in a hangar in Baikonur, and ultimately destroyed in 2002 when said hangar collapsed on top of it.
Despite its rather tragic ending, the story of the Soviet Space Shuttle did have a few silver linings. DRAKON, the coding language developed for Buran’s flight computers, proved so versatile and useful that it is still in use by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
Additionally, the An-225 built to carry Buran was bequeathed to Ukraine following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For over thirty years until her destruction during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the gargantuan plane — the heaviest aircraft in the world — carried outsize cargo loads that no other plane could across the globe, and thrilled aviation geeks worldwide with her signature sextuple contrails.
Ultimately, it appears as if the Soviets would have benefited from knowing Hanlon’s Razor — never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. The Soviet military brass took the contradiction between the claims and the reality of the Shuttle’s cost-effectiveness as “proof” of its nature as a weapon of war, and demanded their own in a desperate effort to keep up with the Americans, even as evidence piled up that suggested that the Shuttle program was entirely scientific and that the Americans were just plain wrong about its efficiency. For the rest of us, the saga of Buran is a good reminder that important decisions must be made objectively. Just because somebody else is doing something, it does not mean that it is a good idea, since the other fellow could just as easily be incorrect in their beliefs, and we risk blindly repeating their mistakes.
