The article about the Space Shuttle and Buran programs was supposed to be the second part of a large article about space shuttles: past, present, and future. But so much has already been written about the Space Shuttle that I saw no point in returning to this topic.
I was convinced by NASA research engineer Oleg Guscha, who sent me unexpected words of gratitude after the publication of the first article in the series about the Boeing X-37 and its clones. According to Mr. Oleg, despite the fact that there seems to be enough information about the Space Shuttle, many people, even in the USA, have a poor idea of the achievements of this program.
An additional factor was the false confidence of supporters of the Soviet Union and the "invincible" Soviet space program that the "Buran" was completely ahead of the Space Shuttle in everything, and if it hadn't been for the collapse of the USSR, it would have "shown everyone its mother."
It's a bit strange to compare a manned space system that was used for 30 years, helped 355 astronauts travel into space (many several times), participated in the construction of the ISS and other unique missions... with a device that made only one test unmanned launch... But whatever. So Space Shuttle vs. Buran.
Purpose and construction
The Space Shuttle program was created with a clear goal. After US President Richard Nixon chose in 1969 the direction of development of near-Earth space infrastructure, instead of continuing the exploration of the Moon or a manned flight to Mars (in the 1970s!!!), NASA needed a reusable ship capable of launching satellites and elements of the future modular station into low-Earth orbit, and if necessary, returning spacecraft to Earth. A kind of cheap space truck. The Space Shuttle was even "sold" to Americans precisely as a space truck. Look, it even has a body! Fast, cheap, convenient!
It didn't happen quickly and cheaply (recall that the program cost $221 billion in 2012 prices, in 2025 it will be over $305 billion), but the Space Shuttle did launch satellites, scientific modules in the cargo bay, and elements of the International Space Station into orbit; it returned satellites that were failing or had exhausted their resource to Earth; it helped repair spacecraft, the long-suffering Hubble telescope, etc.
NASA's plans for a reusable spacecraft were announced almost a year before the historic Apollo moon landing, in August 1968. The first phase, Phase A, began in October 1968, and the second, Phase B, in June 1970. The winner was announced in July 1972. It was North American Rockwell, partly because it was this company, then North American Aviation, that had designed and built the command and service modules for the Apollo lunar module. As a result, North American Rockwell (later Boeing) was responsible for the orbital module, that is, the shuttle itself; Thiokol / Alliant Techsystems for the solid-fuel boosters; Lockheed Martin / Martin Marietta for the shuttle's external fuel tank.
Construction of the first test ship, the OV-101 Enterprise, named after the ship from Star Trek: The Original Series, began in 1974. On August 12, 1977, it made its first test flight, simulating a landing after separation from a special Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Enterprise was later planned to be converted for space flight, but this never happened.
The construction of the first full-fledged OV-102 Columbia began even before the end of the tests, in March 1975. In March 1979, Columbia went to the Kennedy Space Center, and on April 12, 1981, exactly 20 years after Gagarin's flight (how symbolic and how treacherous!), it went into space with astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen on board. The first shuttle flight lasted 2 days and 6 hours. By the way, Young flew on almost all American spacecraft - twice on Gemini, twice on Apollo (including a flyby and landing on the Moon), and twice on the Space Shuttle. Legend!
As for the Buran, its purpose was… strange.
The USSR had been interested in the topic of spaceplanes since World War II. In 1946, the future academician Mstislav Keldysh studied the captured documents of Eugen Senger and Irene Senger-Bredt on Silbervogel. The result was a project for a suborbital bomber, which in English-speaking sources is called the Keldysh bomber, by analogy with the Amerikabomber. Things did not go further, the USSR concentrated on ballistic intercontinental missiles.
In addition, there was also a project for a light orbital reconnaissance/bomber - the aerospace system "Spiral", work on which began in 1964 and which was even tested in space in 1984-1988. The Russians consider "Spiral" to be a kind of "source of inspiration" for the Dream Chaser and the Boeing X-37, this is not entirely true. But the work on "Spiral" was definitely connected with the development of "Buran".
Of course, the USSR also carefully studied the work on the Space Shuttle program. And, as always, they decided that space shuttles have a purely military purpose and can act as carriers of orbital laser and nuclear weapons, as well as steal Soviet satellites and even space stations from orbit. The latter conclusion was made purely because of the coincidence of the dimensions of the shuttle's cargo compartment and the Soviet military stations of the Almaz series. That is why weapons were installed on the Almaz, supposedly for defense.
In the end, the USSR decided that since the US had one, we needed one too, although the Buran program ships had no real purpose and even possible military tasks looked rather vague. It was pure money down the drain, as often happened in the USSR. In addition, one should not write off the undercover games of various Soviet institutions and design bureaus in the hope of obtaining additional funding and a bizarre "influence" on the Politburo. This was also a typical Soviet practice, which partly accelerated the destruction of the USSR.
The development of the Energia-Buran system started in 1974. The first project was almost identical to the Space Shuttle, except that there were four lateral boosters instead of two. Later, the main engines on the shuttle itself were abandoned in favor of the Energia heavy launch vehicle, which theoretically could have been used for other purposes (no, it was not used). The project was approved in 1976, and in 1980, construction of the first spacecraft began.
The first autonomous manned flight of the Buran in the atmosphere took place on November 10, 1985. The test BTS-002 OK-GLY had its own turbojet engines and, unlike the OV-101 Enterprise, could take off independently. Starting from February 16, 1987, BTS-002 made automatic landings from an altitude of 4,000-5,000 meters, there were more than fifteen of them in total.
In 1985-1988, four suborbital launches of a 1:8 scale dimensional and weight model of the Buran orbital spacecraft, the so-called BOR-5, took place. Four of them were recognized as successful.
And finally, on November 15, 1988, the first and last unmanned orbital flight of the Buran took place, lasting 206 minutes, or two orbits around the Earth. The landing was carried out in automatic mode, a fact that even got into the Guinness Book of Records, which fans of the USSR are still proud of. Evil tongues say that the world's smallest Soviet computers that ensured this landing took up half of the shuttle's cargo bay.
Three more automated flights were planned for 1991–1993, including a docking with the Mir station. The first manned flight was to take place in 1994. But the USSR, fortunately, stopped its exploration and the expensive space system with an uncertain purpose and dubious prospects turned out to be useless.
The USSR is believed to have spent close to $10 billion on the Energia-Buran system. This is of course much less than the $221 billion on the Space Shuttle program, but we are talking about only one flight and one finished shuttle, not 135 launches and five shuttles. Of course, with scaling up, the cost of one launch should have fallen, but there was simply no need for hundreds of Buran launches.
The only noteworthy achievement of the Energia-Buran program is the An-225 Mriya aircraft, which was developed specifically to transport the Soviet shuttle.
Design and reusability
Despite all the visual similarity of the ships and the close profile of the missions, the Space Shuttle and Energia-Buran are fundamentally different systems, both in terms of design and reusability.
The Space Shuttle is the closest we can come to the Single-stage-to-orbit concept dreamed of by astronautics theorists, i.e. a single-stage rocket/ship capable of reaching Earth orbit. Yes, the Space Shuttle is not exactly a single-stage system, it also has solid-fuel boosters, which can be considered the first stage, operating simultaneously with the ship's engines, but according to NASA's classification, boosters are not a separate stage, but are accelerators, so formally the Space Shuttle has only one stage.
So the shuttle seems to be launching itself into orbit, and the boosters only help with the initial momentum, although in reality it is a significant 85% of the thrust in the first 2 minutes of flight. The huge cylinder in the center is the shuttle's giant external tank, it has no engines of its own.
As for honest Single-stage-to-orbit, that's what Radian Aerospace is trying to do now with its Radian One spaceplane. Whether they'll succeed is another question.
One of the main objectives of the Space Shuttle program was to reduce the cost of launching due to partial reusability, plus reducing the time intervals between launches. As we know, reducing the cost did not work out, but NASA managed to increase the number of launches, thanks to the use of multiple shuttles.
Regarding reusability. Of course, the orbiter itself was reusable, that is, the shuttle itself weighing 78,000 kg (takeoff weight 110,000 kg), capable of delivering 24,310 kg of payload into low Earth orbit in a cargo compartment measuring 18.3 × 4.6 meters. In total, one test one was built - OV-101 Enterprise, and five full-fledged orbiters - Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery and Endeavour. Two of them were lost during the disasters of January 28, 1986 and February 1, 2003.
The solid-fueled Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) were also reused. After launch, they separated from the orbiter at an altitude of 45 km, coasted to an altitude of 67 km, and then began a descent, ending with parachute deployment and splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. The boosters were retrieved by special ships MV Freedom Star and MV Liberty Star and transported to the Kennedy Space Center.
It is worth noting that the boosters were not used as a single unit, as, for example, SpaceX does. After returning, they were disassembled into 5,000 parts and assembled into a new booster. During the 135 shuttle missions, only 4 SRBs were lost - two due to parachute failure during the STS-4 mission, and two more were remotely detonated after the Challenger disaster (STS-51-L mission). The boosters used during the last mission, STS-135, launched on July 8, 2011, were assembled from parts that had been used in 59 previous missions, including the very first STS-1, i.e. April 12, 1981. Not bad endurance, but the process of disassembling, checking and reassembling SRBs significantly increased the cost of launches.
But the shuttle's main fuel tank for liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen was a consumable. It was shot out at an altitude of more than 70 km and destroyed while passing through the atmosphere, before falling into the waters of the Indian or Pacific Oceans. There were several versions of the Space Shuttle external tank (ET), including the Super Lightweight Tank, which was lightened by 3,175 kg (this is a lot in terms of space technology), which was used after the STS-91 mission. The orange color of the tanks is due to the spraying of insulating foam.
So in the end, the Space Shuttle system was partially reusable, but due to the complex and lengthy procedure for recovering ships and boosters after flights, this did not make it possible to significantly reduce the cost of one launch.
As for "Energy - Buran", as can be seen even from the name, it is not one, but two systems working together.
As we have already mentioned, initially the Buran almost completely copied the Space Shuttle, that is, it had main engines on the orbiter itself, but later this idea was abandoned in favor of a separate super-heavy launch vehicle "Energy", which theoretically was to be used for other purposes, for example, launching into orbit larger segments of space stations, heavy interplanetary vehicles and, of course, weapons. The country that talked more about peace than others was always preparing for war, and not at all defensive.
The Energia launch vehicle could launch a payload of up to 100,000 kg into low Earth orbit, the same amount that the SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy is expected to lift. The rocket had a central section that resembled the Space Shuttle's external tank, with four high-power RD-170 oxygen-gas engines designed specifically for Energia. Plus four boosters that were modified Zenit-2 launch vehicles with one RD-171 engine.
Let us recall that the Zenit missiles were manufactured by the Dnipro-based Yuzhmash, they have been flying since 1985, and later these missiles in the Zenit-3SL modification were used in the Sea Launch system. By the way, the Energia control system, like the control systems of many missiles and spacecraft of the USSR, was developed by the Kharkiv-based Khartron.
Due to the need to mount the Buran itself, the accelerators were placed asymmetrically, with a shift to one side, which made the entire system asymmetrical and wasted part of the momentum on trajectory correction.
None of the parts of the Energia launch vehicle were reusable, so only the orbiter itself could be used multiple times, but since it only flew once, it was also disposable.
"Energia" itself, despite its apparent multifunctionality, carried out only two launches - on May 15, 1987, with a dynamic mock-up of the unmanned combat laser orbital platform "Polyus" / "Skif" (we already mentioned space weapons, right?) and on November 15, 1988, with the actual "Buran".
Among the advantages of the Buran shuttle itself, one can single out automatic landing, which was really quite an achievement at that time, as well as the presence of an emergency crew rescue system - a catapult at low altitude and separation of the ship and landing at high altitude. All other advantages should be considered only theoretical, because subsequent missions, and even more so manned missions of the Soviet shuttle, never happened.
In total, the construction of several orbiters of the "Buran" class was started. Actually, "Buran" itself, 1K or Product 1.01, was 100% ready. The ship 2K / Product 1.02, which is most often called "Bird" or "Storm", was 95–97% ready. The ship 3K / Product 2.01 "Baikal" was 30–50% completed. The 4K / Product 2.02, the construction of which started in 1988, was 10–20%. The construction of 5K / Product 2.03 had only just begun. Plus, there were ten test shuttles and prototypes, including wooden ones.
Reliability
Critics of the Space Shuttle program most often mention the high cost of launches, as well as insufficient measures for the safety of astronauts during launch and flight. Indeed, it is the space shuttle disasters that account for the largest number of victims among the conquerors of space - 14 people.
The Challenger shuttle's lateral booster burned out due to insulation failure and the ship exploded 73 seconds into the flight during the STS-51-L mission on January 28, 1986. 7 astronauts died, and shuttle launches were suspended for 2.5 years.
The shuttle Columbia was destroyed on February 1, 2003, during the STS-107 mission during reentry due to damage to the protective thermal insulation tile during launch. 7 astronauts died, flights were suspended for 2.5 years. That is, in total, due to the investigation of the accidents, the shuttles did not fly for 5 out of 30 years of operation.
Space exploration was and is a dangerous business, and we will always remember the astronauts of Challenger and Columbia. But… Two disasters in 135 launches is really not much. The reliability of the system is 98.5%, and the large number of victims is only due to the size of the shuttle crew, which exceeds any other spacecraft built by mankind.
It is not possible to compare the reliability of the Space Shuttle and Buran, because the latter only made one flight, and even then without a crew, but you can compare the Space Shuttle with the ship with the largest number of launches - the Soyuz.
During 58 years of operation, the Soyuz series of spacecraft of various modifications, and there are already eleven of them, the latest being the Soyuz MS, have made 151 flights, two of which, Soyuz-1 on April 23, 1967, and Soyuz-11 on June 29, 1971, ended tragically. Four cosmonauts died, with the Soyuz-11 crew – Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsaev – the only Earthlings to have died in space – the depressurization of the spacecraft occurred during descent at an altitude of 150 km, i.e. above the Karman line.
Two disasters out of 151 launches is a reliability of 98.7%, almost the same as the Space Shuttle. In addition, several Soyuz launches were interrupted moments before the disaster by an emergency rescue system that actually saved the astronauts. Unfortunately, the shuttles did not have such a reliable system.
So yes, the shuttle disasters are tragedies, but talking about the low reliability of the Space Shuttle system is not worth it. The shuttles were a very complex space system, and all complex systems have reliability flaws, if only because of statistics.
Heritage
The Space Shuttles retired with honors. In separate moving farewell ceremonies. All surviving orbiters, including the test OV-101 Enterprise, became museum exhibits.
Enterprise is on display in New York on the aircraft carrier Intrepid. Discovery is docked at the Stephen Udvar-Gazy Center, part of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, 25 miles (40 km) from Washington, D.C. Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Endeavour is at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
One of the pressurized transport modules used to lift cargo into orbit and return to Earth, and housed in the shuttle cargo bay, namely MPLM Leonardo (first mission – STS-102 took place on March 8, 2001) in February 2011 became the permanent ISS Leonardo module. Now it is a kind of ISS pantry.
7,000 shuttle insulation tiles were donated (shipping only) to schools and universities in the United States.
NASA is trying to save money and use proven technologies, especially when it has some leftover parts. So the remaining 16 RS-25 oxygen/hydrogen engines created specifically for the shuttles will be used in the Space Launch System lunar launch vehicles that "work" for the Artemis program.
SLS will also use the shuttle's solid-propellant boosters. Updated, with an additional segment, but these are the same Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters, although in this case they are planned to be used once. In addition, the structure of the Space Launch System central unit with four RS-25 engines repeats the structure of… the Space Shuttle's external tank.
Shuttle maintenance buildings, unique vehicles, runways, booster recovery ships, and more are used by NASA on other missions, including the Artemis program.
The fate of the Buran is much sadder.
The original Buran that flew into space was destroyed on May 12, 2002, when the ceiling of Assembly and Test Building No. 112 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome collapsed. Along with the shuttle, a mock-up of the Energia launch vehicle also disappeared. The remains of Buran were sawed into pieces by cosmodrome workers and sold as scrap metal. Amidst the uproar, the Russians also scrapped and sold three RD-0120 engines to China. Very telling.
The 95–97% complete orbiter "Ptychka" / "Burya" rots in one of the Baikonur hangars. Due to interesting commercial machinations, the ship and the hull in which it is located ended up in the ownership of a Kazakh businessman. Russia and Kazakhstan are currently arguing over who owns the remains of the shuttle. In 2021, street artists broke into the hangar and "decorated" the shuttle with the inscriptions "Yura, we have arrived" and a quote by Clifford Saymak "Before climbing to the stars, a person must learn to live on Earth."
"Baikal" (30-50% ready) was a little luckier, it is going to be repaired and placed in the museum complex of the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company in the city of, sorry, Verkhnyaya Pyshma, Sverdlovsk Region. We do not know what relation the mining and metallurgical company has to space.
The 4K and 5K orbiter data has been destroyed.
But several Buran test platforms ended up in various museums around the world. For example, the same BTS-002 OK-GLY, on which automatic landing was practiced, is now in the Speyer Technical Museum (Germany). By the way, our An-22 is also there.
As we mentioned, the Energia launch vehicle flew only twice, the last time in 1988. In the 1990s, attempts were made to convert the Energia project into a smaller Energia-M rocket with two boosters, capable of launching 30-35 tons into low Earth orbit. In 2016, plans were made to assemble an alternative to the heavy Angara-A5 from Energia components, but that didn't work out.
But the lateral boosters of "Energia", i.e. the medium-class launch vehicles "Zenit-2" / "Zenit-3", capable of launching up to 14,000 kg into low Earth orbit, survived the USSR and worked to their full potential, both from ground platforms and from the unique Sea Launch naval cosmodrome. A total of 84 launches were carried out (71 successful), the last in the "Zenit-3F" configuration after the start of the war (the missiles were delivered to Russia earlier) in 2015 and 2017.
Another great achievement of the Buran program is, of course, the An-225 Mriya , a unique super-heavy aircraft that was created specifically for the Soviet shuttle, but after the collapse of the USSR, it performed unique transport missions under the Ukrainian flag and delighted aviation fans with its every appearance. Unfortunately, it has already been lost and a second model is unlikely to ever take to the air.
Conclusion
As I noted at the very beginning, it is difficult to compare the Space Shuttle, which operated for 30 years, and the Buran, which only made one test flight. But I hope that it is clear from the comparison I have made that the Buran was in no way superior to the Space Shuttle.
Unlike the utilitarian Space Shuttle program, whose authors had a clear vision and purpose, the Buran program was an example of typical Soviet gigantomania, a poorly thought-out adventure without clear plans and meaning. Another big straw on the camel's back called the USSR, which may have been the last. In vain attempts to catch up with the USA and somehow respond to the SDI program (Strategic Defense Initiative - a US program to create a global missile defense system with space-based elements, a kind of analogue of Golden Dome from the 1980s), the USSR broke its spine and died. The Buran project was buried with it.
After the not-so-positive experience of the Space Shuttle programs (disappointing financial performance, two disasters) and Buran (a complete failure), space agencies of major countries are in no hurry to return to the concept of manned spaceplanes, instead preferring automatic systems like the Boeing X-37 and Dream Chaser , which, we hope, will still fly this year.
But... "never say never", maybe some private space company, like Sierra Space or Radian Aerospace, will return large manned shuttles to space.