Soviet space shuttle BURAN

[@SashaTibelius]

Wonderful project Energia-Buran. Very smart Soviet people worked several years to make this happen in 1988.

[@Огонек-т5к7н]

Классное видео, но не хватает инфографики с бортовых самописцев )))

[@electrogestapo]

I thought I was seeing things, this shuttle actually took off from a runway by itself? 0:20

[@АлександрМон-с7ш]

No, my friend. In this video we saw testing exemplar with jet engines, that could take off and land as an usual plane. There were several exemplars, one of them flew into space in automatical mode without kosmonauts for the first and last time...

[@philipcoffman4372]

@@АлександрМон-с7ш it was better than an American shuttle in every way. if you only knew how every russian hates gorbachev for breaking ussr apart.

[@autofox1744]

@@philipcoffman4372 It was a different kind of spacecraft. The shuttle was self-powered, carrying its own main engines. Buran was essentially a payload for the Energia booster; it had maneuvering engines, but it couldn't normally fly on its own. The video clip you saw was of a test air-frame fitted with external jet engines, these weren't on the normal production model. In some ways, the Buran was absolutely a better Shuttle than the Shuttle. Originally, a large part of the Shuttle's intended mission profile was returning payloads from space to Earth; this was at the insistence of the DoD, which wanted the ability to capture hostile satellites, bring them back and study them. In practice, this capability was only ever used a couple of times to bring back faulty American satellites for repair on Earth. Buran actually has a much _larger_ payload capacity than the Shuttle, owing to the fact that it doesn't carry its own main engines. Buran would have been able to return much larger objects to Earth than the Shuttle. Unfortunately, there would have been almost no reason for it to do that, for the same reason the Shuttle didn't; snatching American spy satellites would have created an international incident. Unlike the Shuttle, using Buran for the _opposite_ mission doesn't make much sense; Buran rode the Energia booster to orbit, and if you wanted to put a heavy payload up, there's no reason you would load it on Buran first instead of putting it directly on Energia. Obviously Buran would have been good for repairing satellites in orbit, as the Shuttle was, but the Soviets by that time were good at building satellites that worked the first time. Buran could carry a crew, certainly, but the Soyuz could get cosmonauts to Mir much more cheaply than launching an entire Energia-Buran stack every time. In the end, there wasn't much point to Buran, as damned impressive as it was. The real tragedy is that its cancellation took the Energia booster with it; that rocket could have been used for all kinds of interesting stuff, and would have been very useful for building the ISS alongside the Shuttle.

[@ShandlRu]

Кадры техники древней развитой цивилизации.... Предзакатные кадры...

[@andreichberger3850]

Видел когда-то на фото, в ангаре, всё что от него осталось, и надпись граффити - "Юра, мы приехали".. Больше мне нечего добавить.

[@marinaberzines6310]

Искусственный Интеллект был использован в этом запуске Бурана....

[@philipcoffman4372]

i remember being 10 yo in ussr when it happened. it was 10 times better in every spec than nasa's

[@philipcoffman4372]

@@Org80 you can laugh but it was able to have a way larger payload , was fully atonomous. basically first space drone. my parents work at nasa for a qtr of a century. most programs nasa has are soviet designs n 40 year program like dream catcher is an exact copy of Bor 1 through 4 of project " spiral" . same thing we have 64 rd180 engines stores in decatur, al because we couldnt make nothing as good. i dont even believe about moon landings anymore. i was always the one who tried to prove it happened but this year nasa's official statement was they cant repeat moon landing because saturn 5 technologies are lost

[@johnbrown8570]

It really was. I wonder why they didn’t use it more. It was the NASA space shuttle perfected.

[@philipcoffman4372]

@@Org80 shuttle or the delivery vehicle " energia" ? shuttle no, i think it was a single space flight, but energia wasnt designed like the usa version. i told you it was better .. the delivery system was completely working independently if needed and had flies after buran.... russia took our austranauts to iss for over a decade, won the space race and didnt claim moi landings 50 years ago , just to say till this day that we dont posess the technology to go throygh van allen belt

[@autofox1744]

It's a different kind of spacecraft. The Shuttle was self-powered, whereas the Buran is basically a payload for the Energia booster. Launching an entire Energia-Buran stack just to, say, fly crews to Mir is a lot more expensive than flying a Soyuz. Likewise, if you wanted to put a heavy payload in orbit, you could just put it directly onto an Energia rather than loading it on a Buran first. Effectively, the Buran was only good for the Shuttle's original intended mission, that being the theft of enemy satellites; obviously this would have been politically fraught, which is the same reason why the Shuttle never actually attempted it, as far as anyone knows. To be clear, Buran is a _remarkable_ achievement, but the real prize was the Energia booster. Finest heavy lift booster since the Saturn V, and could have been the foundation for a new era in Soviet spaceflight. It's a shame Gorbachev's reforms failed in the end.

[@kosmos8460]

Такое чудо сотворили и угробили вместе с советским союзом

[@singularhigs3592]

И посадка в автоматическом режиме