The Cold War was entering
its fifth warm phase when, in June 1982, the RAAF deployed a No. 10 Squadron P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft
to the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The objective of Operation
Caterpillar, as it was dubbed, was to monitor a fleet of seven
Soviet ships that had arrived in the area. Some 560 kilometers south of Cocos, the Orion took close up
photographs of a mysterious one-tonne object floating on the water
and monitored a Soviet recovery vessel
as its crew retrieved the object. The photos,
when released to the press, were hailed as an intelligence coup by the RAAF. The scrutiny proved justified. It was the first Western imagery to reveal
what was evidently a small test model connected with the Soviet space
shuttle program, an enormously expensive effort
that would see fruition with the full size shuttle's one and only orbital space flight
Six years later. Since 1981, when the first
US space shuttle was launched, it was known that the Soviet Union
was also developing a shuttle. It appeared from the outside, at least
to be a copy of the American design. But initial estimates suggested
it might carry a payload twice that of the US shuttle. US intelligence had long been aware
that the Soviets were experimenting with the Spaceplane concept, which NASA
and the US Air Force had been developing. In 1965 work began on the vertical takeoff
horizontal landing project named Spiral. Similar in concept to the USAF’s
rocket launched X-20 Dyna-Soar delta-wing lifting body, but optionally capable of air launching. Spiral closely resembled US
lifting body prototypes. The project lapsed after a few years,
but was revived in 1974 in response to the US space shuttle
program and a piloted test vehicle, The Mikoyan MiG-105 was flown
from a runway an atmospheric test flights during 1976-78. The spiral space plane, had it reached fruition, would have featured the innovative ability
for the pilot to raise its wing dihedral angle to 60 degrees for atmospheric reentry,
creating a lifting body profile before lowering the wings
and gliding to a landing. From 1969-88, the Spiral Project
accounted for several of the numerous launches
of unpiloted orbital rocket plane (BOR) small scale reentry test models. A scale model of a three crew
mini shuttle was the first to fly with three Cosmos series test flights,
launching the one ton craft while likely intended for shuttling crews
and supplies to Salyut space stations and perhaps as a replacement for the
Soyuz-T three-manned transporter spacecraft. It was the mini shuttle's military
potential that attracted more U.S. government interest. Like the American X-20, such a craft could potentially be used as a quick response, reconnaissance,
or even a weapons platform. The Kremlin was made aware
of preliminary US shuttle design data sometime after
its program was announced in 1972. It was evident to many that the USSR
should build a shuttle and launch system for its own space program. An important proponent was Leonid Smirnov, head of the well-funded Military
Industrial Commission (VPK) which directed military projects and strategies
for obtaining new technologies. In a secret meeting at the Kremlin in 1974, Smirnov briefed Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev on priorities for the following year
and raised the US shuttle program. It was in the VPK’s interest
to exaggerate any potential American threat, and Smirnov told Brezhnev that the Americans
might use the shuttle as a space bomber capable of diving towards Moscow
to deliver a nuclear weapon. Although that would have contravened
the outer space treaty signed by both parties in 1967,
Brezhnev was easily persuaded. Despite opposition by the Soviet
Minister of Defense to its necessarily large budget. In February 1976, a shuttle program
primarily military in focus, along with a space station
program, were authorized by the Communist Party's Central Committee
and the Soviet Council of Ministers. The shuttle program was named
Buran (Blizzard), and the space station Mir, meaning peace, world or community,
for which Buran and its civil role was to deliver components
into Earth orbit for assembly. The space bomber threat was the subject of a report
to the Kremlin the following month. It cited American plans to launch their
shuttle into polar orbits from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, potentially
bringing it over Moscow. The Vandenberg site was needed partly
to satisfy a NASA requirement formulated in 1973 and made public
that the shuttle be able to place a 11.4t payload into polar orbit
to be retrieved on a subsequent mission. The specific weight requirement
matched that of the secret hexagon or Big Bird military spy satellite, which could be accommodated
in the US shuttle cargo bay. As events transpired,
all Hexagons were launched by Titan rocket and Vandenberg
was never used for shuttle launches, despite $4 billion
being spent on facilities to do so. No American plans for the shuttle to carry
weaponry are publicly known. But Soviet suspicion
about the large payload requirement no doubt reinforced
the urgency of its own program. In 1978,
two years after program authorization, a group of seven cosmonauts began training
for the Universal Rocket and Space Transportation System or space
shuttle system. With the buran program underway,
the BOR test models came into their own. The fourth design BOR-4 was a half scale
model of the spiral lifting body, incorporating a braking engine
for atmospheric reentry. The Cosmos 1374 mission launched the first BOR-4
by Proton rocket from Kapustin Yar (east of Volgograd) on June 4th, 1982, to test the heat tiles developed
for the full sized space shuttle. Its aim was to record the physical
and chemical effects on the tiles of the hot
plasma generated by atmospheric reentry. Its orbital flight reentry
and splashdown were followed by the RAAF observed Naval Recovery
operation described earlier. The following March,
the recovery of a second BOR-4 test vehicle was also photographed by a
Cocos-based RAAF Orion. Based on the detailed photos
obtained, NASA built a model for wind tunnel testing, which showed the design
to be quite efficient and maneuverable. Six BOR-5 craft launched during 1984-88
were 1/8th scale models of the Buran shuttle orbiter. The re-entries were aimed to splashdown
in the Black Sea away from prying Australian camera lenses. Certain Western aviation
and aerospace technologies had long been acquired
and adapted by the Soviet Union. Cases in point in the 1940s
included the unlicensed reverse engineering of British jet aero engines
and of America's Boeing B-29 bomber. In the 1960s design documents from the Concorde
and Boeing's supersonic airliner projects were used in developing the Tupolev Tu-144. For the Buran program, the Committee for State Security, the KGB and the Chief Intelligence
Directorate of the Soviet General Staff were tasked with acquiring all available
American shuttle documentation. The first priority was the re-entry heat shielding, amounting to 124 documents. East-West
research centers in Vienna and Helsinki were used as covers for transmitting
the trawled information to Moscow. The US space shuttle data was actually
unclassified and contained in databases available via NASA, government,
and commercial precursors to the internet. Shuttle research documents from Caltech, MIT and a host of other institutions
were trawled. A US intelligence official described
how Soviet embassy staff in Washington, D.C., would visit the Government
Printing Office with the document numbers they had obtained from the databases
covering wind tunnel tests, shuttle computer systems,
solid rocket boosters, etc. They paid for the printing,
collected the documents and casually took them back
to the embassy. The practice was eventually stopped. It was only after construction
of the first Buran orbiter began in 1980 four years after program commencement
that the CIA realized just how much shuttle information had been obtained
through overt Soviet trawling. It saved the (Soviet) government billions of rubles
and years in research and development. By 1983, a full sized shuttle
orbiter had appeared in U.S. spy satellite photos of the Ramenskoye
flight test center near Moscow and other details later became known. While externally similar
to the American orbiter, though 90 centimeters shorter
and with a slightly greater wingspan, Buran featured many differences. It weighed six ton less as the main engines were contained
within the Energia launch vehicle. The orbiter’s rear rocket engines were only sufficient
for post-launch orbital insertion. The weight advantage potentially
allowed a slightly greater payload than its counterpart,
not double as originally thought. Like the American shuttle, it was covered
in thousands of ceramic thermal tiles for atmospheric re-entry, with critical
areas made from reinforced carbon-carbon. Unlike its counterpart, Buran was capable of flying
a fully automated mission with no crew. The American shuttle could land autonomously
if need be, but never flew without a crew. Of the Soviet defense Ministry's
four stated primary goals for the shuttle, the first three were explicitly military. Potential payloads for Buran included
anti-satellite and anti-missile weapons using lasers or rockets, and even targeting
air, ground and maritime objectives. Indeed, the man in charge of the Buran
development program, Colonel General Aleksandr Maksimov, was head
of military space and missile programs. Only the fourth stated goal
the transportation of cosmonauts and supplies between a space station
and Earth was not explicitly military. In the 1960s, the N-1 super-heavy-lift
launch vehicle was developed and planned to be used
for the Soviet manned lunar program, but was canceled in
1974 after several failures. A rocket of similar power was needed
for the Buran program, and on May 13th, 1987,
its replacement was publicly announced under Mikhail Gorbachev's
new Glasnost or Openness Policy, Soviet Radio announced the existence
of the Energia launch vehicle Buran’s ‘fuel tank with engines’
previously noted by U.S. intelligence. It was, the announcer said, capable of launching a reusable space
plane into low-Earth orbit. The first public confirmation of the Buran program. Energia, like the orbiter, was to be fully recoverable
after launch for re-use. At 60 meters it stood taller than the U.S. shuttle's external fuel tank
and incorporated the four main engines fueled by liquid hydrogen
with oxygen oxidizer. Four liquid fueled boosters
clustered around the central rocket, adding enough thrust for Energia to launch
nearly a 100t payload and potentially four more boosters could be added
for launching up to 200t. The advantage of liquid fueled
rocket boosters over the US shuttle's solid rocket boosters
was that thrust could be controlled just two days after the announcement Energia first lifted off
from the Roscosmos Cosmodrome at Baikonur in the remote Kazakhstan desert. For its maiden launch it carried not Buran,
but a mockup of the Polyus spacecraft, a laser-shooting (’Skif’) satellite-
killing response to the planned U.S. Strategic Defense
Initiative known as Star Wars. Although Energia performed flawlessly, Polyus-Skif failed to orbit. Eighteen months later, on 15th of November 1988, Energia’s second launch took Buran orbiter 1.01 into orbit for the first and only time. It was unmanned and fully automated, a world first for a full sized space plane. After separation from Energia,
the orbiter fired its rear engines to maneuver into orbit. It completed two orbits
before reentering the atmosphere when an onboard computer
decided to change the landing direction due to a 60kph crosswind Buran successfully
landed itself on the runway near Baikonur. Elapsed time was 206 minutes since launch, a remarkable technical achievement. The USSR was dissolved in 1991
and within a couple of years the Buran program
was indefinitely suspended. Plans for three more unmanned Buran
space flights, which were to include atmospheric and radiation experiments
along with manned flights, were scrubbed. With the existing Soyuz system
evidently fulfilling the role adequately and with much criticism
that the expense of Buran was sapping funds from other space programs. It was no longer
considered viable or necessary. The US shuttle program, meanwhile,
continued until 2011 to complete
the International Space Station Project. Had the Buran program continued, the second orbiter was to be launched
three years after the first in 1991. Manned flights
would have commenced in 1994. It was intended that the shuttles would
initially service the Mir space station. But as events transpired,
the only shuttles to dock with Mir were American during 1995
to 97, conveniently using docking ports designed for the Buran Shuttle. Orbiter 1.01 mounted on its AN-225 carrier aircraft was displayed at the 1989 Paris Air Show. In a final ignominy, the historic orbiter and its Energia launch
vehicle were destroyed on May 12th, 2002, when the roof of their hangar at
Baikonur collapsed, killing eight people. In effect, Buran was the second generation
shuttle system benefiting from, and potentially improving
upon, the American designs and methods. In some respects it would have been more capable. It could perform spaceflight uncrewed
and was designed to stay in orbit for 30 days, twice
the American shuttle's duration. It could deliver an equal
30t payload into orbit. It was originally designed
for a crew of up to ten cosmonauts, three more than the American,
although it would have generally carried just four, each of whom had an ejection
seat for emergencies, a capability that might have saved
the American Challenger crew. Russian sources
state that 39 principally new materials and 230 new technologies were developed
specifically for the program. However, like the USA,
the USSR decided space shuttles were not an efficient means
of launching payloads into space. That might not have been
a major impediment if its missions were to be primarily military,
but with a cost over its 16 year program of some 16 billion rubles
about 100 billion AUD in today's money. Baran was the most expensive
of all Soviet space programs. Up to 1200 organizations, and perhaps
a million workers were involved. Its payloads would thus have cost up to six times
more to launch than by Soyuz rocket. The Energia launch vehicle, on the other
hand, was more flexible that the US shuttle system as it could carry other
payloads of up to 100t. In the political and economic environment
that developed in the USSR soon after Buran’s launch, though,
the program's future effectiveness could not be tested.
