Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika called for a tighter accounting of state expenditures. The country was struggling to recover from the grim legacy of two decades of the Brezhnev regime, which placed international prestige and military expenditures ahead of the comfort of its citizens. Through espionage, the Soviets obtained the design specifications of the US shuttle.Ī model of the Buran and its launch vehicle, the Energia, which Russian President Boris Yeltsin donated to the Museum.īuran’s launch occurred during a critical time in Soviet history. It resembled the American shuttle quite closely - not by coincidence. The Buran launched strapped onto the Energia launch vehicle, the largest among Soviet launch vehicles. Although they tested the Buran extensively in the Earth's atmosphere with trained pilots, the maiden, and only, orbital launch was made without a crew. Amid much international speculation and after many delays, the Soviet Union launched the Buran (Snowstorm), its first full-scale reusable space shuttle, on November 15, 1988. These reports began speculation that the Soviet Union was trying to build a shuttle to match the U.S. Although the program had been secret, Australian fishermen caught sight of a Soviet ship pulling a small scale model form the ocean. This was a series of 1:3 and 1:2 scale models of the planned spacecraft. At the time of the early US space shuttle launches, the soviet Ministry of Defense took a renewed interest in the project and began testing an unpiloted scale model of the Buran, called the Bor. Among test pilots was the second man to orbit the Earth, German Titov, who left his career as a cosmonaut to become a test pilot for the program. After the dawn of the space age, Soviet rocket designers and cosmonauts continued work on a space plane then called Spiral, during the 1960s. Also known as the MiG-105, the craft employed a ramjet engine that required an assisted launch to gain orbit. Their first effort, known as the Burya, was developed by engineers in at the Mikoyan Gurevich aircraft design plant. Designers and managers believed that such a craft ultimately would provide more reliable and efficient access to space than single-use rockets. For 30 years several programs overlapped. Official Soviet interest in a reusable space plane revived in the 1950s. The Soviet Union still achieved many more firsts: the first lunar rover, the first soft landing on Venus, the first soft landing on Mars, the first recovery of samples from the Moon by automatic spacecraft.A commemorative medal of the Soviet Buran shuttle in the Museum’s collection. Undaunted, the Soviet Union rebuilt its space program around orbiting stations, building the first one, Salyut, and then the first permanent home in space, Mir. The Soviet Union engaged in that race far too late, with divided organization, and made a gallant but doomed challenge to Apollo. In 1964, the Soviet Union decided to contest the decision of the United States to put the first person on the Moon. Except one, the first human landing on the Moon. The Soviet Union achieved all the great firsts in cosmonautics-the first satellite in orbit, the first animal in orbit, the first laboratory in orbit, the first probe to the Moon, the first probe to photograph its far side, the first soft landing on the moon, the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first spacewalk. At that time, few could have imagined the dramatic events that lay head. The rebirth of the Russian space program marks an important event: 50 years since the first Sputnik was launched on 4th October 1957.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |