From: jamesoberg@aol.com (JamesOberg)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Buran
Date: 7 Aug 1998 04:37:39 GMT

The flown Buran and the #2 bird are still at Baykonur, not Star City. The
air-breathing engines were for the two dozen manned takeoff/landing test
flights from Ramenskoye (NEVER air-dropped from the back of a Bison -- that was
sheer idiocy for US DoD to suggest it), and although the Russians were tempted
to leave one pair of engines on the Orbiter for space flight, they smartened up
about 18 months before launch and removed them (you can stiill see the tile
scarring in some views). But Buran and Energia are dead-dead-dead -- teams
gone., tooling gone, flight hardware well over lifetime and exposed way outside
environmental limits. RIP.

Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
From: henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Russian Space Shuttle??
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 23:11:59 GMT

In article <37B3227F.25D42890@nwu.edu>, Andrew Reid  <reida@nwu.edu> wrote:
>  If the same people who wrote the propaganda were involved in
>setting goals for the Buran program, they might have wanted to
>have the same "form factor," for payload interoperability.
>This doesn't necessarily mean stealing KH-11s, although that
>must have occurred to them, but it might also allow them to
>compete in the launch-service market for Shuttle-designed
>payloads.  Is that technically reasonable?

Technically, perhaps, but organizationally, I doubt the competition part.
That was never a major driver for the Soviet space program.  The idea of
stealing a KH-11, on the other hand, is worthy of note.  As I understand
it, it's fairly solidly established that the Soviet military were the main
backers of Buran.

(The reason why Buran seems so purposeless, in retrospect, is simply that
the people who set its main requirements and provided most of its
political support are not talking.  People who try to understand it on the
assumption that its politics matched those of its Western counterpart -- a
mostly civilian program with minor military influence -- naturally can't
make sense of it.)
--
The good old days                   |  Henry Spencer   henry@spsystems.net
weren't.                            |      (aka henry@zoo.toronto.edu)

Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
From: henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Russian Space Shuttle??
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 12:56:21 GMT

In article <ant160858bc8M+4%@gnelson.demon.co.uk>,
Graham Nelson  <graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> That was never a major driver for the Soviet space program.  The idea of
>> stealing a KH-11, on the other hand, is worthy of note.  As I understand
>> it, it's fairly solidly established that the Soviet military were the main
>> backers of Buran.
>
>What did they hope to accomplish with it?  The launch of spy
>satellites?  Surely not -- Buran couldn't be the best way to do
>this, or even a sensible way to do this.
>A vehicle for suborbital bombing runs?

Like I said, the people who know aren't talking. :-)  I wouldn't be
surprised if they were the victims of their own rhetoric to some extent,
and simply decided that any capability the US had, they had to have.
--
The good old days                   |  Henry Spencer   henry@spsystems.net
weren't.                            |      (aka henry@zoo.toronto.edu)