![]() Russia remembered with gratitude as India joins elite space club New rocket expands Russian space launch capabilities Russia’s Proton rocket to place into orbit Intelsat satellite in 2015 R.G.: The precision with which the Buran landed utterly stunned everyone. And without any fuss, we developed our own version of the spacecraft and its launch vehicle. We dealt with translations, scientific analysis, editing and publication of “primers” on the shuttle. ![]() It had two design departments – mine looking at aircraft, and Yefrem Dubinskiy’s taking care of launch vehicles. When the fuss started up over the American shuttle, no decision had yet been taken about whether we should go the same way.īut Energiya’s so-called Service No. V.B.: Back in 1962, with Sergey Pavlovich’s support, I obtained my first inventor’s certificate for a reusable space vehicle. R.G.: And when did you start working on the Buran project? Tsiolkovskiy gave Korolev a little book called “Space missile trains,” and advised him to have a think about using liquid-fuel rocket engines for flights not into the stratosphere, but even higher, into the ether. He said that, without a liquid-fuel rocket engine, the glider could not be controlled at that sort of height, and would break up as it fell and gained speed. Russian space industry seeking to improve performance He decided to go and visit Tsiolkovskiy to get him to sign a letter confirming that a flight at this height was viable. He was toying with the idea of taking a glider up to 6 km, and then into the stratosphere, using a hermetically sealed cockpit. In 1929 he was 23, and he was already a well-known glider pilot. V.B.: Korolev! That’s what I heard from Sergey Pavlovich himself. R.G.: Who was the first person to come up with the idea of an aircraft-style orbital vehicle that could land on a runway just like an aircraft? We could have withdrawn the Mir space station from orbit and turned it into a museum exhibit! Unmanned landings, no toxic fuel, horizontal flight tests, and transporting the rocket’s tanks on a specially designed aircraft. But the Buran was capable of much more than the American shuttle, both in terms of the payload it could bring back to Earth (20 to 30 tons rather than 14.5 tons) and the range of its center of gravity. Until the Buran came along, the American space shuttle was at the top of the tree. ![]() Rossiyskaya Gazeta: Valeriy Pavlovich, people say that the Buran spacecraft was the most complex machine ever created by mankind. He is now a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute. Rossiyskaya Gazeta spoke to Valeriy Burdakov, one of the men behind the Buran project, where he worked as a head of department at the Energiya scientific production association. PHOTO OF THE DAY: Will Smith on a wing of a Soviet space shuttle ![]()
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