The Buran project would have employed 30,000 people, and there were plans for up to 30 launches a year. Buran’s only imported component was heat-resistant paint. While the Soviet Union was crumbling around them, Energia’s engineers continued to get funding because the military saw Buran as vital to any missile defence system similar to America’s Star Wars. Flying without a crew, it orbited the Earth twice, before landing on a purpose-built strip at Baikonur.Įnergia built two Buran shuttles and three main boosters to carry them.
So far, the giant craft has made only one flight, in 1988. There is no alternative to Buran and I don’t see any coming.” The largest load possible in a Western launcher is little more than 20 tonnes. “By extending the length we can carry 200 tonnes. “Buran is the only launcher with a 100-tonne payload,” he says. On the two occasions when a security officer stopped by to check on the hangars, the watchman used a walkie-talkie to warn the others to stay quiet.“There is a future for this programme,” says Leonid Gurushkin, director of launch operations at Baikonur. To avoid security patrols, they took turns performing guard duty on the roof of the hangar. They also snuck into a nearby hangar housing a prototype of the old Energia-M rocket used to blast the Buran into space. "Of all the abandoned sites I've explored, this was by far the most impressive," he says. Despite the dismal storage conditions, they found the shuttles to be in better condition than expected. "To see it abandoned in the dark like that was something I'll never forget." After bedding down in sleeping bags inside the hangar for a few hours, Jonk and his three-man team spent the next two days exploring and photographing the two shuttles. "When I finally passed my flashlight over the shuttle, it was amazing," he recalls. Climbing in through an unlocked window, they began looking for the shuttles in the cavernous, pitch-dark building. Jonk and company arrived at the hangar at around 2 am, and found it unguarded. Using a GPS device programmed with the hangar's coordinates, they hiked across the rocky steppe for seven hours, wearing headlamps to see their way. From there, they found a local willing to drop them off on the side of the highway at nightfall, around 20 kilometers (13 miles) from Baikonur. To get there, Jonk and three friends flew to the nearby city of Kyzylorda and took a four-hour bus ride to the small town of Toretam. (Since NASA ended its shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts have hitched rides into space with the Russians.)īaikonur's location in the middle of the vast Kazakh Steppe presented another challenge. For one thing, Baikonur is still an active spaceport-the Russian space program leases the site from Kazakhstan for around $115 million a year, and uses it to launch its own and other country's astronauts into space. But few places were more difficult to access than the Buran hangar. Jonk is a veteran urban explorer, or "urbexer," who estimates he's photographed around 1,500 abandoned places around the world.
Among them is French photographer Jonk, who managed to sneak into the hangar in April 2018. The site has also been targeted by international adventurers seeking a glimpse at Soviet space history. Over the years, local scavengers have snuck into the hangar to harvest valuable metals and electronics. The other two-including the shuttle that was scheduled to fly the second mission-are rotting away in an abandoned hangar in another part of the sprawling Baikonur complex. One, a full-scale test model, is on display at the Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum. Today, three versions of the Buran survive.
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