Ruskie Business: Soviet Wooden Space Shuttle

It never made it to orbit but a wooden mock-up of Buran, the USSR’s space shuttle, did spend 25 years parked out in the open air before being scrapped. wooden-buran-9

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In Soviet Union, space shuttle YOU! OK, tired old meme is tired and old but hey: who knew the Reds even HAD a space shuttle? Buran (Russian for “snowstorm”) may have been a thinly veiled, tiles-and-all copy of NASA’s “flying truck” but it did what space shuttles were designed to do – get launched into orbit… just once, and the flight was unmanned.

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Plenty of groundwork was required before Buran was strapped to its massive Energia booster, however, and one critical step in the process is depicted here in this set of images from Aleksander Markin dated October 11th, 2013.