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find of the week

(http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/09/23/shuttle.shtml)

Quote:

Soviet Shuttle Found in Persian Gulf — Paper

German television journalists say they have found a Soviet space shuttle in the Persian Gulf, Spiegel newspaper writes.

The find could be a pre-production model of the Buran (Snowstorm) space shuttle that was launched into space only once, on November 15, 1988. The shuttle made two circuits around the Earth without a crew.

In May 2002, the flight version of the Buran orbiter was destroyed when the roof collapsed at the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.

The other shuttle called Ptichka (Little Bird) built in 1990 was not launched at all, and the program officially ended in 1993.

It is not yet clear what version of the shuttle the German journalists found. There are several pre-production models, one in Moscow (with a restaurant inside), another was sold as a tourist attraction for the Olympics Games in Sydney, a third is thought to still be at Baikonur. The producer of the Dusseldorf television team, Chris Maier, quoted by the paper, suggested that the one found in the Persian Gulf was from Sydney. It had completed 25 practice flights in the Earth’s atmosphere.

A German businessman, Kai Niedermaier, who works in the Gulf, decided to buy the shuttle and sell its parts via Internet auctions, the paper wrote.

The Soviet Union had six active and several test Burans. The location of most of them is unknown. After the single flight in 1988, the program quickly ran out of funds, as the Soviet Ministry of Defense realized the lack of purpose for the system, compared to its tremendous cost. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the program was essentially shut down and, in 1993, the head of NPO Energia, Yuri Semenov, publicly admitted that the project was dead.

how wierd is that? :crazy:
Apparently it is the OL-GLI or Buran 002 model, the one that made 25 atmospheric flights to test landing procedures.

A German Museum has bought the Shuttle and will birngt it to germany shortly

OK...so "in the Persian Gulf" does not actually mean underwater, like "in Lake Michigan?"

:confused:

A comparsion for those of you who are curious

http://www.buran.ru/images/gif/mtkkman.gif

in the persian gulf is a bit misleading, AFAIK it was close to Bahrein

When did NASA start building the reuseable version?

First NASA Shuttle Flight (Columbia) was 1981.
Yes, the Russian version is somewhat a Copy

Because Buran's debut followed Space Shuttle Columbia's and the visual similarities between the two shuttle systems, during the Cold War many have speculated that espionage played a role in the development of the Soviet shuttle, however we now know that while externally it was an aerodynamic copy of the space shuttle, internally it was all engineered and developed domestically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran

Cool story.
Thanks!

Post-Modern Archaeology...

That's interesting....Espionage, how exciting. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by the_marq

OK...so "in the Persian Gulf" does not actually mean underwater, like "in Lake Michigan?"

:confused:

That's what I thought the article orginally meant!

well, Bahrain is in the Gulf. It is an island.

So the next obvious questions is “why were German television journalists diving in the Persian Gulf?" where they looking for it originally? Or where they looking for something else?

In the german article it says that they were doing a documentation about the GrandPrix of Bahrain (Formular1)

The German Article:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/w...319316,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/w...319521,00.html

There are even some more Pics:
some of the systems still work
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,392696,00.jpg
more Pics:
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,...Zucj0x,00.html

Well, it was cool up untill the point where what they said in the article was only a ruse to make us want to read it.

In the Persian Gulf apparently does not mean what most of us thought.