Night view of shelter, gantry and Space Shuttle Enterprise in launch position on the Space Launch Complex (SLC) #6, commonly known as "SLICK 6", Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
Photographed by TSGT James R. Pearson in February 1985.
NARA: 6506011
STS-1 was the first orbital spaceflight of NASA’s Space Shuttle
program. The first orbiter, Columbia, launched on April 12, 1981 and
returned on April 14, 1981, 54.5 hours later, having orbited the Earth
36 times. Columbia carried a crew of two – mission commander John W.
Young and pilot Robert L. Crippen.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aR52XJ
Shuttle Launch by Chris Thompson
San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive
Size comparison between the International Space Station and older Soviet and American stations, with the Space Shuttle as a point of reference.
Abandoned ruins of the Soviet space shuttle
A Soviet-era Buran shuttle lies abandoned in a hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It’s been gathering dust here for nearly 30 years. French photographer David de Rueda has visited the site, which is not open to the public, three times between 2015 and 2017, taking these photographs.
A building called MKZ houses two of the shuttles, only one of which was designed to fly into space: “This is the first photo ever showing both space shuttles and the entire MZK building. It’s the main piece of my first trip [in 2015]. After the long trek through the steppe we were quite exhausted but we couldn’t sleep because it was too cold. Being there was so unreal and exciting it gave me enough power to take the pictures I was looking for,” said de Rueda in an email interview.
“The hangar is huge: 150 meters long, 80 meters wide and 70 meters high. During the winter, water drops are falling everywhere and it sounds like it’s raining inside the hangar. Due to extreme temperature changes (from -40°C to +40°C), the roof of the biggest hangar collapsed in 2002. It destroyed OK-1.01, the only Buran which ever flew.”
The Burans are no longer owned by the Russian government: “RKK Energia, the Russian company that built the vehicles in the 1980s, sold them to a Kazakh company called Infrakos in 2004, which in turn sold it to a Russian-Kazakh company called Aelita a year later,” said Soviet space historian Bart Hendrickx in an email interview.
“The main motive for developing Buran had been to match the military
capabilities of the Space Shuttle. When US-Soviet relations improved in
the second half of the 1980s, Buran lost much of its “raison d'être” and
also much political support from the Kremlin. Gorbachev showed very
little enthusiasm for it,“ said Hendrickx.
The Buran program was canceled in 1993: “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there simply was no money left to use it for the civilian missions that it could still have performed. With hindsight, the decision to build Buran was based on a false perception of the primary objectives of the Space Shuttle program and an urge in the Soviet defense industry to blindly copy whatever the Americans built. There was no fundamental need for it in the immediate future of the Soviet space program,” said Hendrickx.
(x)
Robert McCall
The Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with Russia’s Mir Space Station, photographed by the Mir-19 crew on July 4, 1995. (NASA)
NASA: We will build the heaviest, most powerful, most complex and most expensive spacecraft humanity has ever seen!
Also NASA: How about we land it in ummm dirt strips
lonestarflight
nocternalrandomness
alphamecha-mkii
70sscifiart
thebeautifulcosmos
enriquemzn262
ohsoromanov
humanoidhistory
