![]() Hopefully, his photos will inspire the Russian government to put these shuttles in a museum where they belong. Mirebs’ photos showed this forgotten Russian space program derelict and frozen in time. Unfortunately, this shuttle was destroyed in a hangar collapse in 2002. The mysterious reusable vehicle touched down Monday (May 8) at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. The only operational Russian space shuttle from Buran, Orbiter 1K1, completed one unmanned orbital flight before it was grounded. The second orbital mission of Chinas robotic space plane has come to a close. The Buran prototype shuttles found in the abandoned hangar by Mirebs, however, are from an earlier era – they are the last remnants of a space program that began in 1974 and was finally shuttered in 1993. According to Infographics, several ingenious designs were proposed but all were dismissed as they did not meet the capabilities or aesthetic of the Space Shuttle. Not only the Baikonur station is the world’s first and largest space exploration and shuttle launch facility, but it is also from here that the first artificial satellite and the first human spaceflight of the famous Yuri Gagarin were launched. The abandoned hangar is located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which is still in operation today (with the close of NASA’s shuttle program, Russian Soyuz shuttles are the only way for astronauts to reach the International Space Station).
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