If you want to see a Buran without hiking through the desert for 3 days, you can go to Technik Museum Speyer [1] - they also have other great air&space related exhibits (notably including an Antonov An-22 and a retired Boeing 747-200).
It is really interesting how similar the Russian space shuttle is in design to the American space shuttle. Kinda like how all of China's latest generation fighter jets look suspiciously similar to their American counterparts... https://www.defensetech.org/2015/09/29/lawmaker-chinese-j-31...
That's because Buran was built as a direct response to the Space Shuttle. Apparently the Soviets couldn't imagine civilian uses for such a large reusable vehicle so built their own to find out what it was for.
There are also significant differences though. Buran didn't carry its own engines, Energia provided all the launch thrust. The orbital manoeuvring system used LOX/Kerosene instead of MMH/N2O4. Also it was fully automated, its solo launch and landing happened under computer control.
Lockheed entered into a "partnership" with Yakovlev, copied the blueprints, and dissolved the "partnership", while pocketing hundreds of billions in US government largesse. The end result even looks similar.
This is not very well known in the US, although the Russians were sore about it for quite a while. This was back in early 90s when the US was universally perceived as a "friend" by freshly ex-Soviet people for the first time in their lives, and such military cooperation was actually possible. Turns out this somewhat naive trust was misguided.
It's a bit more than similarity. Watch the launch video of the Buran and you'll see it executes a roll shortly after take-off. Why does it do that? The American space shuttle performs that exact roll at that exact height because the orientation of pad 39A at Cape Canaveral is wrong and it corrects as soon as it clears the tower. The Buran launches from a different tower at a different latitude with a different height at a different orientation... but it performs _exactly_ the same roll. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
That's not surprising at all, and would be required even if Buran was developed completely independently to STS. Without that manoeuvre the engines would thrust off-axis due to the side-mounted payload. It's easier to compensate for off-axis pitch than yaw when you have gravity to account for.
For Soyuz launches on the other hand they physically rotate the launch pad.
All space craft perform a roll program to align with the selected launch azimuth, which is chosen for a specific orbital inclination and launch site latitude.
Without roll, all spacecraft from a launch site would be placed on similarly inclined orbits which would be useless.
> During the launch of a space shuttle, the roll program was simultaneously accompanied by a pitch maneuver and yaw maneuver.
It's the STS-specific pitch and yaw I'm talking about. And specifically that it happened at the height it would happen at the Cape, whereas energia had a different tower design that would have allowed the roll to happen earlier, for better efficiency.
See, there are only so many form-factors you can do given a particular set of requirements. In a lot of cases it's just one, this is why all modern passenger planes look very similar — aerodynamics dictate the form as soon as you accept the requirements (safely and cheaply transport people from A to B).
The Shuttle had wings quite larger than the minimum necessary to land. Apparently the reason for that is military's requirement for "polar once around" capability: it had to be able to launch, do one polar orbit and land immediately [1]. Such a maneuver makes it impossible to predict when and where the Shuttle will overfly some (e.g. Soviet) territory. The problem is that while the Shuttle does that orbit, the Earth spins a bit and now you are over ocean. To compensate for that, Shuttle had to have large aerodynamic surfaces so it can fly sideways and land properly. If not for this requirement, Shuttle may had smaller and lighter wings and lower chance of damaging heat proof tiles.
We know that requirement existed because nowadays Shuttle's design documents are declassified. However, I've not seen a single bit of rationale for Buran's shape/wing surface. So it may be the case that it's not just a copycat, but copying without for the sake of keeping up, with no purpose for the copy.
Fun fact... although the Soviets (obviously) never executed, they actually independently developed the exact same solution for going to the moon as the US used - lunar orbit rendezvous.
For anyone who's actually going there: you have to book the tour 2 weeks ahead because the company that will be taking you there needs to get an entry permission for each visitor.
I expected better from Vice. They were just drunk the entire time and didn't get to see the mutated animals or anything.
I wonder why they keep these shuttles abandoned compared to turning them into museum type pieces. Pretty amazing that these awesome machines are just abandoned on a military base.
I was disappointed to learn it wasn't a difficult place to visit after the kidofspeed girl posted about her (fake) motorcycle tour of the place some years ago.
If you visit the European Astronaut Corps (ESAC) in Bonn/Cologne you can see a lot of cool stuff - they have 1:1 mockups of the ISS (various modules) including stickers, a neutral buoyancy lab and a Soyuz trainer. It's tricky to get in randomly unless you have friends there (not for any security reason, it's just not a public place), but I think they do tours every now and again.
Although why Kazakhstan? You can visit Cape Canaveral (which launches fairly often) or French Guyana. You wouldn't want to be ringside, even if you could get there. There's a good chance you'd be deafened. Rocket launches sound like a fighter jet flyby even when you're in the public viewing areas.
I remember reading somewhere that those shuttles were in an old hangar that collapsed on top of them. Looks like that wasn't true, this was definitely shot fairly recently, drones and all.
At one point in the video they mention that this is what happened to the only Buran that actually was in space. The ones in the video were never completed/in service it seems.
They actually mention the hanger collapse during the video, that was the only ex-operational Buran that got crushed. The hanger in the video is the one that houses partially completed Burans.
[1] https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran