The cavernous interior of the MZK building (Site 112A at Baikonur Cosmodrome). Abandoned for some years, it contains the second Buran orbiter and a static test model.
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Thanks to reddit, we discovered this amazing photo essay by Ralph Mirebs from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan. A lot of Mirebs' photography has been documenting the industrial decline that followed the disintegration of the USSR at the end of the Cold War, and this most recent post starkly illustrates this via the fate of the Soviet shuttle program, Buran. We've included some of our favorites in the gallery above, but be sure to check Mirebs' post for the whole set.
Buran (Blizzard) was a reaction to NASA's Space Shuttle and closely resembled the American reusable orbiter, but without the latter's main engines (Buran was powered into orbit by the Energia heavy lift rocket). It only made a single (unmanned) space flight, in November 1988. Orbiter (OK)-1K1 Buran made two orbits before returning to earth (unlike the Space Shuttle, Buran was capable of autonomous flight from the outset). A lack of funds saw the program suspended shortly after its return to earth, and Boris Yeltsin cancelled it in 1993. It got worse from there; in 2002 an earthquake caused the roof of the MIK building in which OK-1K1 was being stored collapsed, destroying the orbiter and killing eight people.
Following that tragedy, the second orbiter, OK-1K2 (Ptichka, or Little Bird) was moved to the slightly smaller (but still huge) facility we see here. This building, known as MZK (Russian for Assembly and Fueling Complex, we think), was specially designed to contain the massive shockwave that would follow a catastrophic explosion during fueling (to prevent damage to other parts of the Baikonur complex. While that may seem like overkill, a failed launch of the USSR's N1 heavy lifter in 1969 was equivalent to almost 7kT, about half that of the Hiroshima bomb.
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