• U.S.

Space: Sunny Debut for Snowstorm

3 minute read
John Langone

It was not a perfect launch day at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Central Asia. Winds were gusting; a cyclone was reportedly moving in from the Aral Sea. The temperature was near freezing. Flight officials held an urgent meeting, then made their decision: it was a go. Minutes later the Soviet Union’s first space shuttle rose, unmanned, out of a giant fireball that spread over the steppe. Looking much like its U.S. counterpart, the white- tiled, double-delta-winged vehicle, called Buran (Snowstorm), made two orbits around the earth, then executed a perfect automated landing a few miles from where it had blasted off. Total flight time: 3 hours 25 minutes.

“The space plane has ushered in a new era in the history of Soviet space exploration,” trumpeted Radio Moscow. Western observers were no less admiring. “This shows that the Russians’ boldness and ambition is matched by their ingenuity,” says James Oberg, a Houston engineer and an expert on the Soviet space program. “It blows us out of our last space-operations monopoly.” The Soviet program achieved a second milestone just a few days earlier: on board the orbiting Mir space station, which has no U.S. equivalent, cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov broke the world record of 326 days in space.

Buran’s triumphant maiden voyage came after several glitches in the Soviet space program. The first attempt to put the shuttle into orbit was scrubbed last month with only 51 seconds left in the countdown. Worse, a Soviet-Afghan crew was nearly lost in space last September due to a computer malfunction.

Despite some obvious similarities, the Soviet orbiter is a different bird from the U.S. species. Its wing angle and nose are sharper, perhaps giving it greater maneuverability. More important, as demonstrated last week, it is set % up for fully automated flight. Onboard computers can guide it through re- entry to the earth’s atmosphere and landing. The ship is also capable of manned flight, carrying up to ten people, but the Soviets plan at least one more unmanned shot before putting a crew on board. “Just as we were scared to death by Chernobyl,” explains a Western diplomat in Moscow, “they were scared to death when Challenger blew up.”

Another significant difference in the shuttle systems concerns the boosters. The U.S. orbiter is lifted by two recoverable solid rocket boosters and its own three main engines, a system designed exclusively for shuttle missions. Buran piggybacks on the l97-ft.-high Energia, the world’s largest operational booster rocket — a multipurpose powerhouse designed to lift shuttles or unmanned spacecraft weighing up to 100 tons. “Energia could be said to be a much smarter system than what we’ve got, since it could take anything up,” says Seth Arenstein, editor of Soviet Aerospace magazine.

The question facing Soviet leaders is how to use this new toy and how to justify its cost. Its real utility, say experts, will be linked to the next- generation Soviet space station. In a tight economic environment, the cost of that project and of the Soviets’ huge space effort in general may be prompting some second thoughts. Despite the successes, says John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, “the glasnost-perestroika crowd is somewhat down on aerospace.”

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com