When the AN-225 was finally ready, it was history it couldn’t catch up with: both the Buran and the AN-225 first flew in late 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which foreshadowed the collapse of the Soviet Union.Īs a result, the Buran program was canceled after just one official mission, and the AN-225 ended up carrying the shuttle piggyback style in only about a dozen test flights. The Antonov Design Bureau worked quickly to produce the finished plane in just three and a half years, but it still couldn’t keep up with the development of the Buran, so an interim solution was chosen: adapting a fleet of old 3M-T bombers to carry the spacecraft unassembled. ![]() The AN-225 carrying the Buran space shuttle was the star of the 1989 Paris air show. The result was the Buran (“Blizzard” in Russian), a Soviet Shuttle that looked remarkably like its American counterpart, down to the black and white paint job.īut whether it was a straight up clone or simply informed by the laws of aerodynamics, the Buran – along with its companion rocket, the Energiya – came with a logistical problem: how to transport the spacecraft from manufacturing facilities around Moscow to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, 1,300 miles away in today’s southern Kazakhstan, from which Soviet space missions departed. The USSR perceived this capability as a threat, and wanted a vehicle that could do the same. Its large cargo bay was a design feature pushed by the Pentagon, which used the Shuttle in a handful of classified missions to send military satellites into orbit. GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty ImagesĪ new era in space exploration began in April 1981, when the first Space Shuttle launched into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. ![]() The AN-225 was conceived to carry Soviet space shuttles.
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