Soviet Shuttle Almost Right on Money
The Soviet shuttle Buran performed so flawlessly on its maiden flight two weeks ago that the unmanned reusable orbiter landed less than five feet from its designated point of touchdown, a top space official said.
“The automatic program justified itself brilliantly,” Alexander Dunayev, head of the Glavkosmos space agency, said in remarks published Wednesday in the official Izvestia newspaper.
“Buran landed only 1.5 meters from where planned, and its planned flight time deviated by one second.”
Soviet space officials have not announced when they will next launch Buran, the new pride of the Soviet space program along with the Energia heavy-duty rocket booster that lifted the 2,000-ton shuttle into orbit.
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