Russia’s Crashing Economy Grounds Shuttle Factory : Aerospace: The plant boasted one of Soviet science’s proudest successes in space. Now it makes bath tiles.

As if moving among gravestones, Vladimir Lozovitsky shambled between the silenced forms of high-tech equipment at the Molnya Design Bureau. He was virtually alone in the 10-story testing laboratory where he works, and the sound of his footsteps clattered off the walls.

“My entire life is connected with this plant,” said Lozovitsky, 57. He first came to work here 33 years ago, when it turned out military planes, and stayed through its conversion into the showpiece of Soviet aerospace design in the 1980s.

But now his efforts to keep a sheen on the chrome of a vacant testing complex unique in Russia are burdened by futility.

“How come all this has stopped?” he asked. “I always thought that we were advancing progress. Then comes our President (Boris N.) Yeltsin and he makes us stop. Is that progress?”

He might well ask. What was once on the cutting edge of Soviet space technology is now turning out bathroom tiles for which there is not even a real market.

The Molnya (Lightning) Design Bureau here on the outskirts of Moscow designed and tested one of Soviet science’s proudest--and perhaps most perverse--achievements, the Buran (Snowstorm) space shuttle.

It was a $14-billion project that managed to turn out two prototypes--only one ever flew--of a craft that bore an amazing resemblance to the American space shuttle, with a few internal differences.

“We had terrific financing, I can’t deny it,” said Alexander B. Dolgov, Molnya’s deputy general director. “But now, practically speaking, it is down to zero.”

If Buran once symbolized the Soviets’ determination to claim parity with the American space effort, today it stands for other things: the crisis of resources that is destroying Russian technology and the enormous obstacles to redirecting a national economy that was insanely misconceived.

“Buran will never fly again,” Boris D. Ostroumov, deputy director of the Russian space agency, this country’s counterpart to NASA, said in an interview. The reason is not that the Russians lack technology, he said, but that “we can no longer afford to choose anything. We can barely afford to maintain what is still working. And Buran never worked.”

A single launch of Buran now, he said, would cost almost 10 times the space agency’s entire $78-million annual budget.

Given the high levels of funding, equipment and staff once devoted to Buran, the Molnya works would seem to be an ideal candidate for conversion to civilian production, a program to which the Russian government is devoting billions of dollars.

“We have great scientific potential,” Dolgov said. “Whatever happens, we’ll remain an aerospace firm.”

But this particular plant faces exceptional problems in converting. Built over three years for the express purpose of turning out the Buran, it is so specialized that Russian space and defense officials find it almost impossible to fit into their conversion programs.

“To convert such a unique plant to some other program is really going to be difficult,” said Alexander A. Mering, an engineer in the plant’s vacuum-research laboratory.

When the United States and Russia agreed last September on a joint multibillion-dollar plan to build an orbiting space laboratory, Buran was completely ignored--even though the joint program anticipates several space shuttle missions in the period of preliminary construction.

NASA officials, on their frequent trips through Russia to pick over Soviet space technology for Western adaptation, never fail to skip Tushino entirely, as if to snub Buran as a rank knockoff.

“We did tentatively probe the Americans whether they would be interested in any joint project concerning Buran,” Ostroumov said. “They displayed no interest in it whatsoever.”

Molnya got barely a crumb from Yeltsin’s recently created fund to finance defense conversion: The plant received 2 billion rubles, or less than $2 million, as a government loan. That money was supposed to last until the year 2000, but Dolgov said last week, “It’s already spent.”

The money went for salaries and the full Soviet-scale panoply of social services that the plant supports in Tushino, including kindergartens, medical clinics and food shops, he said.

Programs such as Buran will be further threatened if Yeltsin’s favored party, Russia’s Choice, wins enough seats in the Dec. 12 parliamentary elections to push through its economic program.

That program foresees a ruthless slashing of spending in the military-industrial complex, of which Buran was inextricably a part, to bring inflation down to 3% to 5% a month by the end of next year.

“The Russian economy is not normal,” Vasily I. Selyunin, an economist and Russia’s Choice candidate for Parliament, said in an interview. “We make more rockets than the United States. Who needs that production? So we will cut it. It will increase unemployment, but we don’t see anything bad in that.”

Perhaps nothing is so painful to the workers as the distance the plant has fallen. At its peak, Molnya was one of the most favored enterprises of the Soviet state. Tushino was the only part of Moscow closed to foreigners.

“Something like mass self-hypnosis took place,” Mikhail Osin, Molnya’s deputy general scientific director, said of the esprit of the work force in a recent interview with the Russian monthly Delovie Liudi (Business People). “People worked relentlessly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

To this day, Molnya officials are sensitive that the result of all this specialized work was almost indistinguishable from the American space shuttle. The resemblance, they argue, is only on the surface.

Acknowledging “many outward similarities,” Osin said: “We developed new control and navigation systems, created a unique space laboratory and a ground-control system and we perfected original horizontal takeoff and landing techniques.”

The spacecraft’s crowning moment came Nov. 15, 1988: a 205-minute unmanned flight that ended with a picture-perfect automated landing.

For a couple of years, the program seemed to be in suspended animation, still receiving funds but in want of a real goal.

“I myself could see in 1990 that the work was falling off,” said Alexander P. Sokolov, director of the plant’s vacuum and temperature laboratory, “because preparations for the second plane, the infrastructure, weren’t being undertaken.”

As work ground to a halt, as many as 35% of the plant’s more than 10,000 employees left.

Those who have remained can scarcely make ends meet.

“I’m ashamed to say that my salary is a ridiculous 60,000 rubles (about $50) a month,” Mering said. “That is lower than poverty.”

Most employees make even less, with the average wage now reaching about 12,000 rubles, or $10, a month. With the plant’s ablest and youngest workers abandoning ship, there is little hope of doing more than keeping the existing equipment from rusting.

Today the plant is engaged in a desperate search for a goal. Its remaining engineers are working on the design for a six-seater triplane called the Molnya-1, about 20 test flights of which have already been completed. But several other Soviet aeronautics factories are also working in that field, and it is an open question how much the Russian government can continue to support research in such a competitive market.

Meanwhile, the plant’s facilities are ludicrously underused. In the vacuum and temperature laboratory, lined with colossal hermetic tanks, their ports agape, a few workers are turning out mirrored glass tiles for sale to “rich people to place in their bathrooms,” as Mering puts it.

Elsewhere, workers such as Lozovitsky look for something to do.

“Buran was like a child to me,” he said. “When I saw the launch on television, my eyes were teary and I told my family, ‘Look, this is what I have done with my own hands.’ Now I would quit, but who will offer me a new job? Who needs me except my Buran, which is dead anyway.”

Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.