- Joined
- Jul 19, 2004
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This story is so complex and involves so many strange issues that I'm at a loss as to where to put it. Insofar as it involves historical events among adversarial parties and a recent proposal for a deal entangled in those events and the tensions they generated, I'm tempted to place it under Conspiracy.
Let's start with the latest developments and leave the convoluted back story for excavation by those interested in exploring this strange storyline ...
The Soviet Union was pursuing its own version of the American space shuttle technology and operations at the time it collapsed. This was the Buran program. Only one of the multiple Buran orbiters ever undergoing construction (the first, named Buran) ever flew (an unmanned test flight in 1988). Buran ended up stored in its massive hangar facility at Baikonur (in Kazakhstan), where it was destroyed in 2002 when the building collapsed as catastrophically as the USSR. The second Buran orbiter in line for operations (named Ptichka) was at least 95% completed at the time the program was cancelled.
Fast-forward to the present day ... A Kazakh businessman who is fighting to realize his claimed ownership of Ptichka is offering the spacecraft to Russia in exchange for the skull of a 19th century Kazakh khan who led a rebellion against czarist colonization, died, and has recently emerged as a national / ethnic hero figure.
Now ... Read on ...
Let's start with the latest developments and leave the convoluted back story for excavation by those interested in exploring this strange storyline ...
The Soviet Union was pursuing its own version of the American space shuttle technology and operations at the time it collapsed. This was the Buran program. Only one of the multiple Buran orbiters ever undergoing construction (the first, named Buran) ever flew (an unmanned test flight in 1988). Buran ended up stored in its massive hangar facility at Baikonur (in Kazakhstan), where it was destroyed in 2002 when the building collapsed as catastrophically as the USSR. The second Buran orbiter in line for operations (named Ptichka) was at least 95% completed at the time the program was cancelled.
Fast-forward to the present day ... A Kazakh businessman who is fighting to realize his claimed ownership of Ptichka is offering the spacecraft to Russia in exchange for the skull of a 19th century Kazakh khan who led a rebellion against czarist colonization, died, and has recently emerged as a national / ethnic hero figure.
Now ... Read on ...