The interior of one of the abandoned Soviet Buran space shuttles at Baikonur

@ElentirENG ES 2·28·2024 · 22:49 0

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the most important Soviet space base and is still operated by Russia today.

The infiltration of Spanish urban explorers into the Russian Baikonur cosmodrome
They sneak into a Russian base and there record two abandoned space shuttles

As we saw last month, in that cosmodrome there is a huge hangar, the MZK, in which there are two abandoned space shuttles from the Buran program, recently seen by some Spanish explorers who dared to infiltrate that space base. On YouTube there are more videos of these shuttles published by other urban explorers, as Baikonur is becoming a common destination for lovers of exploration and strong emotions.

However, so far I have only seen one video of the interior of these shuttles. That video was published in 2017 by the YouTube channel Ninurta, an urban explorer from the Russian city of Saint Petersburg who publishes very interesting videos. Last Sunday, that channel published a remastered and expanded version of that video, in which we can also see the model of the Energia launcher in the huge SDI (Dynamic Test Bed) hangar:

The images that you can see in this entry are screenshots from this video. In the following image we see the starboard part of the shuttle cockpit. On the left you can see two of the cabin windows.

Here we see the instrument panel of the shuttle cockpit, or rather what remains of it, since almost all the instruments have been removed. The only thing that can be seen in place is the base of the joystick on the left, below, with a yellowish color.

Below these lines we see the storage cabinets of the living compartment. This compartment was located just below the cockpit, communicating with it through a hatch located in its roof.

Below we see the duct that connected the habitable compartment with the payload bay.

Finally, we see the payload bay. According to the Soviets, the Buran shuttles could have put up to 100 tons of payload into orbit, four times more than the American shuttles. We will never be able to confirm this, since no Buran shuttle ever reached space.