Skeletons of the shuttles were cut into pieces and melted at the factory's production yard in Moscow's Tushino district, yielding some 20 to 30 tons of aluminum, said Gennady Matveyev, a leading designer of the Buran space ship at NPO Molniya.
Putting another nail in the coffin of the Russian shuttle, the Tushino Engineering Plant which built the Burans has shifted from space production to less exotic fields. The plant, founded in 1932 under Stalin's orders to build airplanes, now produces passenger planes and buses, diapers and disposable syringes. "Burans are now monuments of architecture," said Igor Zverev, deputy director of the plant.
"The program had a serious ideological bias. We tried to copy the [U.S.] space shuttle, but instead poured a lot of money down the drain," Matveyev said. "There is no way we can reopen the project, because it involved several thousand factories from all over the Soviet Union."
The government of the ex-Soviet Union spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Buran to challenge the rival U.S. space shuttle program, but the Russian government canceled the program due to a lack of funds in 1993.
One of the Burans is now a tourist attraction and sits on the bank of the Moskva River in Gorky Park. Buran flew just once in an unmanned test flight in November 1988.
The Molniya management, however, tried to play down the financial problems the factory faces today. "The Buran program was not closed but postponed because of the lack of funds," Alexander Bashilov, director general of Molniya, said Thursday. He gave no time frame for its resumption.
Kenneth Mitchell, representative of NASA in Russia, said he believed the Russian government had long ago come to the conclusion that it could not afford the Buran program and that the infrastructure had to be converted to civilian use. "It's not the first time this has happened in the aerospace industry," he said.
Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky, chief designer at Molniya, said the company is seeking to raise funds to launch a new project called MAKS, or Multi-Purpose Aviation Cosmic System, that employs an Antonov cargo plane to put Buran into orbit from air which would lower the craft's launch cost.
Lozino-Lozinsky said the MAKS program has had positive reviews from British Aerospace and Deutsche Aerospace, but so far no companies have offered to invest in the project.
Boris Rybak, executive director of Infomost, an aerospace consulting company, was less enthusiastic, saying there were "millions of such projects" in an industry seeking ways to survive in the market economy.
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