Amazing Pics of Abandoned Russian Spacecraft Factory

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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This Russian blogger took a pretty sweet series of pictures of an abandoned spacecraft factory in Russia: Baikonur Cosmodrome. The original site is in Cyrillic but Chrome's autotranslate function worked well enough for me to understand what I was looking at.

(Click link to see pics)
 
Wow. I'd hate to see my billions wasting away like that...
 
A Buran just sitting there!

A collector or museum would snap that up.

Amazing what can be left behind. I used to get excited if I found some staples and pencils in an office desk drawer.
 
very interesting images. and it's not a mere shuttle factory, it's a freakin cosmodrome! :)
 
Who knows, maybe our descendant will have to rely on this to desperately fight against an extra-terrestrial invasion?
 
Wow. I'd hate to see my billions wasting away like that...

Good, don't look up the 84km Superconducting Super Collider (the Large Hadron Collider is 27km in comparison) which the US spent billions on constructing...before canceling the project and encouraging the world's brightest physicists to go to CERN.
 
Wow, it looks almost almost abandoned intact... doesn't even seem like much was scrapped for parts.
 
GenMay = not public. Front Page News = public. Any other questions?

Yeah. Means lost opportunity to mention that it was posted in Genmay over a week ago and that's the kind of stuff they're missing by not subscribing.
 
A Buran just sitting there!

A collector or museum would snap that up.

Amazing what can be left behind. I used to get excited if I found some staples and pencils in an office desk drawer.

Make that 2. I'm amazed no one has bought them.
 
While scroll I kept wishing he would go inside the shuttle..... Then he did and my day was made :D
 
Wow, why would they just abandon this? Seems like such a giant waste, why not sell it to another company instead of just leaving it to rust and decay.
 
For the motherland! But yea what a waste. Who knows we could be colonizing Mars right now.
 
Didnt these get destroyed a few years ago due to roof collapses from snow?
 
Wow, why would they just abandon this? Seems like such a giant waste, why not sell it to another company instead of just leaving it to rust and decay.

People were too scared to ride in one of these shuttle clones and only one Buran was ever flown and then only by remote control. And yes one or both was destroyed later on, as is mentioned Here. It's sad though, since this shuttle could actually make a 2nd attempt at a landing and do that under automatic control, the Buran lost 8 tiles out of 38,000, not bad, not bad at all. :)
 
A Buran just sitting there!

A collector or museum would snap that up.

Amazing what can be left behind. I used to get excited if I found some staples and pencils in an office desk drawer.
It's not THE Buran (1K1). The Buran was destroyed in a hanger collapse. What you're looking at is Ptichka which is an incomplete Buran program spacecraft.
 
Wow, why would they just abandon this? Seems like such a giant waste, why not sell it to another company instead of just leaving it to rust and decay.

At that time period it would have been owned by the government instead of a private company, so they wouldn't worry about leaving it to rot.

Cool that there are two shuttles there. Can you imagine being a kid living near that, talk about fun having your own space ship to play in :)
 
At that time period it would have been owned by the government instead of a private company, so they wouldn't worry about leaving it to rot.

Cool that there are two shuttles there. Can you imagine being a kid living near that, talk about fun having your own space ship to play in :)

So it's comletely free to public , as in I could go there and start looting?
 
Wow. I'd hate to see my billions wasting away like that...

The United States has a couple spare Saturn V's sitting around corroding away. They spent half a billion or so on Skylab B and it's sitting in the National Air and Space Museum.

Buran was a huge waste of money for the USSR. Between that and the funding drops in the 80s they decided to cut their losses and abandon the whole program.
 
Wow. I'd hate to see my billions wasting away like that...

Your government (and your people) gave up on space travel. As result you DID waste billions of dollars.

Invented the light bulb and then through it in the trash because poor people couldn't eat it.
 
Turn it into luxury apartments! That's what they do with all other total trash building and it works.
 
Your government (and your people) gave up on space travel. As result you DID waste billions of dollars.

Invented the light bulb and then through it in the trash because poor people couldn't eat it.

What are you talking about?

Are you saying we 'gave up on space travel' because we finally retired the Shuttle after multiple extentions? NASA has a new heavy-lift rocket in development and private American contractors are slowly taking over ISS resupply missions...

IMO the real mistake we made was opting to develop the Space Shuttle rather than continuing with the Saturn family of rockets. The tech just wasn't there yet, it ended up being too dangerous and expensive.
 
I'm a little shocked it hasn't been turned into a museum for tours or just scrapped for the metal. To let it sit, rust, and rot just to be crapped on by the birds... seems wrong.

Then again it's not in Russia proper, it's in Kazakhstan so there probably isn't even money in the budget to tear it down. And if they did there would probably be a small war over who gets the salvage rights.
 
Wow, those are some amazing pictures. Plus an amazing amount of debris all over that machinery. lol.
 
A Buran just sitting there!

A collector or museum would snap that up.

Moving one of those costs more than just about every museum's entire budget and assets. That is the main reason why no one "snaps that up". Most museums interested in space do not have 10s of millions of USD just lying around for shipping and handling costs. Nevermind building a site to house it.

Remember the pandemonium that came with trying to move the last of the USA space shuttle orbiters?
 
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