Ptichka and this other test shuttle remain at Baikonur. The facility remains a busy spaceport under the current Russian space programme but its Soviet chapter in history remains frozen in time inside this building. Buran, the shuttle that actually flew, was destroyed in 2002 when its hangar collapsed after an earthquake, killing eight people. It’s located on the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first and largest operational space launch facility which launched the first manned spacecraft in human history, and before it, Sputnik 1. These two crumbling space crafts are inside a building that closed its giant sliding doors for the last time two decades ago. “Everything is just words on paper and ‘projects'”. For more than twenty years, the country has not produced anything new, continuing to exploit the legacy of the Soviet Union,” writes explorer Ralph Mirebs accompanying his photographs (I’ve done my best with Google translate). “Russia is rapidly losing its status as a leading space power. Spacecrafts are not usually the sort of thing you just leave lying around, but then again, when you’re the losing team in a race between two world superpowers, it might seem like a good idea to hide away any reminders of that failure in a warehouse out in the desert. Inside a remote rusting warehouse in the Kazakhstan desert that once housed the Soviet space shuttle program, Russian urbex photographer managed to gain access inside the hulking building to find not one but two spacecrafts, sleeping under layers of dust and twenty years worth of bird droppings. The only operational Russian space shuttle from Buran, Orbiter 1K1, completed one unmanned orbital flight before it was grounded. This, is something you don’t see everyday. The uncrewed spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia.
After five years searching the internet for the abandoned and forgotten, it takes a lot to shock me these days. Russia has successfully launched Luna 25, the country’s first lunar lander in 47 years.
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