Buran-Energia

Last week, on Sunday December 24th, I had the pleasant surprise to see that the website (French and English parts merged) had exceeds the symbolic borderline of 10 000 uniques visitors since the launch, the September 10th 2006 for the French part, and on October 11th for the English part.

I hope that the content of this site please you, that it is organized well and that you find it pertinant, do not hesitate to post comments (it is made for that ;P) to send me your remarks.

I’m using this event to do a making-up of this personal project, I decided to put on-line all the informations and the documents which I was able to collect on the project Buran Energia, which I find passionant, and to make an Internet site in French and in English. At the beginning I planned to put only some pages and photos and finally I got hundred of pages by language. Even after some months of work I haven’t published all my documents, thus you can return regularly to see the evolutions. I have unseen videos to be added, numerous photos and different documents on the functioning of Buran.

I want to thank you, every readers, because I did not expected such a traffic at the beginning. Thank you and good reading.

I published some pages on the Soviets then Russians engines developped by the NPO Energomash company. I speak about the company and its history, then the various engines it designed for launchers. I also published a page on the rocket engine mechanism and the difference between the opened and closed cycle.

New photos on the Buran-Energia project, in the Buran’s pictures section:

• Carriage on the Energia’s top tank by the VM-T Atlante plane.
• Assembling of the first stage boosters.
• Tests on Buran and Energia on the launch pad, at this stage the shuttle is not finished yet.
• Carriage of Buran and Energia on the launch pad.
• Preparation for the flight.
• Storage of Buran 1.01 after its first flight.

I updated the chapter about Energia to add articles about Vulkan and Energia M, which are launchers of the Energia familly. I will add in the next days an article on the Zenit launcher too.

Update 2006-12-15: New pages about the Zenit launcher, which was also used for the A block of Energia.

I decided to decrease the price of the Buran encyclopedia. Until now the price of the encyclopedia for downloading was the same that the CD version. Now the price is 30% less expensive, 14$ for the CD and 36$ for the complete set.

Do not hesitate to cross the step because this encyclopaedia is the most complete source of information about the Buran Energia project (SPIRAL SPRING, BOR, MAKS) and contains numerous exclusive documents and videos which are not available on-line (and nowhere else on internet).

The US Air Force has announced that it is developing an unmanned reusable spaceplane, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle. The first launch is in 2008 on an Atlas V rocket. The X-37B will be one-fourth the size of the Space Shuttle and serve as a testbed for technologies for future reusable spacecraft.

This is the first project to make an unmanned spacecraft since Buran.

GAC Logistics UK (service of goods transport) welcomed the Antonov An-225 Mriya, to the UK at Nottingham East Midlands Airport today. It was chartered to return sound and stage equipment from the first annual “This Day” festival staged in Lagos (former capital of Nigeria) to mark the 46th anniversary of Nigerian independence.

“It is really exciting to see the Antonov at East Midlands,” said Bronwyn Mead, Manager of GAC Logistics‘ East Midlands. branch.

“We needed to charter an aircraft of such dimensions because of the sheer volume of equipment and the critical timescales we were facing,” says Martin Corr from Sound Moves, who partnered GAC in this transportation operation.

“The ‘This Day’ festival was a massive event held in the glare of the world’s publicity spotlight – there was absolutely no margin for error. We chose GAC Logistics to clear the return of the equipment to the UK because our two companies always work well together to meet the needs of the music industry.”

As you can see I have changed the pagination of the column ‘News’ to adopt the structure of a Blog. It will allow me to manage more easily posts and especially will allow you to react to the site’s news through comments, to post remarks and further informations.

Indeed, although the Buran Energia project is old of more than 20 years it is very difficult to obtain viable informations about it, that’s why if you have informations, documents or remarks do not hesitate to inform me.