Buran News

In August 2007 I went to the Monino museum, at 40km of Moscow, here are the pictures I taken.

Menitsky Valery, passed away on Wednesday 16, January 2008 at Moscow.

Valery Menitsky was born on February 8, 1944, in 1965 he was graduated from the Tambov Military Flight School, in 1969 he entered a school of test-pilots, and in 1975 - the Moscow Aviation Institute.

In 1969 he integrated the A.I.Mikojan design bureau as test pilot, in 1984-1995 he was chief-pilot of the design bureau.

He flied and tested MiG-27, MiG -25PD, MiG -29M, took part in the test programs of MiG-21,-23,-25,-27,-29,-31 aircraft, and EPOS (space plane combat).

Since some years he was chairman of the board of the Open Joint-Stock Company Atlant-Soyuz Airlines, Adviser to the Moscow mayor.

During his carrier he received lots of awards, test pilot of the USSR, Hero of Soviet Union (1982), Awarded with Big Gold medal of IAF (International aviation federation), the winner of the Lenin premium, the winner of the International premium “Pilot of the year”. Awarded with the state and government awards. The author of the book “My heavenly life”.

Update: Here is an interview about the SPIRAL project (in russian).

When I went to Moscow this summer, I went to the military airfield of Monino. This airfield is near Moscow (only few kilometers) and has a really beautiful assortment of planes. Their is all the main soviet planes (Sukhoï, Mig, Lisunov, Mikoyan, Myasischev, …) which distinguished them-self at their time.

In this assortment their is the EPOS 105.11 plane, full-size model test, which was part of the SPIRAL project in the 60s-70s.

The other pictures are here.

Here is a little animation on SPIRAL, to download it’s in the video gallery.

Even if the launcher plane and the auxiliary rocket have differences in comparison with the originals blueprints, this animation is very well done.

I put on-line a complete chapter on the SPIRAL project. Project which began in the 60s, it had to goal to make a horizontal thrower to put into orbit combat spaceplanes (before the project Star Wars).

At the moment there is only the French part, the translation into English will be on-line soon.

Good reading.

Update of May 23:

The english translation is now available.

On Tuesday, 20 March on the russian channel one was telecasted a show about the SPIRAL project. This project aimed to put into orbit a small space plane launch by a high altitude plane carrier. This project was a forerunner of Buran.

The video (in russian) is available on download in the Gallery part.