news.nationalgeographic.com by Nadia Drake 5/9/2017
A film catches amazing views of the remains of a space program from the Cold War.
Tucked into a lonely hangar at Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe, two Soviet-era space shuttles are quietly gathering dust, bird poop, and rust. They’re also attracting photographers eager to sneak around the ruins, such as Alexandar Kaunas, who recently filmed part of his journey into the cavern where the derelict shuttles are housed.
One shuttle, named Ptichka, never left Earth. The other, a test vehicle, was never meant to fly.
It’s a rather unceremonious end for these abandoned icons of a once-proud space program. The space shuttles were designed and built during the 1970s and 1980s as part of the USSR’s attempt to outdo the U.S. winged orbiters. As envisioned, the Soviet shuttles would not only be able to fly themselves, they would also lift vastly heavier cargo into space that could then be used to build space stations and weapons.
That didn’t happen.
More:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/soviet-space-shuttle-kazakhstan-film-science/
