The Quest to Get Photos of the USSR's First Space Shuttle

[Karlston]

The Quest to Get Photos of the USSR's First Space Shuttle

French photographer Jonk snuck into Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan to capture images of the Buran shuttle.

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  The Ptichka ("Birdie") is one of the three remaining Soviet-era Buran space shuttles. 

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  In 2018, French photographer Jonk and three friends snuck into the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan to capture these images of the abandoned shuttles. 

   

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  With striking design similarities to the NASA space shuttle, the Buran was intended as the future of the Soviet space program. 

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  Over the years, local thieves have broken into the hangar to steal valuable metals and electronics from the two abandoned shuttles.

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  Jonk is a veteran urban explorer who estimates he's photographed around 1,500 abandoned places around the world. But few were more difficult to access than the Buran hangar. 

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  Despite parts of it being in disarray, Baikonur is still an active spaceport—the Russian space program leases the site from Kazakhstan for around $115 million a year. 

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  The hangar is filled with abandoned Soviet-era technology, books, and literature. 

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  On two occasions, a security officer stopped by to check on the hangars. Jonk and his friends communicated by walkie-talkie to avoid getting caught.

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  To get to the hangar, Jonk and his team flew to the nearby city of Kyzylorda and took a four-hour bus ride to Toretam, a small town where they found a local willing to drop them off on the side of the highway at nightfall, around 20 kilometers (13 miles) from Baikonur.

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  Jonk also snuck into a nearby hangar housing a prototype of the old Energia-M rocket used to blast the Buran into space.

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  Like the Buran shuttles, the Energia-M rocket prototype is decaying away in an abandoned hangar. 

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  Using a GPS device programmed with the hangar’s coordinates, Jonk and his team hiked across the rocky steppe for seven hours, wearing headlamps to see their way. What they found when they got to the Baikonur complex was incredible. 

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  From the top floor of the Buran hangar you can see the tall hangar containing the Energia-M rocket prototype. 

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  For Jonk, a longtime aficionado of Soviet relics, the trip was a career highlight. He hopes the surviving Burans will eventually be rescued from their current neglect and accorded the proper respect.

   

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  This photograph, taking from the Energia-M hangar, shows the cavernous abandoned hangar containing the two Buran shuttles. 

The Ptichka ("Birdie") is one of the three remaining Soviet-era Buran space shuttles. 

 

On November 15, 1988, the Soviet Union's first space shuttle, the Buran, blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan. With striking design similarities to the US space shuttle—prompting speculation that Soviet scientists had stolen or copied American plans—the Buran (Russian for "blizzard") was intended as the future of the Soviet space program. Instead, its first flight proved to be its last. A year later, the Berlin Wall came down, followed in subsequent years by the dissolution of the USSR. The space shuttle program was suspended and then, in 1993, canceled by Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet Russian president.

 

Today, three versions of the Buran survive. One, a full-scale test model, is on display at the Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum. The other two—including the shuttle that was scheduled to fly the second mission—are rotting away in an abandoned hangar in another part of the sprawling Baikonur complex. Over the years, local scavengers have snuck into the hangar to harvest valuable metals and electronics. The site has also been targeted by international adventurers seeking a glimpse at Soviet space history. Among them is French photographer Jonk, who managed to sneak into the hangar in April 2018.

 

Jonk is a veteran urban explorer, or "urbexer," who estimates he's photographed around 1,500 abandoned places around the world. But few places were more difficult to access than the Buran hangar. For one thing, Baikonur is still an active spaceport—the Russian space program leases the site from Kazakhstan for around $115 million a year, and uses it to launch its own and other country's astronauts into space. (Since NASA ended its shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts have hitched rides into space with the Russians.)

 

Baikonur's location in the middle of the vast Kazakh Steppe presented another challenge. To get there, Jonk and three friends flew to the nearby city of Kyzylorda and took a four-hour bus ride to the small town of Toretam. From there, they found a local willing to drop them off on the side of the highway at nightfall, around 20 kilometers (13 miles) from Baikonur. Using a GPS device programmed with the hangar's coordinates, they hiked across the rocky steppe for seven hours, wearing headlamps to see their way.

 

Jonk and company arrived at the hangar at around 2 am, and found it unguarded. Climbing in through an unlocked window, they began looking for the shuttles in the cavernous, pitch-dark building. "When I finally passed my flashlight over the shuttle, it was amazing," he recalls. "To see it abandoned in the dark like that was something I'll never forget." After bedding down in sleeping bags inside the hangar for a few hours, Jonk and his three-man team spent the next two days exploring and photographing the two shuttles. Despite the dismal storage conditions, they found the shuttles to be in better condition than expected. "Of all the abandoned sites I've explored, this was by far the most impressive," he says. They also snuck into a nearby hangar housing a prototype of the old Energia-M rocket used to blast the Buran into space. To avoid security patrols, they took turns performing guard duty on the roof of the hangar. On the two occasions when a security officer stopped by to check on the hangars, the watchman used a walkie-talkie to warn the others to stay quiet.

 

At the end of their two-day sojourn, Jonk and his friends trekked back across the steppe to rendezvous with their driver at a prearranged spot on the highway. Six days after departing from his native Paris, he returned bearing some of the world's hardest-to-get photographs.

 

For Jonk, a longtime aficionado of Soviet relics, the trip was a career highlight. He hopes the surviving Burans will eventually be rescued from their current neglect and accorded the proper respect. "It was unbelievable to me that the shuttles are still there, and that they're so unguarded. They are what's left of the Soviet space program. They should be in a museum."

 

Images of the Buran shuttles and the cosmodrome, along with Jonk's narrative of how he got them, have been compiled into a book from Jonglez Publishing.

 

 

The Quest to Get Photos of the USSR's First Space Shuttle