04/14/2008

By Air, Sea and Land

Soviet Space Shuttle Touches Down in Speyer

The Buran has "landed" in Speyer. The Soviet space shuttle captured the attention of the German media and public as it made an unusual voyage this month by barge and truck from Rotterdam to a technical museum in southwest Germany.

The "Blizzard" has landed. After a long and highly publicized odyssey from Bahrain to the technical museum in the German town of Speyer, the Soviet space shuttle "Analog Buran" finally arrived at its destination on Saturday. And just as during its stately float up the Rhine River last week, thousands were on hand to watch the spaceship travel the last few kilometers overland to its final resting place.

The journey of the Buran, which can be translated as "snowstorm" or "blizzard," dominated the German media last week and generated considerable public interest. The banks of the Rhine were often jammed with people out to watch the Buran float by on its barge journey from Rotterdam, where it had been shipped from Bahrain on the first leg of its trip.

"To transport this shuttle on the Rhine was really something special," Ben Kik, the Dutch captain of the tugboat that propelled the Buran 620 kilometers (385 miles) upriver, told the German news agency DPA. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing."

Once the Buran arrived in Speyer, its wings were removed and it was loaded onto a truck -- and accompanied by 15,000 people on its trip through town to the museum.

The Analog Buran was one in a series of shuttles -- the Buran series -- that the Soviet Union developed in an attempt to catch up with the Space Age capabilities of its Cold War adversary, the US. The shuttle made a series of test flights in the 1980s before going out of service as the Soviet Union broke apart.

The Buran was bought a decade later by a team of investors and displayed at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. It later landed in Bahrain for an exhibit during a summer festival in 2002. A dispute between the Buran's Russian manufacturers and its new owners left it in limbo in a Bahrain junkyard for almost five years, until the German museum managed to buy it this year. The purchase, transport and installation of the shuttle will cost the museum roughly €10 million ($15.8 million).

The shuttle will anchor a new exhibition hall alongside Soviet space suits and model satellites. The new display is expected to open this summer.

pmm/dpa

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