BOR-4

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BOR-4S at MAKS Airshow in Zhukovskiy, 2005
BOR-4S at MAKS Airshow in Zhukovskiy, 2005

The BOR-4 flight vehicle is a scaled (1:2) copy of the Spiral spaceplane. An unmanned, subscale craft, its purpose was to test the heatshield tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon for the Buran space shuttle, then under development. BOR was the Russian acronym for Unpiloted Orbital Rocketplane.

Several of them were built and flown between 1982 and 1984 from the Kapustin Yar launch site at speeds of up to Mach 25. After reentry, they were designed to parachute to an ocean splashdown for recovery by the Soviet Navy. The testing was nearly identical to that carried out by the US Air Force ASSET program in the 1960s, which tested the heatshield design for the X-20 Dyna-Soar. On June 3, 1982 a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion reconnaissance aircraft captured the first western images of the craft as it was recovered by a Soviet ship near the Cocos Islands.

According to Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica, the design of the BOR-4 differed slightly from that of Spiral in that it "had a flattened, wider body with a much smaller vertical stabiliser. The cruise-back turbojet...seems to have been eliminated, and the canted stabiliser tips were cut off at the Mach angle, a MiG trademark." In addition, the wings were now fixed at the 60-degree up position and functioned solely as vertical stabilizers.

Several of these craft have been preserved in aerospace museums around the world.

[edit] Flights

  • 1982/06/04 - COSMOS 1374 - suborbital - splashed down into the Indian Ocean about 900 km to the west of Australia
  • 1983/03/16 - COSMOS 1445 - orbital - splashed down into the Indian Ocean about 900 km to the west of Australia
  • 1983/12/27 - COSMOS 1517 - orbital - splashed down into the Black Sea to the west of the Crimea peninsula
  • 1984/12/19 - COSMOS 1616 - orbital - splashed down into the Black Sea to the west of the Crimea peninsula

[edit] Characteristics

The vehicle, weighted 1.5 tons and was put into a 225 km orbit by a 65M-RB5 ballistic rocket. After circling around the Earth descended along a Buran type trajectory.

[edit] External links

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