| MiG-105 | |
|---|---|
| MiG 105-11 test vehicle at the Monino Air Force museum.[1] | |
| Role | Test vehicle |
| Manufacturer | Mikoyan-Gurevich |
| First flight | 1976 |
| Status | Cancelled |
| Primary user | Soviet Air Force |
The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-105 was a manned test vehicle to explore low-speed handling and landing.[2] It was a visible result of a Soviet project to create an orbital spaceplane. This was originally conceived in response to the American X-20 Dyna-Soar military space project and may have been influenced by contemporary manned lifting body research being conducted by NASA's Flight Research Center in California. The MiG 105 was nicknamed "Lapot" Russian: лапоть, or bast shoe (the word is also used as a slang for "shoe") for the shape of its nose.
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The program was also known as EPOS (Russian acronym for Experimental Passenger Orbital Aircraft). Work on this project finally began in 1965, two years after Dyna-Soar's cancellation. The project was halted in 1969, to be briefly resurrected in 1974 in response to the U.S. Space Shuttle Program. The test vehicle made its first subsonic free-flight test in 1976, taking off under its own power from an old airstrip near Moscow. It was flown by pilot A. G. Festovets to the Zhukovskii flight test center, a distance of 19 miles. Flight tests, totaling eight in all, continued sporadically until 1978. The actual space plane project was cancelled when the decision was made to instead proceed with the Buran project. The MiG test vehicle itself still exists and is currently on display at the Monino Air Force Museum in Russia.
Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy was the leader of the Spiral development programme.
Although having basically the same mission, Dyna-Soar and Spiral were radically different vehicles. For example:
A cosmonaut training group for pilots assigned to fly this vehicle was formed in the early 1960s. It went through many changes and was eventually dissolved entirely. Known members included:
Although Spiral itself never made it to the launch pad, it is rumoured that the design was reused and enlarged to build a piloted space interceptor known as "Uragan" (Russian for "Hurricane") in the 1980s. This craft was to have been launched by a Ukrainian-built Zenit expendable booster and was intended to intercept and destroy (if necessary) military space shuttle missions launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Its armament purportedly consisted of space-to-space missiles.
It is not known how many times the vehicle flew into space, if any. It is known that two Soviet Air Force cosmonaut groups, consisting of six in the first group and at least three in the second, were selected and trained to pilot the vehicle. The possibility that the shuttles could now be intercepted and shot down caused quite a stir in the US Department of Defense at the time, which issued several artists' conceptions showing the vehicle on the pad, in space, etc.
After the fatal Space Shuttle Challenger disaster prompted NASA and the DoD to cancel all planned launches from Vandenberg, it is said that the Soviet Union had no further need for the craft and, in turn, cancelled the Uragan program.
To this day, Russian officials continue to deny that this craft ever existed, leading some to believe that the purported space interceptor was all part of a successful Soviet disinformation program meant to scare the American military into thinking twice about its plans for the Space Shuttle.
The current whereabouts of any completed Uragan craft or components, if they exist, are unknown.
The БОР (Russian: Беспилотный Орбитальный Ракетоплан, Bespilotnyi Orbital'nyi Raketoplan, "Unpiloted Orbital Rocketplane"). Another spacecraft to use the Spiral design was the BOR series, unmanned subscale reentry test vehicles. American analogs X-23 PRIME and ASSET. Several of these craft have been preserved in aerospace museums around the world.
| Image | Type | Launch date | Usage | Current status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BOR-1 | 15.07.1969 | Flight test, the experimental 1:3 scale model. Burned in the atmosphere at a height of about 60-70 km with the speed 8 000 mph (13 000 km/h). Was deployed at an altitude 328,083 ft (100 km) by 11K65 |
Burned(planned). | |
| BOR-2 | 1969 - 1972 | Sub-scale model of the Spiral space plane. 4 launches. | NPO Molniya, Moscow | |
| BOR-3 | 1973 - 1974 | Sub-scale model of the Spiral space plane. 2 launches. 1. Destruction of the nose fairings after launch at a height of about 5 km (speed 0.94 Mach). 2. Flight program is fully implemented. Crashed on landing (Parachute failure) |
Crushed. | |
| BOR-4 | 1980 - 1984 | Sub-scale model of the Spiral space plane. 4 launches and 2 unconfirmed | NPO Molniya, Moscow | |
| BOR-5 | 1984 - 1988 | Flight tests, the experimental sub-scale base model. 5 launches. Data was also used in the Buran project. | Technik Museum Speyer, Germany Museum in Monino, Russia |
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| BOR-6 | Sub-scale model of the Spiral space plane | NPO Molniya, Moscow |
Data from Soviet X-planes; Yefim Gordon, Bill Gunston
General characteristics
Performance
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