A television station reported that the Council of Chief Designers, a body
consisting of the leading specialists in the Russian space industry, had
decided that the Buran programme must be shut down. A spokesman for the
Russian space enterprise NPO Energia told 91av: ‘The report is very
close to being true. There has been a conference about it. It is up to the
government to make the final decision.’

The debate over the Buran programme has been raging for some time. Since
last year, officials of the Russian Space Agency have been suggesting that
Buran is unlikely to fly in the foreseeable future. The agency’s director,
Yuri Koptev, declared that cutbacks in the Energia-Buran project are
essential to release scarce funds to new, more profitable enterprises such
as launching communications satellites. Nevertheless, the agency allocated
1.8 billion roubles or 3.5 per cent of its 1993 civil space budget to work
connected with the shuttle.

Yuri Semenov, Buran’s chief designer has until now been struggling to
promote the shuttle and the giant booster which carried Buran into orbit on
its one and only flight, in November 1988. The latest proposal was to use
Buran to perform tests before the planned docking of the American shuttle
with Mir in 1995. However, this came under fire as an expensive political
stunt which the country could ill afford. The Mir station’s docking port has
already been tested by a Soyuz spacecraft.