Thirty years before the first launch of the Space Ship Two rocket plane in the early eighties, the Soviet Union approached the need for space-less space launches. No wonder. A military power that became militarily invincible precisely thanks to mobile air defense of a mineless launch, like no one else understood the importance of flexible mobility of weapons and their delivery vehicles. The spaceportless launch system was also promising for civilian launches - in this case, the cost of delivering cargo to a low reference orbit was dozens of times lower compared to bulky and ultra-expensive multistage rockets.
The system was named MAKS, a multipurpose aerospace system. It had to be two stages of delivery, and both stages had to be fully returnable. The rocket design was abandoned right away - not because they chose one option and definitely a cosmodrome-free one, but because this performance was implemented in the previous project - Buran-Energia, which, over time, also promised to become a fully recoverable system (see the following articles of the series “Wings for the stars ).
The first stage was the mother plane delivering the rocket plane, the second stage to the highest echelon possible. From there, the rocket plane, with a fuel tank attached to it, took off along an inclined trajectory. This is called an air launch. Further, the fuel tank is disconnected, and the rocket plane enters a low reference orbit along its trajectory, delivering the necessary cargo to it. His own propulsion engines will allow him to get out of orbit. The rocket plane will descend using its high aerodynamic quality, similar to the descents of Buran and the American Shuttle. The rocket plane will be able to land at any first-class airfield, from which, in fact, the mother plane will be launched.
By the way, the famous "Mriya" - An-225, was just built for the start of MAKS flight tests. More precisely: "Mriya" became the first prototype mother aircraft, which was proposed to be used for Buran, and for MAKS they were going to build a more advanced and adapted An-325 tractor on the basis of "Mriya". In the future, for the development of MAKS, a huge biplane with eighteen engines was planned at all, which was supposed to launch the Tupolev aerospace plane into orbit (this option is just shown on the cover of the article).
The development of the project was entrusted to NPO Molniya by Gleb Evgenievich Lozino-Lozinsky, who in the sixties had experience in developing the Spiral system, and in the 70s and 80s developed MTTK Buran. The development itself began even before the first flight of "Buran", using all the developments of previous projects. In 1988, a large cooperation of seventy enterprises of the aviation and space industry developed a draft design in two hundred and twenty volumes. To confirm the design technical characteristics, a large amount of experimental research work was carried out in aerodynamics, gas dynamics, strength of structural elements and other areas. Full-scale mock-ups of the tail section of the orbital aircraft and the external fuel tank were made. The first copy of the An-225 Mriya base aircraft has passed flight tests. The development of design documentation for the orbital aircraft and fuel tank has been practically completed. Over one and a half billion US dollars in modern prices were spent on everything.
In addition to the mother aircraft, the second stage was planned to be performed in three versions: 1) MAKS-OS with an orbital aircraft and a disposable tank; 2) MAKS-M with an unmanned aircraft; 3) MAKS-T with a disposable unmanned second stage and a load of up to 18 tons.
The orbital aircraft was assigned a wide range of responsibilities. It could be used for emergency rescue of crews of space stations and ships, for repairing satellites and towing them from orbits, for reconnaissance purposes, both military and civil. Of course, the plane could also deliver cargo and crew. But the priority and most desirable scheme of application was, of course, the military one - the orbital plane became an extremely invulnerable and all-pervasive weapon of both retaliation and a preemptive strike. Space systems based on many airfields in the country could deliver a weapon of space war into orbit in a very short time. In order to destroy enemy satellites, the stations, in the end, bombard ground and sea targets directly from space, remaining inaccessible to any enemy counter-weapons, both then and now. Most importantly, spacecraft could patrol space, stay in orbits for a long time, especially unmanned variants.
Thus, MAKS was the main trump card in the space and military race between the USSR and the United States. It was an incomparably powerful and far more workable project than President Reagan's much touted Strategic Defense Initiative. Having implemented the project in several years, as planned, the Soviet Union was obliged to become a global leader in space and a military hegemon on Earth. Pathetic as it sounds, it really is. What prevented all this, you know. Already in the nineties, a full-size model of the tank transported from Ukraine was drunk for scrap metal because there was no money to pay for a parking space for it.
The project, unlike Buran, was based in advance on the principles of self-sufficiency. According to calculations, the costs should have been recouped in a year and a half, and the project itself in the future could give nine times the profit. This system was at that time and until recent years unique, since not a single similar device was developed in the whole world. In addition, MAKS is significantly cheaper than rockets due to the repeated use of the carrier aircraft (up to 100 times), the cost of launching a load into low-earth orbit is about one thousand US dollars per kilogram of payload. For comparison, the average cost of hatching is currently around $ 8000-12000 / kg. The advantages can also be attributed to greater environmental friendliness due to the use of less toxic fuel. The MAKS project in 1994 at an exhibition in Belgium received the highest award from the hands of the Belgian president. MAX then, as well as now, was an undoubted sensation.
To this day, the main thing, despite the oblivion of the nineties and zero, is that the project is quite capable of reviving the modern Russian Federation. The potential of the idea has not lost its power even now - we also may well again become the first in space and significantly increase our military power by an order of magnitude, if not by several orders of magnitude. The states realized this and ordered the notorious Elon Musk with his SpaceX an exact conceptual copy of our MAKS. The first unsuccessful launch of the light variant, Space Ship Two did not become an obstacle on the way to this - Musk announced the construction of the largest aircraft of our time - and this will already be a copy of our planned biplane with eighteen engines. Our "Mriya" was crying, now it will be the second. And the United States will finally secure the status of the now global space hegemon. And they will no longer need our "Protons" with "Soyuz", just like our Soviet engines 40 years ago, which we boast about. And there it is not far from space bombing. I am not an alarmist, I just soberly assess the situation.
