A team of YouTubers snuck into a restricted hangar in Kazakhstan to explore and film space shuttles from the Soviet-era Buran space program.
The YouTubers run the channel “Exploring the Unbeaten Path.” They visit abandoned buildings around the world and stream footage of their adventures on YouTube.
To find the old Soviet space shuttles, the YouTubers broke into an old hangar in the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan. While the hangar is already abandoned, the base is still active and the YouTubers had to dodge security patrols to avoid going to jail.
The team managed to camp out inside the hangar for several days and thoroughly filmed the old space shuttles. Though risky because of the noise that it would make, they still managed to get a drone flying and filming the whole hangar.
Apart from the two shuttles in the hangar, the Buran space program produced one completed vehicle. It was called the OK-1K1 and flew one unmanned mission in 1988. When the hangar it was being stored in collapsed in 2002, the OK-1K1 got destroyed. The accident also reportedly killed eight workers.
The Buran Soviet space program began in 1974, but it lost steam at the collapse of the Soviet union and was finally suspended in 1993. It was meant to send reusable spacecraft into space similar to the American space shuttles.
Baikonur is currently being leased by the Russian government so that manned Russian missions could still be launched from the base. Baikonur is also the world’s first and largest operational space launch facility.
After a few days in the hangar, the YouTubers were able to get out without incident. JB