During the 80s the USSR’s space program stayed remarkably focused on Energia/Buran and the Mir space station, especially when compared to the infighting that marred the years 1966-1975. It fended off or adapted to a number of distractions, whether it was Vladimir Chelomei‘s repeated attempts to regain his previous, short-lived position on top of it, or airplane design bureaus suggesting anything from conservative alternatives to the recently discussed Myasishchev M-19 nuclear scram/ramjet.

The OOS was a late Soviet-era shuttle proposal from the Tupolev bureau, an also-ran in that country’s space business despite a strong position in civil aviation and strategic bomber development. Proposed as a fully reusable replacement for Buran sometime around the year 2000, it was about the same size as that craft or the American Space Shuttle, though somewhat heavier at 100 tonnes when fuelled. With a crew of two cosmonauts. it had a payload of 10 tonnes to and from low-Earth orbit.

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, or just sufficiently into spacecraft, you probably slotted the shuttle pictured above toward the conservative end of that spectrum. Apart from the more-rounded contours, it looks to be much like the Shuttle, particularly in the shape of the underside. There, too, we have the usual ceramic tiles for dissipating the heat of re-entry. The engines are not visible, but I can tell you that there were three, burning LH2 and LOX during the ascent to orbit (though, curiously, switching out the hydrogen with kerosene for orbital maneuvers). Knowing that would likely not change your opinion at all.

Given that it’s was to be fully reusable, the ten-tonne payload mentioned earlier may have got you wondering, though. The actual American and Soviet shuttles had payloads in the 25-30 tonne range, so alright—there’s clearly some sort of tradeoff there. You’d be well-advised to wonder about the rest of the OOS’s configuration. Side boosters but no external tank? Perched on a reusable rocket in some manner, maybe?

Well, no. “OOS” stood for Odnostupenchati Orbitalni Samolyot, ‘one-stage orbital plane’, But a single-stage-to-orbit craft the size of the Orbiter? Surely that’s not possible.

This goes to show that you don’t think like a Soviet aircraft designer circa 1989. The OOS was to have been air-launched, and the other half of the system was the Antonov AKS:

Aerospace aficionados will remember that the An-225, which was used to piggy-back the Buran shuttle around the Soviet Union, was by most measures the largest aircraft ever built. This is two of them, one wing apiece removed and replaced with a sort of aerodynamic bridge, and then 675 tonnes of spacecraft and rocket propellants attached to its underside. It had twelve turbojet engines for when it flew without the orbiter attached (the dark circles in the diagram above, at lower right), with a supplementary ten more being added during launch operations (the white circles). The Aristocrats! With a length of 83 meters (272 feet), a wheelbase of 40m (131 feet) and a wingspan of 153m (502 feet), the combination came in at a whopping 1650 tonnes. By contrast, a fully fueled late-model 747 has a maximum takeoff weight of just under 440 tonnes.

There has been only one successful air-launching system in the world to date, Orbital ATK’s Pegasus. It weighs 23.1 tonnes and can put 0.44 tonnes in orbit; it’s launched from a Lockheed L-1011, already getting into the neighborhood of large airplanes. So start with some skepticism that 20 times this in launch mass and payload are a possibility for the late-era USSR.



Further, I haven’t (unfortunately) been able to find a detailed description of the AKS/OOS’s mission profile. I’d like to see it because I’m having a hard time picturing what the moment of separation would look like. Or rather, I have an image of the support crew aboard the AKS bouncing around like ping-pong balls in a boxcar once the plane, straining to get the orbiter to altitude, suddenly cuts loose 675 tonnes. For that matter, the OOS would have to light its engines pretty quickly thereafter or defeat the purpose of an air launch. As these were in the same class as the RS-25’s on the American Shuttle—the noise aboard the AKS, now presumably not all that far above and behind it, would have been intense.

I’m on record for my begrudging appreciation of the come-what-may technological megalomania that gripped the superpowers post-WWII. The US grew out that uncritical mindset after Love Canal and Three Mile Island, while the Soviets carried on until 1989. That extra time coupled with fossilized technocrats in charge allowed awe-inspiring audacity in technology of it to grow even greater than it did in the West.

Even so, I can’t imagine anyone with the power to make the Tu-OOS happen actually doing so. It would have been an immensely expensive and difficult project right at a time when the Soviet Union was in no position to take one up, and technological limitations would have prevented anything like it at an earlier point in that country’s history. The OOS/AKS was a paper project, and would have remained so.

Sources:

OOS, la bestia de Tupolev y Antonov

OOS, el sistema espacial de lanzamiento aéreo definitivo

Artist Vadim Lukashevich has numerous renders of the AKS/OOS combination on Buran.ru (screll down to the second half of the page).

Readers will note a lack of primary sources here. I’m convinced of this project’s existence, but any pointers to a source that’s a little more direct than what I’ve relied upon here would be most welcome.