A pair of amateur explorers have sneaked inside the abandoned hangar at the Baikonur cosmodrome to film inside the husk of the legendary and once state of the art USSR spaceship.

By the time the Soviet response to the Space Shuttle program, the Buran-Energia, was abandoned, two fully-capable Buran spaceships were produced. The first and only that actually went into space was completely destroyed in 2002 during a hangar roof collapse. The second one was stripped of its equipment and remains at the Baikonur cosmodrome inside an abandoned hangar.

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A pair of daredevils who travel to different places and film their experience sneaked inside the hangar earlier this month. The footage they published shows the gigantic building, which dwarfs the spaceplane and its lookalike nearby – a replica used by pilots to train and engineers to tinker with Buran equipment and streamline its maintenance. It’s no surprise – the hangar was used to mount the Buran atop the super-heavy-lift rocket Energia.

The explorers seized the opportunity to get inside the legendary craft – because who wouldn’t want to take the pilot’s seat and pretend to be hijacking a real spaceship. Warning, if you know Russian language – be advised that the pretend-hijacker, Ilya Bondarev, curses like a space marine.

He and fellow traveler, Maks Travor, made their tour dodging the floodlights of the cosmodrome guards, right in time to witness for afar the December 3 launch of the Soyuz spacecraft.

A similar expedition was made in 2015 by a blogger writing under pen name Ralph Mirebs.

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