Photographer has managed to gain access to the building housing the abandoned Soviet space shuttle programme. Ralph Mirebs travelled to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and found the two crumbling, dust-covered craft that were built for the Buran orbital vehicle programme back in the 1970s and 80s.
The reusable spacecraft project began in 1974 but was formally suspended in 1993 after it completed just one unmanned orbital spaceflight in 1988.
They are generally considered as a Soviet equivalent of the United States’ Space Shuttle but in the Buran project, only the plane-shaped orbiter itself was theoretically reusable, and while Orbiter K1 was recovered successfully after its first orbital flight in 1988, it was never reused.