Why a Spaceship Landed in Bahrain And Never Departed
MANAMA, Bahrain -- Khalid Juman has a weighty problem he just can't get rid of: a stranded 70-ton spaceship. Built by the Soviet Union to explore the heavens, the craft got marooned here in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
"I just want this thing out of my life," says the 39-year-old businessman, gesturing at the hulking vessel slumped in a sandy lot overlooking the Persian Gulf.
Designed to withstand re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft is now slowly cracking up under the stress and strain of a very down-to-earth struggle over unpaid bills. Stray dogs take shelter under its wings and graffiti scar its body. Garbage fills its belly, and it badly needs a paint job. Grounded in Bahrain by a battle between the Moscow company that made it and a Singapore concern that says it bought it, the spacecraft left Russia five years ago for what was expected to be a lucrative world tour. Unable to fly after the Russians removed its avionics gear and replaced its heat shield with plastic foam, it traveled by sea.
It went first to Australia, where a company there rented it for an exhibition timed to coincide with the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The exhibition flopped and the company went bust. The spaceship, 119 feet long, then moved here to Bahrain for another show. That fizzled, too. A raft of lawsuits followed, mostly between Russia's NPO Molniya, which built the reusable craft, and a Singaporean outfit that bills itself as sponsor of "Planet Earth's largest space touring event." Each says it owns what, at the height of the Cold War, was Russia's pride -- its answer to the U.S. space shuttle.
"I'm caught in the middle and I want to get out," says Mr. Juman, a Texas-educated businessman who first arranged for the shuttle to come to Bahrain back in 2002 and is now its custodian while feuding would-be owners slug it out.
The Russian Buran spaceship stranded in a Bahrain storage yard.
The shuttle, called Buran, which means "blizzard" in Russian, was meant to stay just two months in Bahrain, the tiny Gulf kingdom next to Saudi Arabia. Three years and more than a dozen court hearings later, it is still here, blistering from overexposure to the desert sun. Mr. Juman says he doesn't care who gets the craft so long as they take it away and reimburse him his storage costs.
Like most Russian assets, the Buran used to belong to the state, which poured billions of dollars into competing with America's own shuttle program. To develop a Russian version, Moscow set up NPO Molniya, a then top-secret design bureau.
Lagging behind the U.S. despite their early triumphs, which included putting the first man into space, the Soviets never attempted a manned shuttle mission and settled instead for a single unmanned voyage of a Buran in 1988. It orbited the Earth twice, made a flawless landing after three hours and never flew again. Mikhail Gorbachev, then Soviet leader, declared it a "major success for Soviet science and technology" and cut back funding as the Soviet Union unraveled. Russia later scrapped the program, but kept alive its old but reliable Soyuz spaceship, which became the only way of carrying humans into space after the 2003 Columbia disaster.
In the 1990s, NPO Molniya followed the same trajectory as other state-owned Russian companies: It became a public corporation and started cutting capitalist deals. But unlike the oil fields and aluminum smelters whose shady privatization generated massive private fortunes, old spacecraft proved to be a much harder sell.
NPO Molniya tried to hawk a Buran space shuttle in America at an auction organized by a Los Angeles radio station. The Russians set a starting price of $6 million. No one bid and the shuttle stayed at home in a crumbling warehouse outside Moscow.
In all, the Soviets built about a dozen shuttles, most of them test models. One became a tourist attraction and is now in Moscow's Gorky Park; another was dismantled. Others were stranded in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, which became an independent country in 1991 and inherited the Soviet Union's main rocket-launch pad. The only Buran that actually made it into space met with disaster on Earth: A hangar roof collapsed in 2002, killing eight people and destroying the space vehicle.
The shuttle now beached in Bahrain, originally known as the BTS-002, made several suborbital flights but never got out of the Earth's atmosphere. But it did get a shot at the commercial big time thanks to a company chaired by an Australian scientist who had flown to space aboard America's Challenger shuttle in 1984. This company, Buran Space Corporation Ltd., leased the shuttle from NPO Molniya and shipped it to Sydney in 2000 for an exhibition on the grounds of an old casino.
The project bombed, leaving a trail of wreckage. The company behind it went under.
With its Australian client in liquidation, NPO Molniya began scouting for another customer. In 2002, it hooked up with a newly formed venture called Space Shuttle World Tour, set up by Events HQ International, a Singapore company. The Russians agreed to sell, not merely rent, their spaceship. Bank documents relating to the transaction suggest the Singaporeans got a good deal on price: just $180,000. Molniya and Space Shuttle World Tour declined to give a figure.
Undeterred by the shuttle's failure to draw big crowds in Sydney, the Economic Development Board, a government agency in Bahrain, decided it wanted the Russian spaceship for its own show. It hired Mr. Juman's events and marketing company, PICO International (Bahrain), to help organize the summer festival and got him to negotiate a spaceship rental deal. The Singaporeans agreed to deliver the Buran to Bahrain -- and to then take it back -- for $1.3 million.
Mr. Juman also rented some mock UFOs and American space gadgets. But the Buran was the star attraction. Visitors got driven out to the shuttle in a bus decked out to make them feel as if they were astronauts on the way to a launch pad. Mr. Juman says he started reading about the Soviet space program and felt sad that the Russians had fallen on such hard times. "I fell in love with the Buran," he says.
The rapture quickly faded. Bahrain's summer festival, like the earlier event in Australia, drew smaller crowds than expected. When the festival ended, the UFOs and other exhibits all were packed up and sent back where they came from. The Buran, though, stayed. Pestered by authorities to remove it from prime real estate, Mr. Juman rented a plot of land near Bahrain's port and arranged for barges to dump the shuttle there for safekeeping.
The Russians meanwhile began to claim that they had been cheated, accusing the Singaporeans of reneging on payment terms. To press their claim, they hired Suhaila Toorani, a lawyer in Bahrain who quickly got a court order to keep the Singaporeans from moving the shuttle abroad. "I entered like Superman to stop them taking it away," she recalls. "I felt sorry for the Russians. They were very good at space...but they were so naive" in business.
She presented a letter from a Russian bank to the court to show the Singaporeans had stalled on paying NPO Molniya, 60%-owned by the state, for more than a year and that the money had been sent back to Singapore. The deal was off, she says, and the Russians wanted their spacecraft back. They now want to sell it to a museum in Germany.
Kevin Tan of Singapore's Space Shuttle World Tour, says his company paid the Russians in full. He says he "can't remember exactly" when or how much, but says, "we own this shuttle."
宇宙飞船巴林流浪记
哈利德?吉曼(Khalid Juman)碰到了一个棘手的问题，令他一筹莫展：那就是一个重达70吨的宇宙飞船。这艘由前苏联(Soviet Union)制造的航天器原打算遨游太空，结果却孤零零地被困小国巴林(Bhrain)。
“我只想摆脱这个家伙，“这位现年39岁的商人指著那个陷在面向波斯湾(Persian Gulf)的沙地中的庞然大物苦恼地说。
虽然这艘飞船能经得起重返地球大气层的严峻考验，但现在却因没人付钱这个非常现实的问题弄得不堪重负，灰头土脸：流浪狗在它的羽翼下栖身，机身上则被涂得乱七八糟，机身里到处是垃圾，重新上漆更是迫在眉睫。这艘飞船于5年前离开俄罗斯，开始巡游世界，举办者当初还指望能赚大钱呢。制造这艘飞船的是一家莫斯科公司，但新加坡某公司声称自己已买下了这艘飞船，双方争执不下，于是飞船后来滞留在了巴林。由于俄国人拆除了飞船上的航空电子设备，还用泡沫塑料换下了挡热扳，这艘飞船根本不能飞行，只能通过海路运输。
巡游的第一站是澳大利亚，那里的一家公司租用了这艘飞船进行展览，可时间正巧与2000年悉尼奥运会冲突。结果展览以失败告终，举办公司也宣告破产。这艘119英尺长的飞船随后前往巴林巡展，不料也未成功。之后就是一连串的官司，其中大多数涉及飞船的制造商NPO Molniya与一家新加坡公司，后者称自己是这场“地球上规模最大的太空之旅”的赞助商。双方各执一词，均坚持自己拥有这艘飞船─它可是冷战颠峰时期苏联应对美国飞船的骄傲呢。
“我被夹在中间，左右为难，恨不得赶快脱身，”吉曼说。这位在德克萨斯州接受教育的商人于2002年安排了巴林巡展。眼下，那些官司打得不可开交，而他就成了飞船的看护者。
这艘飞船名叫Buran，在俄语中意为暴风雪，原来只打算在巴林这个毗邻沙特阿拉伯的海湾小国逗留两个月。可如今，经历了三年时光和十几次法庭听证，它还在这呆著，暴晒于沙漠灼热的阳光下，逐步失去了昔日的光彩。吉曼表示他可不在乎谁得到这艘飞船，只要有人把它运走，给他储存费就行了。
像俄罗斯的大多数资产一样，Buran原先是前苏联的国有资产，苏联曾斥巨资在太空飞行领域与美国展开激烈的竞争。为了研制苏联自己的宇宙飞船，莫斯科组建了当时属于机密的设计院NPO Molniya。
苏联起初处于领先地位，进行了人类的首次太空飞行，然而后来渐渐落后于美国，从未进行过载人宇宙飞行，只是在1988年进行过一次无人宇宙飞行。Buran当时绕著地球转了两圈，三小时后顺利地降落在地面上，之后就再也没有执行任何飞行任务。当时的苏联领导人米凯尔?戈尔巴乔夫( Mikhail Gorbachev)宣称“这是苏联科学技术界的重大成功”。后来随著苏联的解体，该项目的研究资金也被削减了。俄罗斯最终取消了这一计划，不过保留了老式但性能可靠的Soyuz太空飞船。在美国哥伦比亚号(Columbia)航天飞机于2003年失事后，Soyuz成了唯一的载人航天器。
在上世纪九十年代，NPO Molniya经历了与其他前苏联的国营企业一样的遭遇：摇身一变为上市公司，开始经营买卖。前苏联的油田和炼铝厂在不明不白的私有化过程中攫取了大量财富，可相比之下，过时的宇宙飞船就没那容易卖出去了。
在美国市场上，NPO Molniya曾试图在由洛杉矶某电台组织的拍卖中兜售Buran。俄国人设立的起拍价为600万美元，可没人竞拍，结果那艘飞船只好呆在莫斯科郊外一个凌乱不堪的仓库里。
前苏联总共建造了约12艘宇宙飞船，其中大部份为测试模型。有一个成了旅游景点，目前在莫斯科的Gorky公园展览；另一个被拆除了；其余的都被搁置在前苏联的哈萨克斯坦加盟共和国(Kazakhstan)，哈萨克斯坦后于1991年宣布独立，并保留了前苏联的火箭发射台。唯一一艘进入太空的Buran飞船却在地面遭遇灾难：飞船仓库的屋顶在2002年坍塌，造成8人死亡，飞船也被毁于一旦。
目前搁浅在巴林的那艘飞船原名为BTS-002，它曾进行过几次亚轨道飞行，但从未飞出过地球的大气层。不过，一位曾于1984年搭乘美国挑战者号(Challenger)航天飞机的澳大利亚科学家却使这艘飞船名声大噪。这位科学家开了一家名位Buran Space Corporation Ltd的公司，从NPO Molniya那租用了这艘飞船，并于2000年运至悉尼，在一个赌场的旧址上举办展览。
展览成为泡影，留下一个烂摊子，而上面那家公司也破产了。
澳大利亚客户的消失迫使NPO Molniya搜寻新的客户。在2002年，该公司瞄上了一家新成立的名叫Space Shuttle World Tour的公司，它是由新加坡公司Events HQ International组建的。俄罗斯人同意出售，而非仅仅是出租这艘飞船。银行交易记录显示：新加坡人只花了18万美元，真是一笔好买卖。Molniya和Space Shuttle World Tour拒绝披露具体数字。
巴林的政府机构经济发展局(Economic Development Board)并没有被悉尼的失败吓倒，而是决定在本国展览这艘飞船。巴林政府聘请了吉曼所在的会展及推广公司PICO International来协助组织这场夏季活动，并指派吉曼负责商谈飞船租赁事宜。新加坡人同意在巴林展览Buran，然后将飞船运回新加坡，全部费用为130万美元。
吉曼还租借了一些模拟的不明飞行物(UFO)和美国的一些航天设备，当然，最吸引人的自然还是Buran。游客们乘上专门的车前往参观，使他们感觉自己好像是准备登上发射台的宇航员。吉曼表示，他原先读过关于前苏联的航天计划的报导，对俄罗斯后来的落后感到遗憾。“我觉得；自己爱上了Buran，”他说。
欣喜很快就褪去了。像先前在澳大利亚的那次活动一样，巴林的夏季盛会并没有吸引多少人。当活动结束时，不明飞行物等其他展品都装运好，运回了原处。而Buran却留了下来。巴林政府要求把Buran移出原先的黄金地段，于是吉曼出于安全角度考虑，租了一块靠近港口的土地，用驳船把Buran运到那里。
与此同时，俄罗斯人声称自己被欺骗了，指责新加坡公司出尔反尔，违背了当初的付款条件。为此，他们还聘请了巴林当地的律师苏哈利?图拉尼(Suhailia Toorani)打官司。这位律师很快获得了法庭的指令，禁止新加坡人把飞船运到国外。“我就像一个超人，阻止他们把飞船带走，”她说。“我为俄罗斯人感到难过。他们在航天技术方面曾非常出色，但是他们在做生意上非常天真。”
图哈尼向法庭出示了一封俄罗斯某银行的证明信，表明新加坡公司拖欠NPO Molniya的款项已有一年多了，而那笔应该支付的款项已汇回了新加坡。她说，这笔交易告吹了，俄罗斯人现在想收回自己的飞船，卖给一个德国的博物馆。
新加坡Space Shuttle World Tour的凯文?潭(Kevin Tan)表示，他所在的公司已经付清款项。他表示。他“记不太清楚”具体付款时间和金额，但“我们拥有这艘飞船”。
