BOR-4


The BOR-4 flight vehicle is a scaled prototype of the Soviet Spiral VTHL spaceplane. An uncrewed, subscale spacecraft, its purpose was to test the heatshield tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon for the Buran space shuttle, then under development.
Several of them were built and flown between 1982 and 1984 from the Kapustin Yar launch site at speeds of up to Mach 25, using K65-RB5 variant of Kosmos-3M launch vehicle. After reentry, they were designed to parachute to an ocean splashdown for recovery by the Soviet Navy. The testing was nearly identical to that carried out by the US Air Force ASSET program in the 1960s, which tested the heatshield design for the X-20 Dyna-Soar. On 16 March 1983 a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion reconnaissance aircraft captured the first Western images of the craft as it was recovered by a Soviet ship near the Cocos Islands.

Flights

Seven BOR were built, and four confirmed flights took place between 1982 and 1984. All orbital flights were launched using Kosmos-3M rockets at the Kapustin Yar launch complex in Astrakhan Oblast, Russia
MissionLaunch date
Landing date
Recovery siteOrbitDuration
Outcome
Kosmos 13743 June 1982
21:36		3 June 1982
23:04
Indian Ocean		158 x 204 km
Kosmos 144515 March 1983
22:33		16 March 1983
00:25		Indian Ocean158 x 208 km
Kosmos 151727 December 1983
10:04		27 December 1983
11:46		Black Sea212 x 217 km
Kosmos 161419 December 1984
04:04		19 December 1984
05:26		Black Sea174 x 223 km. Spacecraft lost at sea during recovery

Current locations