Burya

For other uses, see Burya (disambiguation).

The Burya ("Storm" in Russian; Russian: Буря) was a trisonic, intercontinental cruise missile, developed by the Lavochkin design bureau under designation La-350 since 1954 until the program cancellation in February 1960.[1]:300 The request for proposal issued by the Soviet government in 1954,[2] called for a cruise missile capable of delivering a nuclear payload to the United States. Analogous developments in the USA were the SM-62 Snark and SM-64 Navaho cruise missiles, particularly the latter, which used parallel technology and had similar performance goals.

Development

The Burya was planned as a Mach 3 intercontinental nuclear ramjet cruise missile. The Burya was remarkably advanced for its time, and despite setbacks and several crashes, the vehicle demonstrated a range in excess of 6,000 km with a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb-sized payload at speeds greater than Mach 3. The Burya had a two-stage design - the daring concept for an intercontinental missile was the second stage, which was powered by a ramjet engine at its operational speed of Mach 3. This varied from the original Trommsdorff concept of World War II in that no mother aircraft launch preceded the rocket boosted phase. The first stage was a ballistic-rocket-derived booster, which accelerated the Burya to altitude and the speed necessary to ignite its ramjet engine: a ramjet does not operate below subsonic speeds, and to use a hybrid jet-ramjet to broaden its operating speed would have been more complex.

Successful tests were achieved after official cancellation of the project, when it continued as a technology demonstration. It was a casualty, like the USAF Navaho, of the greater simplicity and relative invulnerability to interception of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Burya was an early precursor to the Zvezda and Buran projects.[3]

Specifications

General characteristics

Launch vehicle (stage 1)

Cruise missile (stage 2)

References

  1. ↑ Siddiqi, Asif A. Challenge To Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974, Part I. NASA.
  2. ↑ "FAS.org - "Burya / Buran- Russian / Soviet Nuclear Forces"". Retrieved 2006-06-17.
  3. ↑ "Burya"
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