Everyone loves a spectacle. A 121-foot Russian space shuttle traveling up the Rhine drew much of Bonn to the riverbanks yesterday.
I happened to be biking to work at the time when I noticed the traffic jams and gathering crowds, peering north towards Cologne in excited anticipation of the river novelty. The Rhine is typically brimming with river traffic: barges bringing coal and other raw materials to and from Germany’s industrial heartland, ferries of ogling tourists, and sometimes joyriders. The extremely swift current and deep waters make it a formidable river.
But a Russian space shuttle was something new. Once the pride and joy of the Russian space program, the long-ago decommissioned Buran (“blizzard” in Russian) spent years languishing in a Bahrain junkyard until the Technik Museum Speyer in southwest Germany snapped it up. Thus began it’s long journey through the Suez Canal, the Straight of Gibraltar, and around the coast to Rotterdam.
It seems the best way to ship it from there to its new home was the path much else goes these days: the Rhine.
I have to say that I always groaned about being dragged into the Air and Space Museum on trips to Washington with my brothers. I am not a big fan of arcane technology. But the excitement of the crowd was contagious as the banged up object sailed under the Kennedy Bridge and then south, the picturesque outline of the Seven Hills in the background.
According to the papers, the Buran 002 was a copycat of the American space program and made 25 suborbital flights in the 1980s before being abandoned. It’s due to arrive at its new home on Saturday.
