On 12/17/2010 12:24 AM, Jochem Huhmann wrote:


The flight version had no rocket engines apart from RCS and OMS -- the
main engines were in the booster core (this was not just an external
tank as with STS but a full booster).

One interesting thing is that Russia was trying hard to eliminate the
use of toxic hypergolic propellants in all of its launch vehicles at the
time, because of criticism by environmentalists and lawsuits by
Kazakhstanies who had Proton stages come down on their land.
Both the OMS engines and RCS system on Buran ran off of Lox/Kerosene.
There's video of them cranking up one of the OMS engines and the RCS
thrusters on this translated webpage:
http://tinyurl.com/336odzo

Pat