Buran
Buran (“Snowstorm”) was the Soviet answer to the Space Shuttle — and one of the strangest what-ifs in spaceflight. It flew exactly once, on 15 November 1988, unmanned, orbiting Earth twice and landing itself automatically at Baikonur in a crosswind. It was the first spaceplane to complete a fully robotic landing. Then the money ran out, the USSR dissolved, and the programme was cancelled in 1993. The one flown orbiter was destroyed when its hangar roof collapsed in 2002.
The Slava Buran is the everyday side of that story: a mechanical watch from the Second Moscow Watch Factory with the shuttle itself printed on the dial, sold to ordinary Soviet citizens who followed the programme in the newspapers. Typically a 43 mm case, 11 mm thick on 18 mm lugs, hand-wound or self-winding depending on the version, usually with a calendar.
These are not flown hardware and were never issued to anyone — they are period commemoratives of a programme that captured the Soviet public imagination, and the dial art is the whole appeal, and they are priced accordingly, which is most of their appeal. Every one below has been serviced by our watchmaker, tested, and photographed individually.
See also Baikonur, Soyuz, the full Slava collection and our wider space-themed Soviet watches.
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Slava Buran mechanical vintage watch – relic of Soviet space exploration era!
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Slava Buran mechanical vintage watch – relic of Soviet space exploration era!
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Out of stockSlava Buran mechanical vintage watch – relic of Soviet space exploration era!
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Out of stockSlava Buran mechanical vintage watch – relic of Soviet space exploration era!
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Out of stockExcellent Slava Buran automatic self-winding mechanical watch – relic of Soviet space exploration era!
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Out of stockExcellent Slava Buran vintage mechanical watch – relic of Soviet space exploration era!
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Out of stockVostok Komandirskie limited series watch – “Zakaz MO CCCP” Buran art (or space shuttle?)