Automatic landing of the unmanned reusable orbiter Buran

The paper discusses the problems that had to be solved in order to make it possible for the reusable orbiter BURAN to land in automatic mode. It provides a brief description of hardware and software configuration used both onboard and on the ground in order to achieve this objective. It presents the results of the BURAN orbiter flight obtained during the descent phase of the world’s first automatic landing of an orbiter on a runway.