Strizh

The Strizh ('Swift') was the emergency pressure suit developed for Soviet cosmonauts aboard the Buran orbiter — the Soviet Union's equivalent of NASA's Space Shuttle. Unlike NASA's LES (which was an emergency pressurization suit), the Strizh was designed to work with Buran's K-36 ejection seat system, which would blast cosmonauts from the orbiter in an emergency during ascent or descent. This made Buran the only crewed spacecraft in history to feature ejection seats at orbital vehicle scale. The suit had to protect cosmonauts from ejection at speeds up to Mach 3 and altitudes up to 30 km, then sustain them during parachute descent to sea. Buran flew only once with cosmonauts (crewed by an automatic control system on its 1988 test flight), so the Strizh was never used in an actual emergency. After the Soviet collapse, the Buran program was cancelled in 1993, ending the Strizh program.