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Message: <blockquote data-quote="priyade" data-source="post: 27420162" data-attributes="member: 565365">The story of the An-225 begins back in the 1960 and '70s when the Soviet Union was locked in a race into space with the United States. By the end of the 1970s, the need arose for transporting large and heavy loads from their places of assembly to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the sprawling spaceport in the deserts of Kazakhstan that was the launchpad for Yuri Gagarin's pioneering space voyage of 1961.The cargo in question was the Buran spacecraft, the Soviet Union's answer to NASA's Space Shuttle. Since there were at the time no airplanes capable of carrying it, the Antonov company was ordered to develop one. What emerged was the An-225 megaplane -- the biggest and most powerful airplane ever to successfully enter service. And on December 21, 1988, three years after she was first conceived, Mriya safely transported the Buran spacecraft to Baikonur.  To this day, Mriya remains the heaviest aircraft ever built. Powered by six turbofan engines, she has a maximum payload weight of 250 tonnes, which can be carried inside or on its back. It boasts the largest wingspan of any airplane in operational service. Because of its size, pilots need special training to cope with the challenges of maneuvering the An-225. One of the airplane's quirks is its ability to perform a so-called "elephant dance," a term used in aviation when the nose gear "kneels" to make cargo loading easier. With Mriya declared a success, the Soviet Union forged ahead with plans to build three more An-225s. Construction of the second began in 1989 amid equally high expectations.Then history intervened. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, taking with it the Soviet space program. In the chaos that followed, production continued on the second plane, but it was eventually halted in 1994.</blockquote>

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