Here’s What You Need to Know: The Buran program was judged a success and would likely have continued had the Cold War carried on. Unfortunately, it suffered from poor timing: the Soviet Union had ...

After Apollo 11 shifted the space race, Soviet leaders feared the U.S. Shuttle could become a space bomber and rushed to build a counterpart. This story traces how public documents, covert ...

Summary: Despite the clear parallels between the American and Soviet designs, including the external similarities and the utilization of shared technology, the Buran program embodied Moscow’s ambition ...

Join us on an extraordinary journey into the deserts of western Kazakhstan as we uncover one of the Soviet Union's most ambitious projects—the abandoned Buran space shuttles. Hidden within the vast ...

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A structural test article of the Soviet Buran space shuttle, on display in Moscow in 2017. WHEN VICTOR ZABOLOTSKY, A TEST PILOT WHO ONCE TRAINED TO FLY the Soviet Buran space shuttle, thinks back on ...

Russia’s Buran program was very short lived. Like, only one flight short lived. But according to cosmonaut (and ISS alum) Oleg Kotov, the craft had some serious potential—outclassing its American ...

The Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union ...

What happens when space programs are left to die? In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Buran reusable spacecraft program was canceled, leaving the launchpads and equipment to decay. The ...

MOSCOW, November 15. /TASS/. November 15, 2018 marks 30 years since the Buran reusable spacecraft performed its first and sole flight. The Buran was part of the Energia-Buran reusable space system. It ...