Built during the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Buran shuttle was designed to rival NASA’s Space Transportation System and surpass it in one critical way: it could fly and land entirely on its own ...

While NASA celebrated the launch of its first Space Shuttle in 1981, the Soviet Union was racing to build its own orbital spacecraft using publicly available American technical data and Cold War ...

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 ...

Today, three versions of the Buran survive. One, a full-scale test model, is on display at the Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum. The other two—including the shuttle that was scheduled to fly the second ...

Tensions are continuing to escalate between a Kazakh businessman and Russian space officials over the fate of the second Buran-class orbiter, named Burya. The businessman, Dauren Musa, claims ...

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 ...

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 ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A full-size mockup of a Russian space shuttle is leaving Moscow for an exhibition center opening ...

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 ...

I sometimes wonder where we would be now, as a species, had the Soviet Union not collapsed and continued its space race with the United States. Would we have already colonized other planets by now, or ...

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 ...