© PinterestSoviet Buran reusable orbiter
A quarter-century ago, it seemed like the
space shuttle suddenly got a new sibling.
On Nov. 15, 1988, the Buran reusable orbiter, the crowning achievement of the Soviet space program, made its first flight. It would prove to be the Buran's last. But looking back 25 years later, some space experts say the USSR might have built a better shuttle, one that would have laid the groundwork for a new generation of launch vehicles, had it been able to weather the economic storms of the 1990s and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Copycat?Once the Soviet winged spacecraft finally made its public debut after years of secret development,
an urban myth spread that it was an exact replica of the American space shuttle. It was easy to believe. A long list of Soviet equivalents of Western technology, from vacuum cleaners and cars to aircraft and rockets, were straight-up copies.
But while the resemblance between the spacecraft is striking, it turned out to be deceiving.At the outset of the Buran project in 1976, the Soviet leadership, indeed, gave its industry the task of developing a system with similar technical capabilities to the space shuttle. However, politicians left room for engineers to choose the exact path to such a vehicle, an opening that Buran chief architect Valentin Glushko exploited. As we now know from numerous unclassified documents and eyewitness accounts,
Glushko's engineers did not blindly copy the shuttle but instead went through the long and painful process of determining an original architecture for the Soviet equivalent.
Comment: A great many sights, some never seen before, have been revealed from the unusual droughts across the planet in recent years: