Like its American counterpart Buran was composed of a reusable spacecraft attached to the side of a huge rocket. In 1980, one year before the first flight of NASA’s Space Shuttle, the Soviets began to construct their own shuttle system which they named Buran, which loosely translates to “Snowstorm on the Steppes”.Īt a glance, it’s clear just how similar Buran and the Space Shuttle really were. Over the next few years they began to gather information about the Space Shuttle, using agents of the KGB (the Soviet secret service) to hack into the databases of American universities. There was an initial reluctance to design a spacecraft so similar to the American Space Shuttle, but after extensive wind tunnel tests, Soviet engineers couldn’t help but agree that the US design was ideal. Undeterred by their failed N1 Moon rocket, in 1974 the Soviet space agency began their own shuttle programme. Matching the Americans’ capabilities was as critical as it had ever been. What could the Americans need with so many potential launches and so much cargo? There were fears amongst the Soviet military that the Shuttle could launch laser weaponry that could knock out nuclear missiles during flight, be used to construct a military base in space, or even be used to dive bomb Moscow from orbit. Capable of launching 30 tons of equipment into space and of being launched up to 50 times in a single year, the military capabilities of this new American shuttle were not lost on the Soviets. In 1981, after years of testing, NASA launched Space Shuttle Columbia, the world’s first space shuttle flight. With these sorts of craft, spaceflights could become more regular and costs could be kept down. For some time both the Americans and Soviets had been planning the development of a reusable spacecraft to be used for missions to low-earth orbit.
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