One Hit Wonder. The Buran did fly in space – just once, in November 1988, not long before the Soviet Union collapsed.Its lone mission was uncrewed. The Buran relied on an automated launch ...

The first Buran shuttle made just a single, unpiloted flight to orbit in 1988. However, this vehicle was destroyed in 2002 after the roof of the hangar where it was stored at the Baikonur ...

The U.S. shuttle could carry into space only what fit into its cargo bay, but the powerful Soviet rocket could haul most anything into space at much heavier payloads of over 100 tons.

The Buran program, which once involved the hard work of so many talented individuals and so much of the USSR’s treasure, is now a footnote in space history.

One shuttle, named Ptichka, never left Earth. The other, a test vehicle, was never meant to fly. It’s a rather unceremonious end for these abandoned icons of a once-proud space program .

It's wild to think that while the Space Shuttle is proudly displayed in museums across America for all to see, this piece of the Soviet space program is hidden away from view.. The Buran program ...

The Buran space shuttle was once the apple of the Soviet space fleet’s eye. Unfortunately, it has now been reduced to floating peacefully down the river Rhine, where it will eventually come to ...

Russia’s space agency says it wants to move an abandoned Soviet-era Buran space shuttle to a museum after urban explorers “infiltrated” a storage facility in Kazakhstan and apparently ...

Russia is developing a reusable spaceplane, a subsidiary of the Kalashnikov conglomerate said on Wednesday, in Russia's first such project since the late Soviet Union's ill-fated Buran space shuttle.

Building the Buran. The American space shuttle is commonly regarded as the most sophisticated man-made machine ever built. The Buran was similarly complicated, if not as high-quality.