The Quest to Get Photos of the USSR’s First Space Shuttle

On November 15, 1988, the Soviet Union’s first space shuttle, the Buran, blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan. With striking design similarities to the US space shuttle—prompting speculation that Soviet scientists had stolen or copied American plans—the Buran (Russian for “blizzard”) was intended as the future of the Soviet space program. Instead, […]