Soviet space officials lamented Buran's draining of funds from more successful endeavors. “It was roundly decried in the arena of Soviet space sciences at that time,” Lewis says. The decision didn't sit well with many inside the Soviet space program. military technology, so they wanted a shuttle for themselves and they built it as a competitor to the U.S. “This was during the era when the Soviet Union was really going full force trying to keep up with U.S. “The Soviet speculation was that the shuttle would be used to capture or destroy satellites,” says Lewis, who specializes in Soviet and Russian space programs. accomplishments in kind, says Cathleen Lewis, curator of International Space Programs at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. shuttle program into orbit in April 1981.)Ĭold War rivalry-and fear of space weaponry-made the Soviet Union feel it had to match U.S. (The space shuttle Columbia launched the U.S. space shuttle program during the early 1970s ignited Soviet interest in producing a similar spacecraft. Scientists in the USSR had toyed with ideas of reusable spacecraft for decades.

Russian space shuttle copied