Quote:
Originally Posted by Nantais
No actually the Soviets made their own space shuttle to not stay behind the Americans in the space race. Above all, they feared that the Americans could have a military use of their space shuttle, so they wanted to have the same kind of spacecraft. Just in case.
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not exactly.
the soviets both 100% stole the space shuttle tech via espionage...
... but also, being an open society, perhaps naive? we gave it to them.
now you can probably imagine the former, they did spy stuff, but its the latter that is a bit more fascinating. they just went to the gao office and copied whatever plans were released there!
anyway, one look at the buran, the bootleg soviet shuttle, would tell you all you need to know about that topic. its the proto nasa shuttle as seen on the opening of the six million dollar man tv show.
the buran only flew once. it was too much money to operate so they gave it up. probably not a bad idea as all in all the shuttle was a dangerous and spectactular money pit of a boondoogle for nasa as well.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cr...iet-espionage/