Today 25 years ago, a major milestone in the space race happened when the Soviets launched their first space shuttle, the Buran on a 200 minute flight into space. The program to develop this orbital vehicle was in response to the U.S. Space Shuttle which obviously was a concern for the Soviet military due to the Shuttle’s ability to take with it enormous payloads. Funnily enough it was actually the calculations by the Soviets that the American Space Shuttle program could never be profitable unless there would be a launch a week, that led them to conclude it must have been military in nature. An assumption that moved the development of the Buran to the top of the military priority list.
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