Russia's Forgotten Space Shuttle: A Rusting Relic of Cosmic Ambitions
The Buran space plane, the Soviet Union's answer to NASA's Space Shuttle, now sits abandoned and rusting in a hangar in Kazakhstan. Despite its successful unmanned flight in 1988, the Buran program was halted after the fall of the Berlin Wall and officially canceled in 1993. While NASA's shuttles are celebrated in museums, the Buran remains largely forgotten, with only a few remnants and an engineering prototype left to tell the story of this ambitious but ultimately short-lived Soviet space endeavor.