Bugün öğrendim ki: Sovyetler Birliği'nin gizlice kendi Uzay Mekiğini inşa ettiğini. Kasım 1988'de, Buran'ı başarılı bir şekilde ilk ve tek uçuşu için ortaya çıkardılar ve başlattılar. ABD Uzay Mekiklerinin aksine, bu uzay aracı tamamen özerkti, fırlatma koltukları vardı ve 30 ton taşıyabiliyordu.

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The Buran spacecraft was a space shuttle developed by the Soviet Union in response to NASA's space shuttle program. Buran, which means “snowstorm” in Russian, flew one time. NASA's space shuttle represented a new form of development for space vehicles. Up until 1982, space vehicles — even those that carried humans — were launched for only one mission at a time, except for certain military test programs. A shuttle, on the other hand, could be used multiple times and reduce the cost of space exploration. While the space shuttle was mostly a civilian program, in the 1980s the US military used it occasionally to launch satellites and perform other classified activities. NASA's space shuttle, in fact, was designed with the military in mind; for example, its payload bay was created to be large enough for Department of Defense satellites. (This practice mostly ceased after the [Challenger shuttle explosion](https://www.space.com/18084-space-shuttle-challer.html) of 1986, after which the military shifted to expendable rockets.) NASA's focus was on reducing space costs, while the Soviet Union viewed the space shuttle as a potential military threat, wrote Anatoly Zak on his website, RussianSpaceWeb.com. “In the USSR, the Space Shuttle was viewed first of all as a carrier of nuclear weapons,” Zak wrote in an [article about the Buran](http://www.russianspaceweb.com/buran.html). “In 1976, despite apparent skepticism in the space industry, the Soviet government decided to respond to the 'Shuttle threat' with a similar spacecraft.”