The one time I saw photos of it, my first impression was that is was “prettier” than ours, in that they had rounded off some sharp corners, etc. But.....copying the APPEARANCE of something, as opposed to duplicating the PERFORMANCE of something, are orders of magnitude apart! Here’s a link to an article and photo of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
Couldn’t agree more.
Buran flew once with no crew. 100% success rate but other than that no accomplishments.
The Space Transportation System (STS)(Space Shuttle) flew 135 times with crew. As you no doubt recall, there were two losses of craft and crew; Challenger and Columbia. Still, 133 completed missions equals a success rate of 98.5%, pretty good by most measures of performance. And let’s not even get started on the string of STS accomplishments. We did a lot and learned a lot albeit sometimes very painfully.
Unfortunately, once we finally got it figured it out, the aging system was very expensive to fly and we chose to retire it vice design STS II as its replacement. I understand and somewhat agree with the logic behind the decision but, in all probability, I won’t see another airplane planform space shuttle (government or commercial) before I die. (Which, God willing, isn’t going to be the day after tomorrow.)