How the Soviet Buran shuttle flew once, landed itself perfectly, and was abandoned — the complete engineering and political history of a spacecraft that outlived its empire

For years, I assumed the Soviet space shuttle was a cheap knockoff. A photocopy of the American orbiter, hastily assembled by engineers working from stolen blueprints, doomed from the start. I held that view comfortably until I actually started reading the engineering literature and talking to people who understood launch vehicle design at a level I never will. The truth is more complicated, more impressive, and far more tragic than the knockoff narrative allows. Buran was a spacecraft that, in certain measurable ways...