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Description
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not have a single national space agency like NASA over in America did, and instead put spaceflight in the hands of design bureaus such as NPO Energia, which designed and built the Buran space shuttle near the end of the Cold War. Buran was launched from an Energia rocket in 1988, making a single unmanned test flight, but the whole program was cancelled in 1993 by the new Russian national government, and orbiter K1 was destroyed when its storage hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan collapsed in 2002. This model at the State Polytechnic Museum in Moscow shows the Energia-Buran pairing. With a thrust of 32 million Newtons, the Energia rocket was so powerful the Buran orbiter did not need main engines like the American shuttle. Had the Buran program survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia could have rented out space in the cargo bay to carry satellites or perform experiments, and could have used Buran to help build the International Space Station.

Description
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not have a single national space agency like NASA over in America did, and instead put spaceflight in the hands of design bureaus such as NPO Energia, which designed and built the Buran space shuttle near the end of the Cold War. Buran was launched from an Energia rocket in 1988, making a single unmanned test flight, but the whole program was cancelled in 1993 by the new Russian national government, and orbiter K1 was destroyed when its storage hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan collapsed in 2002. This model at the State Polytechnic Museum in Moscow shows the Energia-Buran pairing. With a thrust of 32 million Newtons, the Energia rocket was so powerful the Buran orbiter did not need main engines like the American shuttle. Had the Buran program survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia could have rented out space in the cargo bay to carry satellites or perform experiments, and could have used Buran to help build the International Space Station.