The USSR built a space shuttle called the "Buran" which was superior to the American shuttle in every way, but that is because the soviets basically just copy/pasted the design and added a few minor details. It profitted off of NASA experience. Were they cheating, or is plagarism fair game?
Ronald 7
They built it better that's all
nineteenthly
I'm pretty sure it was just a model.
daniel g
The Buran shuttle never saw space, only 1 flight, The US STS has been retired after 135 missions.
Though this whole time, the STS was considered the most advanced craft on or off the planet.
Buran may have done well if that program had continued, but still no match for the much larger STS.
You could use a dictionary now and then.
Quadrillian
Politics is able to exploit the "monkey see and monkey do" mentality to great effect. One good way to sabotage your adversary is to give the impression that you are working on some massive, expensive project with high falutin goals then hope the adversary decides to copy you. But the trick is that your own work is done cheaply in cardboard and styrofoam but the adversary goes at the project full-on and in doing so wrecks their economy and diverts resources from their military.
I'm not saying that was what the shuttle was intended to be about, but the fact that the soviets decided to get their own shuttle project underway says a lot about how politics works. Ultimately the shuttle was a financial drain on nasa and the US, and would have also become a financial "black hole" in Russia too if the project had continued.
Cheers!
quantumclaustrophobe
Debatable.... Their shuttle was slightly smaller, and didn't have the total payload capability as the American counterpart; on the other hand, what killed two of our shuttle crews were the systems needed to get the external fuel tank into space. Challenger suffered a breakdown of the Solid Rocket Booster system, while Columbia was a victim to insulation that was stripped from the external fuel tank itself.
The Russians, on the other hand, used an all-liquid launch system, which was more difficult to maintain, but offered none of the inherent dangers we saw in both the US Shuttle disasters.
The Russians are known for copying American technology - from cars to vacuum cleaners to submarines - letting the American Research and development centers figure out what works best, then simply copying the results. It's one of the reasons why the US Shuttle and the Buran look so much alike.
While it can't be called 'cheating' - the US was publishing it's shuttle plans since the 60's - the Russians were not as involved in the idea of a completely 'reusable' system as much as the Americans were... The Russians were concerned that our shuttle would be a significant step in technology - but once they built theirs, they came to the conclusion that the advanced and complex maintenance needed to keep it flying wasn't worth the cost for their use of space.
Flatly put, my opinion is our shuttle was better and more capable of the Buran; but the Russians really didn't need the Buran for how they operated in space. They would launch major components on boosters directly, while the Americans were tasked with taking up the non-symmetrical pieces to the space station - the truss and solar panels, for example. At the same time, I think our shuttle was better because we were forced to use it for all things; I would bet the Buran would have grown in capability had the program continued.