A Soviet space shuttle has finally landed in a museum. After a long history and a virtual world tour, a Shuttle Buran was put on permanent display to the public on Friday at the “Technik Museum Speyer” near Manheim, Germany.
When you first walk into the Buran building you could easily mistake the shuttle for its American counterpart. It looks almost identical to NASA’s fleet, but the museum points out it’s not just a Soviet copy. They explain the similarities saying both design teams were governed by the same laws of physics, had similar goals, and Soviet designers drew on NASA’s publicized research but the end products were substantially different.