'Air and Space Ship'),[1] was a Soviet and later Russian reusable spacecraft project that began in 1974 at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute in Moscow and was formally suspended in 1993.

Smaller rocket engines on the craft's body provided propulsion in orbit and de-orbital burns, similar to the Space Shuttle's OMS pods.

The Buran orbital vehicle programme was developed in response to the U.S. Space Shuttle program, which raised considerable concerns among the Soviet military and especially Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov.

Like its American counterpart, the Buran orbital vehicle, when in transit from its landing sites back to the launch complex, was transported on the back of a large jet aeroplane – the Antonov An-225 Mriya transport aircraft, which was designed in part for this task and was the largest aircraft in the world to fly multiple times.

Their reasoning was that such weapons could only be effectively tested in actual space conditions and that to cut their development time and save costs it would be necessary to regularly bring them back to Earth for modifications and fine-tuning.

[9] Soviet officials were also concerned that the U.S. Space Shuttle could make a sudden dive into the atmosphere to drop nuclear bombs on Moscow.

[10][11] In 1974, Valentin Glushko's design bureau, OKB-1 (later NPO Energiya), proposed a new family of heavy-lift rockets called RLA (Russian: РЛА, «Ракетные Летательные Аппараты», romanized: Raketnyye Letatel'niye Apparaty, lit.

[12] While NPO Molniya conducted development under the lead of Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy, the Soviet Union's Military-Industrial Commission, or VPK, was tasked with collecting all data it could on the U.S. Space Shuttle.

The KGB targeted many university research project documents and databases, including Caltech, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and others.

[4] By 1975, NPO Energiya had come up with two competing designs for the orbiter vehicle: the MTKVP (Russian: МТКВП, «Многоразовый Транспортный Корабль Вертикальной Посадки», romanized: Mnogorazoviy Transportniy Korabl' Vertikal'noy Posadki, lit.

'Reusable Vertical Landing Transport Ship'), a 34-meter-long lifting body spaceplane launched on top of a stack of kerosene-fueled strap on boosters;[13] and the OS-120 (Russian: ОС-120, «Орбитальный Самолет», romanized: Orbital'niy Samolet, lit.

[14] A compromise between these two proposals was achieved by NPO Energiya in January 1976 with the OK-92 (Russian: ОК-92, «Орбитальный Корабль», romanized: Orbital'niy Korabl', lit.

Although it has been commented that wind tunnel testing showed that NASA's design was already ideal,[17] the shape requirements were mandated by its potential military capabilities to transport large payloads to low Earth orbit, themselves a counterpart to the Pentagon's initially projected missions for the Shuttle.

This provided invaluable information about the handling characteristics of the Buran design, and significantly differed from the carrier plane/air drop method used by the United States and the Enterprise test craft.

The developers considered using a couple of Mil Mi-26 helicopters to "bundle" lift the Buran, but test flights with a mock-up showed how risky and impractical that was.

A declassified May 1990 CIA report citing open-source intelligence material states that the software for the Buran spacecraft was written in "the French-developed programming language known as Prolog",[27] possibly due to confusion with the name PROLOGUE.

They were: Ivan Ivanovich Bachurin, Alexei Sergeyevich Borodai, Anatoli Semyonovich Levchenko, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Shchukin, Rimantas Antanas Stankevičius, Igor Petrovich Volk, and Viktor Vasiliyevich Zabolotsky.

[9] Levchenko died of a brain tumour the year after his orbital flight, Bachurin left the cosmonaut corps because of medical reasons, Shchukin was assigned to the back-up crew of Soyuz TM-4 and later died in a plane crash, Stankevičius was also killed in a plane crash, while Borodai and Zabolotsky remained unassigned to a Soyuz flight until the Buran programme ended.

The appearance of Volk as a crew member caused some, including the British Interplanetary Society magazine Spaceflight, to ask why a test pilot was occupying a Soyuz seat usually reserved for researchers or foreign cosmonauts.

[28] Anatoli Levchenko was planned to be the back-up commander of the first crewed Buran flight, and in March 1987 he began extensive training for his Soyuz spaceflight.

Several facilities at Baikonur were adapted or newly built for these purposes: An aerodynamic testbed, OK-GLI, was constructed in 1984 to test the in-flight properties of the Buran design.

Unlike the American prototype Space Shuttle Enterprise, OK-GLI had four AL-31 turbofan engines fitted, meaning it was able to fly under its own power.

[44] Commenting on the discontinuation of the programme in his interview to New Scientist, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov described the project's end:"We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed.

In 2010 the director of Moscow's Central Machine Building Institute said the Buran programme would be reviewed in the hope of restarting a similar crewed spacecraft design, with rocket test launches as soon as 2015.

[69] Due to the 2011 retirement of the American Space Shuttle and the need for STS-type craft in the meantime to complete the International Space Station, some American and Russian scientists had been mulling over plans to possibly revive the already-existing Buran shuttles in the Buran programme rather than spend money on an entirely new craft and wait for it to be fully developed[66][67] but the plans did not come to fruition.

The rocket would be intended to place a payload of 100 tonnes (220,000 lb) in a baseline low Earth orbit and is projected to be based on the Angara launch vehicle technology.

On 21 December 1988, the An-225 performed its maiden flight; only one aircraft was ever completed, although a second airframe with a slightly different configuration was partially built.

Multiple announcements were made regarding the potential completion of the second airframe, though its construction largely remained on hold due to a lack of funding.

It was commonly used to transport objects once thought impossible to move by air, such as 130-ton generators, wind turbine blades, and diesel locomotives.

The Ukrainian space industry was highly integrated with that of Russia due to its Soviet heritage, but that cooperation was interrupted by the Russo-Ukrainian War beginning in 2014, which has effectively led to a hiatus in the Zenit program.