simonshack wrote:
The most extraordinary part of this story - technically speaking - is that BURAN was a carbon-copy of the NASA Shuttle - down to the smallest details:
Dolphins look a lot like fishes. They even didn't steal the design, but simply live in the same conditions. In fact, Soviet engineers obviously used some stolen information. But, AFAIK, they didn't made a perfect copy. This is why the only flight was [declared] unmanned.
simonshack wrote:
Needless to say (as I've mentioned before in the 'Endeavour' thread) - it is quite absurd that the original shuttle design hasn't changed a whisker for all of 30 years.
"Aspirin" formula is aged more than a century, but still is in use. Is it absurd?
simonshack wrote:
But what to do with THIS further absurdity? Are we to believe the 'Evil Empire of the Soviet Union' copied/plagiarized that multi-million $ design down to the very last screw - and America just stood by and looked on?
There are well documented cases of similar plagiarism. Nearly all Soviet computers in 1970s and later were copied from IBM (mainframes, later PCs).
simonshack wrote:
All this at a time when 'Star Wars Reagan' was pushing for the SDI missile shield...
Reagan announces Star Wars 1983 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U8cHjCBDFc
“The Soviet Union is an Evil Empire, and Soviet communism is the focus of evil in the modern world” (Ronald Reagan)
Well, OK, and he got over this empire, without much blood, economically. What do you expect, an atomic bombardment? This would be much less effective.