>>12666938Don't know if they had that as a plan but if they wanted to snag a satellite, they could have done so with less risk than the US would have had doing the same trying to capture a Soviet satellite.
My guess as to why they created Buran is that it was mostly because they needed to show they could do anything the US could do. International relations during the Cold War was mostly about convincing non aligned countries that communism or capitalism was superior. Things like the Olympics and the space race were ways of demonstrating the superiority of a given system. The shuttle, flawed or not, made the Soviet space program looked dated. Even Mir failed to capture the imagination of the world because it look junky and really didn't do much. The shuttle looked pretty and futuristic. A space plane fit in with the sci-fi future of the movies much better than a can in space did, even if Mir was more useful for science.
