On November 15, 1988, a 100-ton spacecraft dropped out of a violent storm over the Kazakh steppe, executed an unplanned three-percent-probability maneuver to bleed off excess energy, and touched down within meters of its target with nobody on board. This episode explores the Soviet Buran orbiter, a machine that looked like a copy of NASA's Space Shuttle but was engineered on a fundamentally different philosophy. We trace how over a thousand Soviet enterprises built a three-deck crew module designed for six cosmonauts and missions of up to three weeks, and why the orbiter carried no main ascent engines at all.

We dig into the Energia rocket that did the heavy lifting, the 38,600 heat tiles arranged to preserve laminar airflow during reentry, the 37K-based laboratory modules planned for the payload bay, and the lookup-table software that let  ...