The former Soviet Union's analogue was the Energiya-Buran system. The decision to go forward with of this system was made in 1974-1976 the program was slow to gear up. Buran (snowstorm or blizzard) orbiter was not atop the Energiya launch vehicle until 1988, an Energiya test launch was conducted successfully the Buran in 1987. During the 1988 flight, Buran flew two orbits without a and successfully returned to Earth. This turned to be the Buran's one and only The program was put on hold and cancelled in 1993.

Beyond appearances, however, there are several important technical between the two Shuttle systems. Perhaps the significant is that the U.S. Shuttle was intended to carry people into space but its only flight, the Buran flew without crew, although it was designed to accommodate crews as well. At one level, clearly U.S. Shuttle was designed as a follow-on to the Apollo and Skylab projects that send humans aloft on a routine basis. Tom Wolfe described in The Right Stuff, U.S. and NASA aerospace cultures were dominated by pilots and then by astronauts, so might say that flying people, not just into space was always a priority. This still true today, as NASA's human spaceflight on Shuttle and the International Space Station the public's imagination and pave the way and budgetarily for robotic spacecraft missions, ground-based and even aeronautics.