Copying NASA´s Mistakes (a review of Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle by B. Hendricks and B. Vis; 2007) [Books]

This book, written by a pair of amateur European space historians, provides the first full account of the Soviet space shuttle program. The authors present a balanced, technologically insightful, and well-illustrated narrative, providing details never before made available about the spaceship´s power, guidance, and communications systems. In the end, it seems the program´s engineering was probably the best in the history of the Soviet space program, but because the political and social underpinnings were rotten, the engineering work was tragically wasted.