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.