In 1988, the Soviet Buran shuttle launched into a snowstorm with no one aboard, circled the Earth twice, and on the way down abandoned its planned approach, swung a wide arc into a 17-metre-per-second crosswind, and landed itself so gently that its brake parachutes fired nine seconds late.
Resource Hubs: For more long-form features on the engineering decisions, missions, and machines that shaped modern spaceflight, browse the Growth List blog. Think of a bird that hatches, flies once across a continent in a snowstorm, lands without ever being touched, and then never flies again. That is roughly the biography of the Buran orbiter, … Read more