Nuke, the concept is the same, I mean the main purpose: ability to steal sattelites from the orbit. Completely "cold-war"-type 100% military thing. The implementation is absolutely different. Ike posted a picture of Energiya launcher above, with four booster rockets. Is it possible to use Shuttle with 4 boosters?...
Ike, unfortunately, Buran will never fly again. In 1992, when "independant" Kazakhstan tried to seize Baikonur, Russian military destroyed all ground fueling structures. Square kilometers of kryogenic equipment were simply cut off and brought to Russia on cargo planes...
I told you that my Father was a scientific director of ground capital construction (concrete stuff, launch facility and runways), and retired from the Army in Dec. 1987, four months before the first launch. But he has dozens of friends and students (some of them leading military scientific instituts and other research organisations now) who worked there, so he had first-hand accounts on what happened there.
Buran was a great effort for the whole Union. Millions of people worked on it... It costed us maybe almost like WWII, and definetly more then a Bomb. It's very sad that all this heroic (sorry for this word, but IMHO it's right) effort went down the drain when the great Empire felt apart
BTW, most of the pilots trained for Buran flights are dead now
Only the few of them left, like Magomed Tolboyev. They were probably the most professional flight team in history of mankind, ready and able to fly and safely land anything lifted into the air. Their typical excercise was landing MiG-25 without engines, or IL-62 airliner as a glider too...
If you are interesten in it - please visit
http://www.buran.ru