Gorbachev Hails 1st Soviet Shuttle Flight as a Coup

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev today hailed as a major coup for his country the 3 1/2-hour unmanned orbital flight of the first Soviet space shuttle, a flight that broke the U.S. monopoly on reusable spacecraft.

“The space plane has ushered in a new era in the history of Soviet space exploration,” state-run Radio Moscow declared after the 100-ton Buran made two orbits, streaked earthward in a fireball and landed at a specially built runway in Soviet Central Asia.

The Buran--snowstorm in Russian--was launched early in the morning on the back of a 198-foot-tall Energia booster rocket.

The flight of the Buran was a major success for the Soviet space program after a series of problems that included the near loss of cosmonauts on a mission in September and loss of contact with a probe sent to Mars.