A very large amount of eastern "high tech" lagged behind by a couple of years, because stealing and reverse-engineering the Western designs in order to copy them took about that long.
Less so for military equipment. They definitely didn't copy their titanium submarines (which when US intelligence discovered them, the Navy believed to be a false report because they didn't think it would be possible to fabricate).
Grid fins weren't copied western tech, either. Nor was Sputnik.
Buran is much less of a copy than it looks like. It's superficially similar as it has the same mission profile, which was basically because Soviet officials wanted to be able to keep up with whatever nefarious things the Americans might be doing in orbit with such a thing, even if they weren't sure what that would be. But it's far from being a copy in terms of technology, materials, construction, or even major things like the booster.
Agreed. If anything, the technologically interesting parts compare better to the titanium submarine example, as the RD-170 engine that powered the Energia rocket that lifted the Buran was at least in some ways more sophisticated than anything Americans had at the time, and in particular, used an oxygen-rich staged combustion fuel cycle that American engineers had considered but dismissed as being impossible. Aerojet engineers didn't actually believe the Russians had even built such an engine until they were able to examine one in person after the end of the Cold War.
One thing is that laws of physics don't have nationality nor borders.
Another is that the engineers designing Buran were told to "make it look like US Shuttle" - only look, mind you, as outside of common shape the design is completely different.
One of the reasons I've seen for this order was to make a point to USA, though I do not remember the details. MiG designers were reportedly annoyed at the requirement, but still made it look like Shuttle - and be several times more capable than Shuttle.
Did you only look at the pictures? One is made to be piloted by astronauts and the other is made from the bottom up to be remote controlled but with the option to pilot it manually. The USSR were lightyears ahead in remote control and robotics in space.
Not only that - it was simpler, probably easier to refurbish after flight and had, IIRC, twice the payload capacity (because it didn't need to carry the ascent engines along for the ride).
It wasn't as reusable as the American counterpart, but if we did that with today's reusable boosters the way SpaceX does it, it wouldn't be that bad.
Remember, of course, what drove both designs was the capability to bring large objects back from space in a single orbit
It's really no surprise Buran was abandoned and the shuttle was bad at everything else (except looking good in pictures).
It got to be a lot more than a couple of years as time went on and some things - like high precision manufacturing typical in the West is something they never quite pulled off at scale. Dual use (i.e. designing and making things/capacity so that could be repurposed for military use) was a core part of economic policy with predictable results.
Indeed. They had extensive surveillance and sabotage networks all throughout the world. Simple because it was easier (and cheaper) to just steal it than develop it domestically. With the soviet demise, that apparatus hasn't gone away. Russians and Chinese still work off that approach.
I believe everyone is playing the game of industrial espionage in the realm of defence, it's all 'fair game'. It's just that you have to have something worth stealing in order for it to be stolen. Surely 'The West' is analyzing and borrowing every possible concept they can.
The thing is, Westerners will have a different view of what 'Public v. Private' means, and 'Open Enterprise' is something completely distinct from 'Government' which is not the case in other parts of the world - hence a lot of ideological confusion.
It's hard to get ahead by stealing, because you end up under investing in domestic research capability. China probably has a large enough economy to do both theft and cutting-edge research, but the old USSR would never have pulled ahead.
Dropping support for domestic research&development and switching towards "just steal it" are considered part of why USSR failed - and a legacy of Brezhnev era.
