In November 1988, an unmanned Soviet space shuttle called Buran flew a full orbital mission and landed itself in a blizzard at Baikonur without a single human input, and three years later the country that built it no longer existed.
On the morning of November 15, 1988, a Soviet spacecraft named Buran lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a snowstorm with crosswinds. No pilot. No joystick input. No human aboard. The whole flight, from ignition to wheels-stop, ran on the orbiter’s own
