The Buran doubled up on strap-on boosters beside the external tank, fitting four sticks of scientific dynamite designed to literally blow people off the face of the planet instead of NASA's traditional two. This let the gleaming vision of future space travel lift an extra two tons into orbit. The Buran was so beautifully built for space that it didn't bother waiting for a crew. In 1988, it orbited the Earth on automatic, lifting off and circumnavigating the globe twice before the life support systems were even finished. The monitors didn't even work, because it knew what it was doing and didn't see any point in telling any monkey cargo.

USSR Government
"Later, fleshbags!"

You know a ship is amazing when it makes HAL 9000 look stupid. Why bother cleaning up after dead humans when you can just leave before the meatsacks are ready?

If the ship was a paean to the glory of humanity, its death was a Greek tragedy of our failures. The Buran was literally crushed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. They didn't just defund the space program (which is always the sign of a government that's forgotten what it's for), they couldn't even afford to maintain the hangar it was held in. And after 10 years of ignoring the embodiment of everything humanity is capable of, the roof collapsed.

via aerospaceweb.org
No joke. This picture makes me want to cry.

None of which changes the fact that we had a fully functional RoboShuttle. Screw space research: All we need is David Hasselhoff and some paint and we can make a sequel to Knight Rider that's out of this world.

The SuitSat suffered transmission problems after two orbits, but we don't think that was a mechanical fault. That was a robot's first and final thoughts being exactly what we knew they would be: "Screw those humans."

The smartellites are the ultimate expression of Android open source. If you want to build the future, it turns out you need a phone that believes you when you say you paid for it. There won't be any iSatellites until Apple can get a Death Star up there first to enforce the terms of service. The result is 10-centimeter techno-cubes, physical pixels of the robotic space future. The first three phonesats -- technadorably named "Alexander," "Graham," and "Bell" -- spent a week in orbit and sent back a composite picture of the planet, thereby apologizing for every blurry phone picture of lunch ever twittered.

NASA
Although this is technically a picture of several billion lunches.

These nanosatellites are perfect for swarm applications, where a group of cheap satellites can work together and continue even when some fail or are destroyed. And maybe if we put all our phones in space, the government will spend some money getting back up there just so they can keep spying on us.

They built a planetary surveillance system that worked on film. Film! That makes steampunk look like forgetting to update your iTunes. It physically fired parachute-buckets full of film over the Pacific, where they were snagged by C-130 Herculeses in midair. That's using a $70 million plane as a combination of hunting falcon and carrier pigeon.

USAF/Getty Images News/Getty
Under no circumstances allow these to land on your arm.

What happens when you use all four canisters? If you're the USAF, you toss the most advanced space optical system ever constructed like a Big Mac wrapper and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new one. Twenty times. The Hexagon was 20 meters of solid future, including 11 tons of the most advanced space optical gear ever constructed, and it was designed to pop off four film canisters and then self-destruct into remote regions of the ocean to make sure that humanity didn't even accidentally learn anything.

National Reconnaissance Office
They took this image from space before The Empire Strikes Back came out.

They were able to resolve images down to the level of troop movements and swimming pools. The CIA had mapped the entire Earth before the A-Team existed. In 1971, one film canister's parachute failed and it fell straight from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean. The CIA engineered a deep sea rescue operation, using the Navy's most advanced submarine, the DSV-1, mounting three expeditions that took it to almost twice its previous maximum depth. Rocket launches, surveillance spaceships, midair rescues, and revolutionary submarines -- when it came to spying on Russians, suddenly the U.S. was able to build every single Thunderbird just five years after the series finished.

Century21Productions
The anti-PRISM.

So remember: Any time the government claims something is too expensive or complicated, they're full of shit.

Bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors makes them the most accurate positional system known, locating not only the satellite, but also the point the beam was launched from on the surface. They've been used to determine the precise motion of the Earth's continents, variations in the Earth's gravitational field, even the precise length of the day. We built something smarter than the sun and used it instead. They're so accurate that they've been used to measure the Lense-Thirring effect, a relativistic twist due to rotating masses. Chunks of brass and glass mapping the torsion of space-time: NASA won at steampunk decades before that was a thing.

NASA
One technician also used it to marry three dozen soccer teams simultaneously.

They're masters of space science, and they have no moving, beeping, buzzing, or powered parts. At all. Shining shot puts of solid science, hurled into the sky by sheer smartness. The first was launched in 1976, 36 years ago, and did so well that we deployed a double in 1992 to cover another orbital track. They're both still up there. As far as you're concerned, they will always be up there. Unpowered and unguided, and we shoved them so smartly that if nothing gets in the way, they'll stay in the heavens for 8 million years. Zeus only managed a few centuries.

Jupiterimages/BrandXPictures/BrandX

Undoing every college movie by making nerds infinitely better than jocks at throwing things.

It's aimed so far into the future that they hired Carl Sagan to design a plaque it could carry. That's the species equivalent of getting a grown-up to answer the phone -- we got our best human to represent us to the far future. The plaque is genius: binary images of the planet's continents millions of years ago, at the time of launch, and what we think they'll be like when LAGEOS comes back down to meet them, which should enable any giant-headed super-evolved ant-dolphin hybrids to work out that we said hello.

NASA
"Hi! Sorry about all the landfills!"

We're playing "catch" with the entire future. And this is one of the very few things we're doing that would make them proud of their parents.

Luke also explains 5 Reasons Homophobia Is Unmanly and Talks About His Zombie Strategies and Dick Moves. Luke also tries to create infinite whiskey on his website, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.

For more space awesomeness, check out 6 Badass Spacecraft Landings Humanity Totally Nailed and 5 Astronauts More Badass Than Any Action Movie Hero.