Largely, yes. With the added benefit of hindsight they were able to give it much safer heat shielding and boosters, and did a million other small improvements.

But the size remained, because Soviet intelligence couldn't quite figure out what the Shuttle was supposed to be good for. The Buran was essentially a just-in-case program: Once they figured out what the US wanted to do with it, they'd have the launcher necessary to copy it.

Unfortunately, the US never figured it out either. For the roles the Shuttle ended up being used in the 80s and early 90s, existing Soviet hardware was more than a match, so the Buran was cancelled.

Only much, much later was the ISS planned around the Shuttle's capabilities and found a limited use for its construction. (Some Shuttles, the earlier ones were too heavy to reach the ISS with any useful payload.)

I'm reminded of this famous joke: http://militaryhumor.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/military...

> Only much, much later was the ISS planned around the Shuttle's capabilities

IIR, the STS program (of which the shuttle was the only surviving part) was always intended to ferry cargo and some future spacestation parts into orbit. The ISS was the eventual compromise station and was a mere shadow of the original proposal.

As far as I know they could only imagine military uses for it and never envisioned it to be used for civilian purposes.

The pentagon discontinued reliance on STS after the interruption caused by the Challenger explosion.

It caused a lot of communication problems because everything was coded, astronauts forgot what code words meant and the whole thing was a bit of a joke.

http://www.airspacemag.com/space/secret-space-shuttles-35318...