That's only because Soyuz has a smaller crew capacity. Both Soyuz and STS have had the same number of catastrophic failures (Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 on the Soyuz side; Challenger and Columbia on the STS side).
Neat fun fact: Soyuz 11 also has the distinction of being the cause of the only in-space human fatalities (all other spaceflight-related fatalities occurred either during launch or during reentry).
200+ ground crew and spectators were blown apart by Soviet incompetence during the R-16 launch. Yes, there are far, far more deaths in the Soviet program. Its is literally history's worst rocket catastrophe. The Soviets even denied it and covered it up until 1989. Please stop parroting Russia propaganda. You're not fooling anyone here.
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-disasters/nedelin-c...
http://www.astronautix.com/articles/therophe.htm
http://gizmodo.com/5239848/how-not-to-launch-a-rocket-the-ne...
The Soviet space program killed 200+ people. I think you USSR die-hards need to stop making excuses and accept history. Safety is not one of your strong suites.
"Nedelin pressured Yangel and the rest of the R-16 team to accelerate their timetable. They did this primarily by ignoring all of the quite sensible safety measures in effect at the time."
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-disasters/nedelin-c...
I don't know the details on ground crew deaths (if that's what you're actually referring to), in which case Soviet recklessness wouldn't be exactly surprising, and you're probably entirely right. I don't think that's what the parent commenter's talking about, though.
Ha. If you can look at the images from the Hubble space telescope and call the STS a failure, thats some pretty extreme cognitive dissonance.
Ok but if Buran failed didn't STS fail too, just took more money and killed more people? No current space vehicles are based on it. It was too big. Too expensive. Too failure prone (it killed a lot more astronauts than Soyuz even though Soyuz is older). Once the concept was proven, after a few space walks, maybe fixing Hubble, it was time to realize it was a bad idea scrape it. Which eventually happened.
Otherwise if you say, "Ok" it was for research, well so was Buran it was research and jobs program. They showed they could build a space plane just like Americans. Cold War was full of such "we can do it too" feats. Some advanced science and engineering some didn't.
> poster-boy in mismanaging a spacecraft project and what essentially became a Soviet "make work" jobs program
Yes but by that token they can still laugh at us for mismanaging it longer and making it into an even more glorified jobs program.
> I find it interesting that these things haven't been turned into scrap yet.
It is not that surprising. Not sure how much nostalgia plays into but it is probably too expensive and cumbersome to go and start tearing the building and the spacecraft apart.