That was a great article.

Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.

(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)

▲ areoform 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks!

note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point.

Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space.

Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper.

It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand.

I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes.

---

Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1

Somehow all the numbers just happened to line right up. :)

▲ curiousObject 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1

This isn’t true. The same article even explains that.

From that article: “It takes only some basic fact checking to debunk all the preposterous allegations…”

▲ areoform 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, you're right. I'm not going to pretend that this is a serious proposition. There isn't a lot of evidence to support it.

For me, it's a fun conspiracy theory to engage with. I'm only doing this for the love of the game as it were. Please don't take it that seriously.

But you have to admit, it is a fun theory. A lot of the claims made by the Russians / Roscosmos are most likely false, but if you notice the article says,

    > The only concrete document referred to is an intelligence memo that Defense Minister Sokolov supposedly received on February 24 about the assignment of the French astronauts. Whether such a memo really landed on his desk that day is questionable (after all, Baudry’s assignment to 51E had been publicly announced by NASA in August 1984), but the idea that the assignment raised some suspicions in Soviet circles about the objectives of the Challenger mission may not be so far-fetched. There had always been a high level of paranoia in the Soviet Union about the military potential of the Space Shuttle. Misconceptions about the military applications of the shuttle, such as the belief that it was capable of diving into the atmosphere to drop bombs over Moscow, had been a key factor in the Soviet decision to develop Buran in 1976. The Buran orbiter was a virtual carbon copy of its US counterpart in shape and dimensions, exactly to counter the perceived military threat of the Shuttle. Furthermore, a couple of developments in the Shuttle program in early 1985 may have fueled the Soviet paranoia. The Shuttle had flown its first dedicated Defense Department mission (STS-51C) in January 1985 and a controversial laser experiment in the framework of SDI was planned for the STS-51G mission in June.

Whether or not said documentation can be trusted, which bits could be taken as true v. what's just insane paranoia is something that would require more work to discount than most would think. Because, as I've said, the numbers do line up from the article,

    > The least one can say is that Salyut-7, which was 13.5 meters long and had a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, would have fit inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay, whose dimensions were 4.6 by 18 meters. In fact, after the final crewed mission to Salyut-7 in 1986, the Russians significantly raised its orbit in hopes that one day it could be retrieved by Buran, which had the same dimensions as the American shuttle.

The Shuttle was an amazing piece of technology with amazing capabilities. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-41-C and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49

and this is one of my favorite missions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A (with my favorite space selfie)

Fun fact, the original deorbit plan for the Hubble was for the Shuttle to bring it back and then put it inside the Smithsonian, https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/orbitaldebris2019/orbital2...

(the Smithsonian part is IRL lore, and isn't mentioned online, AFAICT)

▲ throwanem 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of primary sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.)

Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241229052235/https://ntrs.nasa...

▲

randallsquared 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?

While I have no reason to believe this particular escapade, I do expect that there are a thousand such wild stories that have remained secret. Watergate seems obvious and explosive to moderns, but at the time it could easily have gone undiscovered or unremarked. How many other similar scale plots, domestic and international, succeeded or failed without ever being surfaced into the history books? A few? Dozens? Hundreds? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

	▲	throwanem 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thousands? Millions? Trillions? Hectoseptisquintillions? "Ignorance is not a datum." Teach that as catechism from 1975 and we would have been spared the "rationalist" scourge altogether.

▲ nick49488171 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That would have been absolutely horrible