The Space Shuttle’s Military Threat

https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-favorite-part-about-the-economically-dubious

by Hooke • 7 years ago

157 81 7 years ago

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nier• 7 years ago

Couldn’t help but think of the Buran covered in bird feces while reading this article about how the Soviets thought the US-Americans were smarter than they were.

https://www.boredpanda.com/abandoned-soviet-space-shuttle-pr...

neolefty• 7 years ago

Haha yes we sure trolled them with our overly-politicized space exploration! Totally on purpose. Deep state.

iaw• 7 years ago

It seems like the Russians believed the shuttle would certainly be used for weapons delivery while the US intended it for espionage purposes.

I wonder why the Russians wouldn't consider such a possibility.

entity345• 7 years ago

The price tag and max payload? Perhaps they thought unrealistic to spend that much and to be able to carry that much just to take pictures...

JohnBooty2• 7 years ago

That's one of my favorite things about this whole debacle.

The Space Shuttle program was so incomprehensibly inefficient that the USSR thought that surely the USA was hiding something. In reality, it was just... a really inefficient program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...

JohnBooty2• 7 years ago

    > I wonder why the Russians wouldn't consider such a possibility

The USA already been doing aerial and satellite recon on the USSR for ages.

We don't see much discussion of the Shuttle's ability to launch surveillance satellites because that was an absolute given. Nobody questioned that.

DuskStar• 7 years ago

The espionage capability he's referring to wasn't the ability to launch satellites, it was the ability to recover them. Including Russian ones!

masswerk• 7 years ago

Manned orbital reconnaissance was an outdated concept then, abandoned with Project MOL/Gemini B and Almaz. I guess, it would have been rather counterintuitive to suspect such a role for the shuttle, with the systems dedicatedly developed for this lying around unused. And then there was still this huge payload capacity, which wouldn't fit the purpose…

(PS: While Gemini B did an empty shell test flight only, Almaz actually flew a few missions. So the Soviets actually won – widely unbeknownst – this military space race. However, at the time the US had already switched to their recon satellite program. We may assume that the two parallel projects had shaped pretty much the idea of the profile of such a mission and that the shuttle would have been an odd fit.)

michaelt• 7 years ago

I assume what iaw means by "espionage purposes" is that the Space Shuttle had a bunch of size/performance requirements set by the National Reconnaissance Office [1].

There's a certain amount of conjecture here, as spy stuff is classified. It's pretty well established that NRO needs impacted the payload size and 'cross range capability' (i.e. ability to land from polar orbit) [2] which may well have driven the delta-wing design and the piggyback-booster design [3]. And of course without the piggyback design, the Columbia disaster might not have happened.

[1] http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1960/1 [2] http://www.jamesoberg.com/sts-3A_B-DRM.PDF [3] https://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/scota.html

PaulHoule• 7 years ago

The Shuttle could grab on to random satellites with the Canadian arm -- it was a potential ASAT weapon.

Astronauts could then get out to inspect or tamper with satellites. Or they could put the satellite in the cargo bay and take it home.

themodelplumber• 7 years ago

Let’s build a copy now, and find out what it is good for later!

It's pretty smart in its own way. At a very superficial level the mimicry has a prospective effect, a potentially advantage-tipping energy. And military-style decisiveness almost always has to draw on things with such a superficial character by necessity. Seen as a start toward refinement of inner character (of a shuttle-like craft) from the outside-in, Buran makes much more sense.

kumarvvr• 7 years ago

Absolutely. USSR, at that stage in the cold war was living everyday with an existential crisis. It would not be uncommon for them to be so paranoid. And, it's a smart move. The amount of scientific and technological know-how generated from such a project would be tremendous. And the USSR military leaders would have surely known that.

Also, having honed in onto a very serious threat, spreading the information of that threat among it's scientists and pushing them towards a goal is an incredible motivation building tool. You can't make a scientist work effectively under threat of punishment. But tell him that his work will save his motherland, and you are on.

arethuza4• 7 years ago

Not to defend the Soviets, but their paranoia was kind of justified - from the earliest days of the Soviet regime they faced foreign interventions, through to the Nazi invasion then Cold War era threats from the US and its allies.

Of course this all nearly backfired on everyone with Operation RYAN and Able Archer 83 when the paranoia of the Soviet leadership was at such a crazed level that they thought the West was planning a first strike so they thought their only option was to strike first.

qaq• 7 years ago

"You can't make a scientist work effectively under threat of punishment" https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/soviet-s...

avmich2• 7 years ago

USSR, at that stage in the cold war was living everyday with an existential crisis. It would not be uncommon for them to be so paranoid. And, it's a smart move. The amount of scientific and technological know-how generated from such a project would be tremendous. And the USSR military leaders would have surely known that.

Shuttle was under development in 1976, and Energia-Buran as well. 70's are relatively successful years for USSR, that's why a project of such magnitude was undertaken.

arcticfox• 7 years ago

While I agree, it's logical in its own way, in retrospect it's pretty humorous:

Very early our calculations showed that the cost figures being used by NASA were unrealistic. [...] Because of our suspicion and distrust we decided to replicate the Shuttle without a full understanding of its mission.

I can imagine someone in NASA, looking at the massive budget overruns, reacting like that "Ha! Got 'em!" meme

mirimir3• 7 years ago

"The studies … showed that the Space Shuttle could carry out a return maneuver from a half or single orbit … , approach Moscow and Leningrad from the south, and then, performing … a "dive", drop in this region a nuclear charge, and in combination with other means paralyze the military command system of the Soviet Union."

Well, now we have ICBMs with hypersonic warheads. Doing the atmospheric skip thing.

rwmj• 7 years ago

This is interesting, but I don't understand why the Soviet's conclusion would be that they also needed a shuttle. Wouldn't they invest in an alternate means to defeat the "dive-bombing" shuttle attacking Moscow such as developing high performance anti-aircraft (spacecraft?) missiles?

vkou• 7 years ago

A missile that's re-entering at orbital velocities is incredibly difficult to defend against. You can't really shoot it down.

The threat profile of a Shuttle carrying nuclear bombs is that it combines the unstoppable nature of an ICBM with the potential for a surprise attack.

A surprise ICBM launch gives you 10-15 minutes between detection and mushroom clouds over your cities. An overflying Shuttle gives you 2-3 minutes.

Symmetry3• 7 years ago

The problem is that you don't know whether the Shuttle is just floating there on a peaceful mission or going in on an attack run until maybe 3 minutes before the nukes are dropped. Plus the big Soviet radars were pointed towards where US ICBMs would be coming from, not south where the shuttle would come from. Getting the capability to take out the shuttle would be really hard.

rkagerer• 7 years ago

My understanding is Shuttle launch preparations had to begin ages in advance, have good weather conditions, etc. So it's a first strike weapon the Soviets would have ample advance warning about (i.e. they'd see the thing crawling out to the pad at 1 mile/hr). Even if the Americans somehow managed to meticulously disguise the mission as a science one, it would only be useful as a very premeditated first strike, not as a rapid response to an imminent geopolitical threat.

The laser satellite stuff is interesting. I was under the impression the massive payload capability (which necessitated the external tank and SRB's) was dictated in part by the military, which lends some credence to those concerns.

lmilcin5• 7 years ago

You miss the point completely. The real issue is how much heads up you get before you get destroyed. This heads up time is what regulated cold war and kept both sides in check.

Effectively, each shuttle launch gives Russians a little heart attack and the culmination is basically each orbit that goes over Russia because SST is supposed to have capability to alter the course, dip in the atmosphere, drop the bomb and go back into orbit and they only get about 2 minutes of warning at best.

This warning time is crucial because that's all you got to decide whether you are under attack or not. For ballistic missiles launched from enemy territory you get half an hour and it means a bunch of people can gather data and figure out if it's real or fluke and make informed decision. You can't make informed decision in 2 minutes and it is extremely dangerous because it does not give you any capability to verify anything or ask anybody.

mcny• 7 years ago

» This warning time is crucial because that's all you got to decide whether you are under attack or not. For ballistic missiles launched from enemy territory you get half an hour and it means a bunch of people can gather data and figure out if it's real or fluke and make informed decision. You can't make informed decision in 2 minutes and it is extremely dangerous because it does not give you any capability to verify anything or ask anybody.

I apologise in advance for the naivety and the insensitivity but what kind of an idiot would give a go ahead for a strike like this knowing that an unprovoked strike on a major civilian population center in Russia will almost assuredly lead to a response from multiple Russian ICBM locations that we keep worrying about the North Koreans.

If there was a fleet of a dozen or more space shuttles either "permanently" in the air or ready to fly at a moment's notice, I can see how that would change the equation but one space shuttle can't just dip, deliver a payload, climb up to rinse and repeat on five or more cities, can it?

cm21872• 7 years ago

I actually wonder why these missiles were not left in orbit. Surely a missile launch directly from space would require much smaller missiles and even less lead time.

Symmetry3• 7 years ago

I wonder if this threat was part of the impetus behind the creation of the Dead Hand system[1], which would put a retaliatory strike in motion automatically after a decapitation?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

jessriedel2• 7 years ago

You miss the point completely. The real issue is how much heads up you get before you get destroyed.

rkagerer addressed exactly this point, so I think you've misunderstood him. He acknowledges that the heads-up time from launch is formally much shorter than other delivery methods, but argues that the effective heads up time is large in scenarios of interest ("imminent geopolitical threat") because you have to slowly roll out a shuttle launch. The only case where you can actually exploit the very quick launch speed is when you have premeditated a first strike months in advance, which is not the typical scenario that Cold Warriors worried about.

grkvlt• 7 years ago

And, welcome to the UK! We only had about three or four minutes warning time available, so when the sirens went off, that was all the time the population had to prepare/shelter, and obviously the authorities also only had that amount of time to decide on a response... This includes getting all your bomber aeroplanes started up, launched and in the air sufficiently far from the airfield to escape the blast radius of the weapons (probably Megaton range) used to destroy it!

Haga• 7 years ago

This heads up time is what gets destroyed by hypersonic missiles today.

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

Yeah space shuttle was a delivery vehicle for spy satellites and space based weapon systems. Pentagon/CIA was on the design committee.

eveningcoffee• 7 years ago

It looks like Tumblr is trying get away with a more elaborate cookie confirmation popup instead of proper GDPR implementation and I am not willing to play this game.

Is there a transcript somewhere?

mnw21cam• 7 years ago

Turn off Javascript?

_i78s• 7 years ago

Amp rendering maybe? https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-favorite-pa...

howard941• 7 years ago

The article doesn't mention it but surely the fears disappeared post-Challenger with the abandonmnent of thoughts to use Vandenberg as a high inclination launch site and the refusal to ever again fly with the Centaur upper stage in the cargo bay.

As an aside my first boss in the computer industry retired USAF detested Shuttle because it wasn't fulfilling a military mission that he thought it ought to fulfill. Strange times. Was great living in Indialantic and viewing the launches.

moftz2• 7 years ago

The Shuttle really taught some lessons to the space industry. We progressed in how to keep people alive in space but we also learned that making a multipurpose vehicle just isn't the best idea. All it takes is for one of the roles to be deprecated because of reasons and suddenly your expensive multi-tool starts to not be so attractive in terms of cost. Any time someone comes up with some complex plan to save money, it probably isn't going to save any money and will most likely end up costing you more than if you just continued on doing what you did before. Expendable vehicles aren't exactly cheap but they get the job done pretty reliably and without the risk of people dying.

lainga2• 7 years ago

that making a multipurpose vehicle just isn't the best idea

Could you possibly CC the Pentagon on this?

anovikov• 7 years ago

So basically, the Shuttle was simply a mistake as we now know, but the Soviets never accepted the very idea that such a massive mistake by a nation they deemed so advanced was possible, which resulted in an even bigger mistake on their own by reproducing it.

Much like in 1941, Soviets never accepted the possibility of Nazis invading just because every rational estimate resulted in suicidal nature of such an invasion by Hitler, which turned out correct, so they never prepared properly believing that Hitler is a military genius and will never commit such a stupid mistake.

kuwze• 7 years ago

Does anyone know of a book that has information like this (about technical aspects of the Cold War)?

tatersolid• 7 years ago

Blind Man’s Bluff is pretty awesome, but focuses on submarines and naval espionage

The Space Shuttle’s Military Threat

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