The answer is buried right in the middle of the article:
Back in 1970, to win Department of Defense support at the program’s outset, NASA had redesigned the shuttle to launch national security payloads. Now, that decision paid off.
If you visit the Museum of the Air Force in Dayton Ohio, the guides will tell you straight out that the cargo bay (and thus entire airframe) of Shuttle was enlarged to be able to hold a Keyhole/CORONA imaging satellite and retrieve it if necessary.
The potential Military applications of the Space Shuttle were why the Soviets copied it so closely. They didn't know why or what clandestine military purpose the shuttle had, but they knew that when they found out, they'd want the same capabilities. So they just copied it, not knowing why.
"Faced with the poorly understood threat of a military space shuttle, the Soviets decided that copying the American spacecraft exactly was the best bet. The logic was simple: if the Americans were planning something that needed a vehicle that big, the Soviets ought to build one as well and be ready to match their adversary even if they didn’t know exactly what they were matching." [0] [1]
Buran was born dead, because it was so expensive, eats all money from programs it could launch.
Examples, Soviets planning space telescope like Hubble; martian sample return; long-duration heavy Venus rover.
Unfortunately, Soviet non-market economy was about 4-5 times smaller than US, so US have money for Shuttle payloads, but Soviets don't have.
BTW, Buran was by design much more expensive than Shuttle.
Because non-reusable parts of Shuttle where cheap SRB's and fuel tank, but expensive LOH-LOX engines saved.
On each launch of Buran sacrificed equivalent to three Zenith rockets (essentially, Energia was unificated with Zenith, side boosters where very similar to Zenith 1st stage, and central block was Hydrogen, but costs similar).
The fun part about the polyus is due to something being mounted backwards, or software error, it did a backflip immediately after being released from its booster, thrusted retrograde and deorbited itself. It was supposed to burn prograde. Oops.
- Energia, unlike most other Soviet rockets, only launch to suborbital trajectory (perigee under sea level), so payload have to add few hundreds m/s speed by its own engines to stay on more or less stable circular orbit, and have only few minutes to do this.
Development of Polyus was not careful enough, to make this operation reliable, because on all previous Soviet rockets top stage launched to payload target orbit.
> They didn't know why or what clandestine military purpose the shuttle had, but they knew that when they found out, they'd want the same capabilities. So they just copied it, not knowing why.
This is the exact same thing that's happened with the Chinese and the X-37B:
I did work on the Inertia Upper Stage (IUS) project. That was the booster that would take satellites from the shuttle bay into their final orbits.
A lot of the IUS specifications were classified because of the payloads that were intended. Even the name of the program that made those specifications and the name of the organization that was behind the program were classified.
Of course, that all kind of fell apart when _Deep Black_ was published, and a lot of code names (the uttering of which were absolutely verboten) were suddenly being bandied about on the evening news.
I was in the weird position of pretending to not know code names that were being discussed on broadcast TV.
Now, what'll really bake your noodle: the Soviets almost certainly knew those codenames, projects, etc.
There's tons of stuff that everyone in the security services knows but is still "classified" and verboten from public discourse or even private conversation.
Half the purpose of classified program rules is to keep the public from realizing how much money is being pissed away on ridiculous boondoggles.
Carter's actual answer, though: he didn't want to throw away the money that had already been spent. Left unsaid is that the money in question represented a lot of jobs, and congresspeople in certain areas of the country would have thrown a fit, and the last thing Carter needed was to further irritate Congress.
I've never gotten a straight answer on who came first the KH-11 or HST. The mirrors are the same size and they both fit in the bay.
A long time ago I considered writing a "sci fi techno thriller" book plot along the lines of the HST was intentionally mis-built to own the Russians trying to copy the KH-11. There's easier ways to make money LOL.
In the 70s progress was fast and they were blasting new observation sats every couple months and new generations every couple years so it seemed sensible to have a "space truck" to service the rapidly changing technology. Then things settled down and at least declassified nothing is new in quite some time WRT observation sats.
Kind of like rapid changes in the PC industry in the 80s then things slowed down a lot to the point we don't "need" a Radio Shack or CompUSA anymore.
People thought the rapid progress of the 70s in spy sats was going to go on forever, so we need a "space truck" to keep up with rapid changes, and like most things predicted to go on forever, it didn't.
The keyhole satellites. Because of security classification the Hubble design had to be semi-cleanroom reengineered, but the contractors were the same and in fact many of the same engineers worked on both. The keyhole test equipment in Sunnyvale was reused for Hubble.
“With a ninty-four-inch telescope in space, we’ll be able to see phenomenal detail on planets,” I remarked.
“Just think what you could do if you pointed it at the earth,” Greg said.
“Why bother? All the interesting things are in the sky. And anyway, the Space Telescope physically can’t point to the earth. Its sensors will burn out if you try.”
“What if someone made such a telescope and pointed it to the earth. What could you see?”
I fiddled a few numbers in my head. Say, three hundred miles up in orbit, a nintyfour-inch telescope. The wavelength of light is about four hundred nanometers.… “Oh, you could easily see detail of a couple feet across. The limit would be around a couple inches. Not quite good enough to recognize a face.”
Greg smiled and said nothing. It took a while, but it eventually sunk in: the astronomical Space Telescope wasn’t the only big telescope in orbit. Greg was probably talking about some spy satellite. The secret KH-11, most likely.
That was the entire point of my Sci Fi techothriller I never finished writing where the plot was the HST was a declassified KH-11 and to F the Soviets over we released the declassified HST with an intentional fault so the Soviet clone would be faulty. Its a win-win because the service mission to fix the HST made the right people on our side extra money, but the Soviets didn't have a working-enough space-truck to fix their clones of the HST/KH-11, and we were certainly not going to volunteer to fix their KH-11 clone for them LOL.
It was never going to be a good book plot so I gave up on it. Unrealistic that they'd steal "everything" including the intentional mistake. The idea of a double agent plot where "their guy" was actually "our guy" who made sure they stole the entire lot including the intentional grinding error was, um, cringy. In defense of my bad novel plot, I was young at the time, and I've read worse books.
I always thought that Hubble in fact was a declassified KH-11. And indeed the NRO declassified and donated a couple more obsolete Keyholes to NASA in 2012 [1], one of which is now being used as the chassis (and optics?) of the NGRST [2].
Well, it wasn’t. This is pretty well documented. It has pretty much the same design requirements and even some of the same contractors, but it also differed in key ways. It had a totally different instrumentation board, optical packages, and was built for servicing which KH wasn’t.
The fact that it was the same form factor is not an accident, as Hubble was sized to fit in the shuttle payload bay, which was itself sized based on keyhole.
Well, there's been a LOT of KH-11 satellites over the years, so unlike with Hubble the NRO has had the opportunity to just put up an updated satellite instead of trying to fix an existing one.
https://space.stackexchange.com/a/58290 lays out some evidence that Kodak built similar mirrors for the KH-11 spy satellites, while Perkin-Elmer was selected for Hubble (and had built smaller mirrors for other spy satellites).
Early spy satelites even used film; I remember reading about one design that took a film picture, developed, and then used a CCD to scan it and send it back to earth, which is a bit mind boggling to me.
The ones my father worked on used film, too. But I do not think they were developed in space. All I know is a canister was dropped and intercepted (caught) by a passing jet. I don’t see why it would be developed or scanned in space. Just drop the can of exposed film and develop on the ground. Scanners in the 60s? Film chemistry in space? Why?
Maybe I'm misremembering the spy satellites using this (keeping the images secret is harder is you transmit them), but Lunar Orbiter 5 worked this way, so we had the technology in the 60's
[edit]
The lunar Orbiter used an adapted E-1 camera from SAMOS. The E-2 and (canceled) E-3 also used the semi-dry development process and photomultiplier readout method.
It would be interesting to know about the scan out piece here.
The idea makes sense to me, generally, in that film is high res, high speed, can have a fadt shutter. Given where digital computers & imaging were, the idea of turning digitization into a batch slow process decoupled from capture makes all the sense in the world.
I read somewhere that the mirror defect was specific to Hubble, because it was designed to focus at infinity while the Keyhole mirrors focused at 400 miles or whatever is orbital height. So it had a different curvature but the custom grind rig for that modified curvature was constructed erroneously. There is definitely public discussion of such details if you dig.
> A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter (94 in) design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites".
It's sort of interesting for them to point this out. This is also why the Titan IV program came into being. The Space Shuttle simply not being available meant that it was needed to develop an equivalent unmanned lift vehicle. I think the same museum even has some stuff from a Titan IV on display
They actually have a CORONA satellite on display and will tell you all about how it worked. So you know we're three or four generations beyond that technology now.
I remember as a kid we had textbooks that explained that the CORONA satellites were state of that art and used for surveillance. This was in the early 00s. Even then I looked at those little things and came to the conclusion that this was not in fact the entire extent of the US surveillance capabilities.
My dad worked for NASA during that time. The above is 100% what he said. NASA needed the air forces support which meant being able to launch large spy satellites. Which also meant the thing was really expensive making it a white elephant. It drained a the money that could have been spent to implement more modern launch systems. People used to get pissed off when I'd say the best thing for NASA to do was to stop flying the shuttle. Retrospectively that was the right thing to do.
Also the form and glidepath potential of the shuttle was designed for military capabilities to capture an adversary's satellite that were never used, according to "The Most Important Space Shuttle Mission Never Happened" by Scott Manley [0]. His source is this pdf [1].
How would capturing a satellite from orbit be any different than a soldier walking up to an enemy's position and driving off with a tank or flying a jet out from under their nose? Some shit would definitely be on the fan at that point.
A better analogy might be detaining a ship or in international waters or implementing a blockade such as the Cuban missile crisis. It is technically casus belli, but rarely does it get escalated that far. Rational actors don't really want to start a war over an incident that doesn't even involve their sovereign territory.
I don't think a blockade is the same thing though. A blockade just prevents a ship from going to the destination or the route it was wanting. It is still free to maneuver and is still in control of the flag it operates under.
The X-37B is much smaller than the shuttle (it was originally intended to fit in the shuttle's payload bay). It physically can't retrieve satellites of any significant size.
This may be changing with rapid extension of satellite size towards the small end of the spectrum. Small size is now significant.
For example, a radar imaging constellation might consist of multiple transmit/receive satellites, each of which could be quite small (say, 1 - 5 cu. ft.). The X37B could accommodate that - especially after it snipped the solar panels off.
Obviously total speculation, but it's the right size to be a flying speed-of-light weapon platform. USAF have been interested in such tech for a long time. Some fun links:
It seems small for any sort of directed energy weapon with a useful power output. There wouldn't be enough capacity for a big generator and heat radiators.
Right, short of a small reactor onboard, it seems unlikely to be able to store the energy or power densities required while in flight. Obviously there may be some unknown breakthrough that allows it...but I'm skeptical.
Only if they're in low enough orbits to make use of atmospheric drag. Such orbits decay quickly if the vehicle does not have boost capacity. Given the extremely long missions this thing flies - several missions over 700 days - it seems unlikely for it to make use of atmospheric drag. It might do so when in a highly elliptical orbit but even then it needs to perform a burn at apogee to keep it from re-entering before long.
Anybody really in the know is definitely not going to spill the beans. The payload is very small, the stated reasons it flew its missions are 'testbed' for various technologies. Which may well be all there is to it.
The links to the specific missions on the wikipedia page have some expert conjecture, based on observations by amateur skywatchers, so we have a good idea that it's being used to launch military surveillance and communications satellites, as well as being used to test new hardware. Which is all rather broad and generic, but if it were aliens, it's not like they'd tell us anyway.
Even if it were actually confirmed that OTV-1 launched a military surveillance satellite, we still wouldn't know how good it is at that other than some hard limits due to physics (mirror size and atmospheric interference).
One common theory is it's being used to do close-up inspections of other countries' satellites. Bonus points if you can attach a magnetic limpet mine to them for future usage.
I don't think anything particularly detectable; they're so outweighed by the planet they're orbiting that the barycenter doesn't move measurably.
(To be clear, I'd imagine they're only doing the inspection thing right now, but I do suspect they're at least tinkering with on-orbit capture, refueling, disabling etc. with an arm.)
Maybe. The mass of an explosive could be pretty small compared to the mass of a satellite. And even if you do notice that your (secret military) satellite is slightly heavier than the spec says, what would you do about it?
How expensive is it to attach a couple of space-rated external cameras to a modern satellite? This wouldn’t eliminate the threat but it would certainly remove the uncertainty. Presumably once you recognized the threat, then defending against it couldn’t be the hardest problem to solve.
It would not need to be very big mine though would it? A grenade would probably be just fine to eliminate the satellite from being useful. Something that small means it could carry a lot of ammo
> A grenade would probably be just fine to eliminate the satellite from being useful
Sure, but if You are lucky or smart enough, to use it close enough.
For example Soviet satellite-interceptors spent few years and made few attempts (each time with bigger explosive), before achieve enough cloud density .
If that is its mission the answer is "small payloads" since the carrying capacity of the thing would be quite limited with its 2.1 x 1.2 m [1] payload bay. That leaves little room for the grappling arm or other mechanism needed to pluck a satellite out of its orbit.
I suspect it does not retrieve payloads but takes them up and down again. Which payloads? Good question. Experimental sensors meant for inclusion in next-generation reconnaissance satellites maybe?
it could also be used to snatch enemy satellites from orbit - that's how we got the capability to repair the Hubble space telescope. Snatching satellites from space was a big deal, you could potentially get rid of a space based early warning system. i guess that potential must have made some Soviet planners quite nervous(or eager), as it would imply first strike capabilities.
Shuttle was designed, to make use of capacity of Morton Thiokol Inc. enterprise, which without SRB's was near 100% military enterprise (created to build SRB's for ICBM's).
That time Moon program was on liquid fueled rocket, but with nazi smell, so made political decision, to make 100% domestic design, without any traces to German works.
And incidentally, because the Hubble space telescope is widely acknowledged but not officially recognized as a Keyhole/CORONA turned the other way around, that's why it happened to be an excellent fit for the shuttle cargo bay.
Back in 1970, to win Department of Defense support at the program’s outset, NASA had redesigned the shuttle to launch national security payloads. Now, that decision paid off.
If you visit the Museum of the Air Force in Dayton Ohio, the guides will tell you straight out that the cargo bay (and thus entire airframe) of Shuttle was enlarged to be able to hold a Keyhole/CORONA imaging satellite and retrieve it if necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)