
The Space Shuttle’s Military Threat - Hooke
https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-favorite-part-about-the-economically-dubious
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rkagerer
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.

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lmilcin
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.

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mcny
» 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?

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darkpuma
I can't recall the source during the moment, but I read that during the cold
war it was decided that targeting major population centers was more ethical
than targeting nuke-capable military installations. This is counter-intuitive
until you consider that population centers are worthless targets if you're
planning on launching a decapitating first strike, therefore targeting major
population centers signals to the opponent that you are poised for a
retaliation strike, not a first strike. This is more ethical because it makes
a nuclear war less likely to occur.

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lmilcin
I like you pointed it out.

Cold War has its own, counter-intuitive logic. It is governed by game theory.

If war is bad then why US invests so much in war machine? Well, probably
because investing nothing is historically bad way of maintaining peace. You
are just inviting a bully to come and take your toys.

Looking from this point of view isn't it strange that so many people treat
Russia as villanous because it invests so much in their military (or it has
been investing)? I really wonder why people think it is ok for US to
militarize itself but for USSR or Russia to do that it is somehow bad. I, of
course, intentionally omit what the country is doing with its power, it is one
thing to have military and the other thing what are you using it for.

Now, if US sends its troops abroad to subject some country, is it so difficult
to think that USSR may feel threathened? If the way to keep peace is to keep
parity and one party is trying to upset the parity the other has no other
choice than to respond.

This game has many paradoxes and I feel people have not enough willingness to
look at some geo-political events through the lens of a longer game.

We may say we want to bring democracy to Venezuela but what Russia is seeing
is their power slipping. Right now they have precious little friendly land
close to mainland US and they have no prospects of gainging more. At the same
time, US is expanding NATO with more and more countries close to Russia
border. Why is it so difficult to figure out this makes them very uneasy?
Wouldn't some kind of response be expected? Why would US be surprised by it?

Up until now the game was to keep parity and now the parity is slowly eroding
away. This absolutely must cause a response from Russia because the theory
says they have to fill the void some way. Electronic warfare? Hacking?
Meddling in elections?

Each side wants, understandabl, to mobilize its population in this struggle
and there is no better way than to paint the enemy as a villain. I just wish
we keep healthy amount of population on all sides capable of seing through
cheap propaganda.

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literallycancer
The calculus becomes a bit different if you are one of the countries Russia
considers its buffer. You might have some aspirations of your own, but of
course Russia has its own plan for you. The opposing superpower follows the
same playbook, but you don't care since they aren't invading you, and so
you'll happily join their defense pact.

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themodelplumber
> 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.

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kumarvvr
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.

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arethuza
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.

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mirimir
Well, in the late 40s, the US was not so subtly threatening to nuke the
Soviets. Some even argue that they nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily as a
threat to the Soviets.[0]

0) [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7706-hiroshima-
bomb-m...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7706-hiroshima-bomb-may-
have-carried-hidden-agenda/)

~~~
arethuza
Curtis LeMay _wanted_ to attack the Soviets - from this perspective there was
a grim logic to this - he (correctly) realised that at some point the Soviets
would reach parity in strategic weapons with the US and he (incorrectly)
thought that a conflict was inevitable - so he wanted to destroy the Soviet
Union while the US could do it without any direct impact on the US.

Thankfully, he didn't get his way.

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mirimir
Yes, that's what I was thinking of. But I'd forgotten LeMay's name :( And I
also vaguely remember something about an attack plan by George C. Marshall.

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lstroud
If memory serves, Patton was a huge advocate for continuing past Berlin to
Moscow.

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arethuza
Not sure that would have been a good idea - the Soviet Red Army was
_immensely_ strong and had just done most of the work in defeating the Nazis
and the US didn't have man (any?) atom bombs left at the end of the war.

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lainga
They didn't have any to start with in May '45, the Trinity test was in July

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nier
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...](https://www.boredpanda.com/abandoned-soviet-space-shuttle-program-
buran-baikonur-cosmodrome-kazakhstan-ralph-mirebs/)

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

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mirimir
> "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.

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iaw
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.

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masswerk
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.)

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

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howard941
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.

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moftz
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.

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

Could you possibly CC the Pentagon on this?

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rwmj
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?

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vkou
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.

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

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

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anovikov
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.

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eveningcoffee
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?

~~~
pp19dd
Amp rendering maybe? [https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-
favorite-pa...](https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-favorite-
part-about-the-economically-dubious/amp)

