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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

Your friend is mixing together some stuff in telephone game style.

While there were some military applications to the space shuttle, it rather emphatically was not some sort of covert space bomber. It's ability to glide and boost itself back into orbit is very limited as it can't store a ton of propellant. While gliding it needs to be in a level slightly nose up posture. How do you think it's supposed to release a bomb in that pose? It rather plainly has a thermal protection system on the bottom, and nothing usable as a bomb bay.

The whole idea is just preposterous.

The military applications of the shuttle were the ability to launch and capture satellites, as well as to potentially act as a reconnaissance platform. The X-37B largely continues those same missions.

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You are correct (AFAIK) about the real military capability of the STS. But the Russians, when analyzing the program, came to the conclusion that the stated reason the shuttle was being developed was bogus. They believed that it would never be cheaper to launch satellites using the shuttle than using regular expendable rockets, and so if the stated reason is bogus they concluded it's a cover for a military program. And then they invented military applications that such a system can have, even if you need to slightly modify the shuttle to achieve them. And then they decided to build their own to achieve parity with the West.

The US military's idea of military capability of the shuttle was to covertly launch a spy satellite from California going south, release it over the pole and land without completing a full orbit. This would, hypothetically, evade Soviet radar. Because the Earth rotates under the shuttle while this happens, the shuttle comes over far away from the launch site (and from the runway), and so it needed the large cross range ability (1100 miles) and this required the wings, etc.

AFAIK, the Soviets said they booby-trapped their military satellites so retrieving them from orbit would be hard.

Shooting at satellites from the shuttle is weird - a first strike requires shooting down many satellites, so you would need your weapons platform in many orbits at once. Just shoot from the ground or use something like the ASM-135 ASAT.

Bart Hendrickx and Bert Vis, Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle, 2007

>The IPM studies were conducted under the leadership of Yuriy Sikharulidze and Dmitriy Okhotsimskiy, two of its leading scientists.

>The IPM studies focused on the Shuttle’s possible use as a bomber, more particularly its capability to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States. Efraim Akin, one of the institute’s scientists, later recalled:

>“When the US Shuttle was announced we started investigating the logic of that approach. Very early our calculations showed that the cost figures being used by NASA were unrealistic. It would be better to use a series of expendable launch vehicles. Then, when we learned of the decision to build a Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg for military purposes, we noted that the trajectories from Vandenberg allowed an overflight of the main centers of the USSR on the first orbit. So our hypothesis was that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes. Because of our suspicion and distrust we decided to replicate the Shuttle without a full understanding of its mission. When we analysed the trajectories from Vandenberg we saw that it was possible for any military payload to re-enter from orbit in three and a half minutes to the main centers of the USSR, a much shorter time than [a sub-marine-launched ballistic missile] could make possible (ten minutes from off the coast). You might feel that this is ridiculous but you must understand how our leadership, provided with that information, would react. Scientists have a different psychology than the military. The military, very sensitive to the variety of possible means of delivering the first strike, suspecting that a first-strike capability might be the Vandenberg Shuttle’s objective, and knowing that a first strike would be decisive in a war, responded predictably” [14].

On other hand, US had own intelligence screwups that ended with "self disinformation."

USSR military planners had a plan to very intentionally design Alfa and Papa class submarines with very bizarre specs, and uncertain strategic role with an intent to set American strategic planners on a wrong path.

They were intentionally let to sail close to population centres, with a lot of subassemblies given to civilian manufacturers to encourage leaks.

Amazingly, 30 years later we got to know that the plan actually worked for them. From what is known now, news of Alfa's existence truly did set the military, CIA, and the executive branch into a contention in late seventies.

> Your friend is mixing together some stuff in telephone game style.

Are they? They said:

>> developed Buran to match what they saw as the space warfare capabilities that USA gained with the Shuttle

"what they saw" being the important part. Everything that follows is a seemingly legit interpretation of what the Shuttle can do, if you (reasonably) assume the U.S. wasn't fully disclosing all capabilities and purposes.

Even if they were wrong about the capabilities of the shuttle (I'm in no place to say) that doesn't mean that the friend was at all inaccurate in what they reported.

> While gliding it needs to be in a level slightly nose up posture. How do you think it's supposed to release a bomb in that pose?

With a little imagination? Shuttle positions rocket in orbit like a satellite and then ignites engine? Shuttle abandons its usual "slightly nose up posture" in preference for a nose-on-target posture; turning into a nuclear armed ICBM toting kamikaze.

>With a little imagination?

Space is surprisingly good at punishing 'imagination'. The nose up posture is related to the aerodynamics of reentry. You can't blow through the atmosphere at Mach 25 dead on and have anything but a scorched hulk left afterwards. Those thermal tiles, and that particular reentry profile are required to allow the atmosphere to safely absorb the kinetic energy of a re-entering craft, while keeping the entire thing safe from becoming part of the exotic and exciting chemistry such a process involves and giving some level of control over the down range trajectory through adjusting the lift vector. That lift vector was engineered to be workable in the hypersonic regime, but once you got to subsonic, it was a bit like flying a brick as I recall.

Could a nuclear payload be lifted by the shuttle? Yes. Would the size of the resulting payload make it as effective as a rocket launched warhead? Not so much.

The Space Shuttle was an interesting effort in engineering extremes that only really got off the ground I think due to the unique situation of the time. The Apollo missions were a success, but Vietnam, and a souring disposition toward manned space programs really put the kebash on what the Shuttle was just meant to be one piece of.

I wish I could remember the exact name of NASA's solar system colonization plan back then, but it was truly a glorious thing to read. Politically impossible. Probably economically ruinous given the wars we'd get entangled in over the next 50 years. But a beautiful dream at least.

Interestingly enough, I think it was really a necessary fumble to make in order to realize that reusable rocketry was the more economic launch paradigm to go for.

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