A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle? | Hacker News Reader

A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle?

arstechnica.com

165 pointsxrayarx171 comments

I found the Soviet Union's alleged theory explaining the American space shuttle to their own leadership[1] to be quite interesting. According to some documents submitted to the central committee by the head of the fledgling Keldysh institute (famous for it's faculty - Israel Gelfand and Alexey Lyapunov among others), the shuttle could theoretically launch in a trajectory from Vandenburg, CA south towards and over Antarctica and northwards over the Indian Ocean towards Moscow, with several nuclear weapons aboard, as a kind of hypersonic dive bomber.

This would, in a nuclear exchange, bring the mean time from initial detection of an American attack to the first nuclear strike on Moscow down from seven minutes (UGM-73 missiles on a depressed trajectory launched from the North Sea near Denmark)[2] to a little over three minutes.

Fears of this, according to the theory, led to several of the design specifications for the Buran shuttle. I find the extensive concerns about, and optimizing of strategy around, minimizing warning time in a nuclear exchange to be fascinating.

[1]https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1 [2]https://www.scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs03gronlu... (PDF)

Nuclear capability explains the “single polar orbit with a large crossrange” requirement. How was the shuttle capable of such a large crossrange? Maneuverability in the atmosphere?

The large delta wings on the space shuttle are what allow the large cross-range, by letting it "turn" on the way down. The single polar orbit was to allow rapid, stealthy insertion of a reconnaissance satellite into polar orbit. According to the space shuttle engineers, there was never any contemplation of arming the shuttle, though the DoD did set many requirements (including payload bay size and cross-range).

So an old school hypersonic glider

Basically, although the space shuttle has the worst glide ratio of any aerospace vehicle I am aware of. To simulate landing the shuttle, they used a businessjet with the engines in reverse…

A brick with small stubby wings bolted on.

Yep! No go arounds once you re-entered.

Here's the training aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Training_Aircraft

Cool, interesting bit about how it actually simulated the flight characteristics that I didn't know before:

> To match the descent rate and drag profile of the real Shuttle at 37,000 feet (11,300 m), the main landing gear of the C-11A was lowered (the nose gear stayed retracted due to wind load constraints) and engine thrust was reversed. Its flaps could deflect upwards to decrease lift as well as downwards to increase lift.

Here's a cool video of landing the shuttle in real time. The whole landing proceeds unnervingly fast!

The actual landing HUD and audio starts at 13:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4prVsXkZU

I assume the details are highly-classified, but I'm curious if a similar cross-range capability is part of what the DOD's been experimenting with via the X-37B.

>the shuttle could theoretically launch in a trajectory from Vandenburg, CA south towards and over Antarctica

Having spent time at the South Pole, the ice runway at the South Pole Station was sized and built and in part funded by NASA to handle the scenario in which a shuttle on a trajectory that took it over the pole found itself in need of an emergency divert runway.

To what extent was the runway there "built" as a permanent installation, vs being an ephemeral phenomenon that is refreshed season by season?

It requires maintenance but it's not like the ice is going to melt in the South Pole "summer."

Not yet

Seems like I just read on HN an article on Antarctic weather patterns (but not ice floes) are self-reinforcing.

That was one model. I sure hope it’s correct. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned over 30 years of following this topic, it’s that things very rarely break in our favor.

After reading endless books from the 70s/80s spreading the fear of entering a new ice age, going through acid rain and a hole in the ozone layer you would be surprised by how quickly important things change.

Acid rain was an enormous problem, and is no longer because a large number of countries passed emissions regulations to curb emissions that caused it. Places like London used to have so much air pollution, going outside on a rainy day was hazardous to your health because the fog was toxic.

The hole in the ozone layer is repaired because a large number of countries passed regulations prohibiting many uses of ozone-depleting substances, and consumers voted with their wallets as well.

Unfortunately, we're not seeing anywhere near the commitment required to slash CO2 emissions, and a huge amount of damage is already done.

It's not just climate change, but in the last fifty years, something like 2/3rds of wildlife has disappeared. In barely one generation we've wiped out two thirds of wildlife. That is mind boggling and if it doesn't count as a mass extinction, I don't know what does.

Had consumers voted with their wallets for banning Freon? I don't know. Isn't it just a successful of developing alternatives and regulation?

Maybe some consumers voted with their wallets for fuel economy car (thus lower CO2 emissions)

We’re above 1 degree C and heading towards 1.5 very quickly, with rising methane levels from multiple sources. This isn’t the ozone hole. I wish it was.

Responding to new evidence is a feature of science, not a bug.

As a 10x traveler to South Pole, have never heard this assertion. Do you have a reference somewhere I can learn more about this?

It's fiction.

It looks like I was at Pole about 15-20 years before your earliest trips, back in the days when the Cold War was still a thing (technically just having ended, but still having been a major part of all of our lives). There were a lot of old timers in those days whose era extended back to the early days of the shuttle (and at least one who went back to the Apollo days, but that's a different story). I'm guessing most of those folks retired long ago and those bits of cultural history likely faded away with them.

I'll also ask out of curiosity if the pair of guys that constituted the Naval outpost that operated the Ground Controlled Approach radar system at the South Pole runway is still there and still as stand-off-ish from the civilian station as they were back in the day, or whether that was a cold-war-era phenomenon (I always assumed that role was reserved for those individuals who managed to piss off an Admiral in a particularly impressive manner, as it seemed to be an incredibly isolated existence for them, hiking out to and back from the radar station and otherwise pretty much not interacting with anyone).

I wonder if that is the same thing as the radome installation I visited in 2010 or so. It was a long, long (cold!) hike almost to the other end of the skiway, and the installation was fascinating. I have to say I remember the people who showed us around being super nice... but it was also thoroughly a civilian operation, distinct from the New York Air Guard crews who would cycle through (and who I also had only good experiences with). Different times, I'm guessing! :-)

Sorry, but that is ridiculous; the diversion airport for a Vandenberg launch (the equivalent of the TAL abort mode) was Easter Island, which NASA had to upgrade at huge cost. Past that there would be enough energy for an abort to orbit. There was no 'land 1/3 of the way across the planet' shuttle abort mode and no way to get the thing home if it had.

I can't tell you why NASA funded it or on the basis of what calculations, only that they did. Large bureaucracies frequently do things that look irrational from the outside, as do those looking to prevent or win geopolitical conflicts (including possibly negotiations involving the cost of operating the Easter Island runway you mention, negotiations that might have been significantly advanced by being able to say "we have an alternate landing site under construction").

NASA does lots of stuff in lots of places, so maybe they spent some money on a South Pole airfield. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that it had no connection to the Space Shuttle.

What would that accomplish? The possibility of a nuclear sneak attack were known to both sides.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)

That's interesting, also a possible insight into what the X-37b mission is. Retrieving payloads, but what payloads?

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.

I'm really curious, do we have any idea whatsoever what the X-37 is being used for?

A big advantage of space planes is the ability to change orbit very quickly, could be used for reconnoissance or as a weapons delivery vehicle.

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.

There is value from the optionality of having a capability even if it isn’t regularly used.

That highly depends on who 'we' is.

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).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQN4hId5psg

"Everything We Know About The US Air Force's Secret Space Plane - The X-37B" by Scott Manley

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:

- Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 1999–2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060831035044/http://www.de.afr...

- Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 2009–2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160428181404/http://www.kirtla...

- LASER Effects Test Facility fact sheet from 2002 showing a 50-kilowatt CO² LASER setting a test target on fire: https://web.archive.org/web/20070315131556/http://www.de.afr...

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.

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.

Wouldn't the mass change cause some kind of detectable change in the satellite's trajectory over time?

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.)

What if your satellite did some more manoeuvres for station keeping, wouldn't you notice the mass difference then?

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

Just something to put the satellite in a spin that is beyond what attitude control can recover from. Could be really tiny.

High energy elementary particle? ;)

> 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 .

It carries a negotiating table. Our telepresence on one side, the aliens['] on the other.

Or black box, so they will spend millennia to understand, what we want to say :)))))

Or... freak out and ATTACK!

What if the X37B was the imaging satellite?

Why would they build it to retrieve itself? That's very meta

Don't you get it. Its shuttles retrieving other shuttles all the way up!

Russian nesting shuttles?

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.

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?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150321121050/http://www.boeing...

https://youtu.be/KZX1YCmzHEw?t=109

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

Believe it or not, they have an entire Titan IV on display: https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact...

It's pretty impressive in person.

(Scroll through the gallery that isn't obviously a gallery near the top to see it)

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.

https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact...

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.

What blew my mind was how large it was. You're thinking it's a camera...how large can that be? It's the size of a school bus.

I think you are thinking of KH-9 satellites. CORONA is just a tiny little thing.

Yes, thanks for the correction.

As a teenager I tried to spec out a flying Titan III model using standard tube sizes from Estes. Never carried to fruition tho.

The Air Force also planned to have its own squadron of shuttles.

As depicted in Moonraker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asgLef3oVAw

I used to work with an English chap who made a habit of reminding me that Moonraker had US Space Marines a good few years before Aliens … Semper Fi!

And a good few decades before space force!

Moonraker is one of the only movies to properly depict a Shuttle launch, and it came out before the Shuttle ever flew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH3EsUTPihg

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].

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY

1. http://www.jamesoberg.com/sts-3A_B-DRM.PDF

Kinda good too because that would be pretty close to an act of war and set a dangerous precedent for the weaponisation of space.

You prepare for the war you don't want to fight...

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.

That's what I mean exactly.

I'm glad we were never in the situation where this would have been thinkable. Because it would mean direct war between superpowers.

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.

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.

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]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6428205

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131001110918/http://arstechnic...

A specific case of the general idea of superpower convergence.

"...the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap." — AdS (fict)

"This is preposterous! I never approved of anything like that!" ~ PM (fict)

"Our source was The New York Times." ~ AdS (fict)

This movie was too clever for it's time.

Buran was radically different - no internal rockets, just jets. Unmanned optionally.

The most interesting thing is that the launcher (Energina) was actually also used to launch a space battlestation.

No - I am not kidding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)

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.

This was very probable for so brave new program.

- 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.

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 potential Military applications of the Space Shuttle were why the Soviets copied it so closely

It was just impossible for soviets, to copy STS.

First, they just don't have (still) anything similar to Tiocol enterprise, and can't build huge SRB's.

Second, soviets have huge weakness in electronics and computers, so they just don't have payloads for such system.

So Buran was pure political decision, without any rational foundations.

Unfortunately for Russians, this is typical for their culture, to make something enormous and than thinking, what to do with it.

> 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:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2022/08/22/mysterious-...

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.

qq and probably no one would answer but did keyhole have the same mirror defect?

Hubble was fixed by the costar addition. I wonder if there's missions to fix keyhole we don't know about.

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.

Seriously, Wikipedia lists 5 generations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN 5+3+4+3+3 total launches.

It is completely depressing that we got one (now two) space telescopes, and… 14 equivalent Earth telescopes.

To be fair, we wouldn't have gotten the space telescopes at all without the Earth telescopes and their predecessors.

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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

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.

Hehe, see also: "the Zenith Angle" by Bruce Sterling (he did complete his book).

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).

I can’t speak specifically for keyhole, but I know that Kodak definitely worked on spy satellites. My father worked there and on them.

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.

> Just drop the can of exposed film and develop on the ground. Scanners in the 60s? Film chemistry in space? Why?

Can't say about recon sats but there are two reasons:

a) you need things fast

b) you can't drop it - you are too far

As sibling points out Lunar Orbiter used this and IMMSMV - some Soviet space probes (Venus?) too.

> Scanners in the 60s?

In the late 60s - just fine. Don't forget, TV existed back then already.

> In the late 60s - just fine. Don't forget, TV existed back then already.

E-1 SAMOS launched in 1960. I was wrong about it using a CCD though, it used a photomultiplier.

https://www.damninteresting.com/faxes-from-the-far-side/

No, that was a manufacturing mistake not a design error. A different contractor was used.

From what I remember, the defect was a manufacturing defect, not a design flaw.

Some chipped paint meant that a critical distance was extended by the thickness of the paint layer.

The defect was a huge deal for a long range telescope because the distortion makes up a larger part of the image the further out you go.

At Earth to spy satellite distances, it's like 1/4" and probably below the resolution of the camera used at the time.

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.

From Cliff Stoll's excellent The Cuckoo's Egg:

“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.

Great book!

>so we need a "space truck" to keep up with rapid changes

Check out Space Truckers, with square pigs, because they pack so tightly!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReKKdeDpb8A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zcBjI9N0rI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Ifaeff0mA

From Wikipedia:

> 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".

This, to me, says that KH-11 came first...

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.

Definitely, no.

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.

Yeah, that's unfortunate. We got a boxcar with wings.

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.

Yeah, even the existence of NRO was officially classified until almost 20 years after it was first accidentally disclosed.

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.

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.

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.

I think it's obvious at this point, but Eric Berger is doing/has done an amazing job covering space for Ars Technica

I think these sorts of articles are so hard to write, where it's simultaneously the story of what happened, with sources, but also the story of how they know; how they found out. It's two different modalities of explanation and you have to be a pretty expert writer to seamlessly switch back and forth between the two. I run into this challenge pretty regularly when writing retrospective analyses with tech.

Side trivia: 20 years ago today the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas, killing all seven astronauts on board.

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

I remember seeing this in school when I was a kid. That was when space exploration because tainted in my generation. It was cool but astronaut wasn't something anyone wanted to be anymore so you die in the atmosphere.

Sorry it was the challenger!

Are you thinking of Challenger which was more than 20 years ago?

> It was cool but astronaut wasn't something anyone wanted to be anymore so you die in the atmosphere.

That's a strong disagree from me and people I spoke with. There were lots of "if they knocked on my door today asking if I wanted to join, I'd do it in a heartbeat" comments. I was one of them, as a 6th grader.

Nobody every thought being an astronaut was without risk, did they? Every time a fighter pilot takes off, there's an inherent risk with that, yet people are lined up to join. I'm sorry you're such a "fair weather fan", but that just means one less person to compete with for those that actually want to do it

It wasn't just the students. I think if the attitude of the teachers were different I might still have wanted to be one. Safety was important and teachers were cautious.

Were you shown the hour(s) of exercises they had to do daily to maintain their muscle? That was enough to make most kids say no thanks if chosen lol.

I guess I was 11 or 12, so I was an extremely active kid. Sitting inside not running around bored the shit out of me, so getting paid to do physical activities while training to be an astronaut? HellzToTheYeah where do I sign.

If they knocked on my door now, I'd still sign up. Again, I'd say "fair weather fan" if you can't handle a little exercise to be able to see the view for yourself. You sound like someone that is unimpressed by the view of a backyard telescope because Hubble's images are better. To each their own, but I'm one for the actual experience instead of pictures of other people's experiences. That's just one of the many reasons I don't give damn about following people on Insta or whatever platform.

Day or two after that happened, it occurred to me to scan back through the Cowboy Bebop episode "Wild Horses" and see which shuttle it'd featured, because I couldn't recall.

It was Columbia, of course, so that episode joined seemingly every movie made between '73 and '01 and set in NY (that was still pretty fresh, too, mind you) in being a bit of a distracting watch, in a way that was not originally intended.

I remember it well, I was on a trip in Australia and I saw the news photos in a newspaper in a shop in Glenelg, Adelaide. One of those things so shocking that you remember (not 9/11 or Kennedy shocking but still)

This classic SNL skit from 1979 explains what a great nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter really is, and Rodney Dangerfield explains just how big Jimmy Carter really is.

https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-04-e-16-ri...

("The Pepsi Syndrome" skit starts at 8:15)

Dr. Edna Casey: Well Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?

[Rodney Dangerfield enters]

Rodney Dangerfield: How do you do, how are you?

Ross Denton: Rodney, can you please tell us, how big is the president?

Rodney Dangerfield: Oh, he’s a big guy, I’ll tell you that, he’s a big guy. I tell you he’s so big, I saw him sitting in the George Washington bridge dangling his feet in the water! He’s a big guy!

Rosalynn Carter: Oh my God! Jimmy! Oh God!

Rodney Dangerfield: Oh, he’s big, I’ll tell you that, boy. He’s so big that when two girls make love to him at the same time, they never meet each other! He’s a big guy, I’ll tell you!

Rosalynn Carter: Oh no! Oh Jimmy! My Jimmy!

Rodney Dangerfield: I don’t want to upset you lady, he’s big, you know what I mean? Why he could have an affair with the Lincoln Tunnel! I mean, he’s really high! He’s big, I’ll tell you! He’s a big guy!

Rosalynn Carter: No! No! No!

Ross Denton: Rodney, thank you very much. You can go.

Rodney Dangerfield: It’s my pleasure. He’s way up there, lady! you know what I mean?

[goes off, leaving Rosalynn Carter very upset]

This case is very likely of model "too large to fail".

Last time it used, when appear high probability of recession, and govt prints money and feed them to larges financial companies, to keep them alive.

Opposite to print money, usually, to suffer huge losses of popularity, because without these measures, could close large chain of connected to subjects companies, will need to spend money to pay for unemployment.

So I think, Carter's decisions where because it was easy solution for him, and less fear than to close.

Examples of brave side politics are very rare, one of them Thatcher, decided to close mining companies, which decades fed by govt subsidies, which costed her very expensive.

I have to confess when I read this I thought, "Jeez, just go ask the guy" and...the author did! So great to see actual journalism.

Wow, what I would give to just hang out and chat with Jimmy Carter!

I wonder if he asked him about the killer rabbit?

Maybe I could get an appointment to sit down with him if I claimed I was the guy who helped eradicate the Guinea Worm?

https://www.cartercenter.org/about/experts/donald_hopkins.ht...

Thanks, for others wondering:

> Why did the president ultimately support funding the shuttle in its time of need? “I was not enthusiastic about sending humans on missions to Mars or outer space,” Carter told Ars. “But I thought the shuttle was a good way to continue the good work of NASA. I didn’t want to waste the money already invested.”

>But Carter, according to Kraft, had just returned from Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna, and he had spoken with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, about how the United States was going to be able to fly the shuttle over Moscow continuously to ensure they were compliant with the agreements.

Assuming this was 1972, the United States had several generations of image reconnaissance satellites in orbit at the time.[0]

The shuttle made a good cover story I suppose.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...

> Assuming this was 1972

Carter was inaugurated President on January 20, 1977.

Whoops, minor detail! Caffeine was not kind today..

Correction: The SALT II agreement was reached in June, 1979 and I believe that’s the correct period of time for the paragraph I quoted above.

It’s worth noting the US had a couple KH-11s already flying at that point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN#Block_I

For what it's worth, I heard Kraft speak about 15 years ago and tell the story of Carter bragging about the shuttle. As he told it, he walked into the meeting expecting to tell Carter that they were going to have to cancel the shuttle program. However, before he could start Carter told him that he had just been speaking to Brezhnev and telling them how much the shuttle was going to outshine what they were doing. Without missing a beat, Kraft said "Mr. President, I'm going to need three million dollars".[1]

[1] I don't recall the exact amount he said.

For the Shuttle to be cancelled by politicians is one thing; that's just democracy in action. For the Shuttle to fail under its own weight is quite another; that's technical and organizational failure. The latter reflects poorly on the politicians who oversaw it and the country generally. It would have been a bad look for Carter's legacy, whether or not he hated NASA.

Other folks have pointed out there are military applications, and I read a while back that these kind of "space planes" have a unique advantage: with their wings they can dip into the atmosphere and very quickly change their trajectory without using a lot of fuel. From a military perspective, I'm guessing this makes them harder to shoot down. The military is still flying space planes [0] so this makes sense to me.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/spaceplane-lands-after-908-days-...

Ah a space shuttle article, wonder if they will use one of my favorite photographs from that era...

Yup!

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Star_...

But gosh they screwed up by naming the one that would never go into space "Enterprise"

Enterprise was supposed to go to space, but it ended up being cheaper to build Challenger from spare parts because the design specs had changed. It then ended up being cheaper to build Endeavor from spare parts than retrofit Enterprise after the Challenger tragedy.

I vaguely remember that some crazy conspiracy theorist confronted Captain Kirk once, and tried to force him to put his hand on the Bible and swear to God that Star Trek wasn't fake, and not just shot on a sound stage Hollywood, and then Captain Kirk punched him in the face!

Is this an attempt at feeding noise into ML data thereby giving humans some more time to rule the earth?

If so, I support it wholeheartedly.

This exact thing definitely happened to Buzz Aldrin when he was confronted about the moon landing being fake, and it's caught on film :)

https://boingboing.net/2022/09/10/i-cant-believe-its-20-year...

I believe that was the joke.

one of my favorite shuttle images was the one with the iPod on the dash while in orbit.

https://news.softpedia.com/news/iPod-in-Space-81065.shtml

Wow, I don't I've ever seen a picture so easy to date from the clothing worn...

I assumed the space shuttle was going to be used to retrieve things from space. Maybe even someone else's satellites. My father used to work in the heat treating industry, and they did a bunch of work on the space shuttle and many other aerospace/military projects.

We certainly hauled a bunch of sats home over the decades, see STS-51-A for a typical declassified example of some relatively boring comsats.

The classified missions published landing weights for some reason; they were low; the assumption is they never hauled anything home or they faked the landing weights because it wouldn't matter if they told the truth or not to the public (AFAIK no payload related change in realistically observable flight path was ever seen by independent observers)

Westar 6 was later relaunched as AsiaSat 1. It trips non-space people out because "everyone knows" SpaceX and the old shuttle are the only things ever launched into space, landed, and re-launched back into space, but they were doing this back in the 80s with comsats and who knows what the military was up to.

The 60s spy sats also took photos on film that were ejected in re-entry capsules and captured in mid-air using an airplane. Really crazy stuff they came up with and I'm surprised it actually worked. Engineering chops they sure had and balls too because capturing a falling object from space is pretty dangerous.

Of course then there were the soviets launching entire nuclear reactors into orbit for a few months' worth of radar duty. Ok the US did one too but it was just one. All those Russian cores are still in orbit except the two that crashed.

Crazy times.

Yeah, the "snag this roll of film with a plane as it parachutes down" is the kind of thing that elicits a "wait .. what!?" reaction.

But then, so does the quality of the images they captured relative to what would be expected given the times.

Stuff that goes inside the shuttle (as I assume a satellite in this case does) I don't know that I'd "count" in that sense. Like, obviously the humans riding inside various craft were routinely launched, landed and relaunched under that same kind of definition.

There's another good explanation, The US didn't want to flush the investment in Apollo entirely. The space shuttle was conveniently expensive enough and on paper sustainable enough to keep the space program alive. In hindsight, there is limited evidence that private companies would have been competitive with the space shuttle in the 1970s.

Carter always gets painted as some sort of dove but he only cancelled the B-1A.

Fully funded carriers, MX, Trident/SLBM, LA subs, Aegis destroyers, GLCM, ALCM, SLCM, Harpoon, F-117, B-2 development and $trillions more.

They probably knew it was a rube goldberg contraption but were hoping to make the Soviets waste resources trying to copy it, and then accidentally ended up getting it to work.

To Jimmy Carter's credit, the space shuttle Columbia disaster could have prevented if the thermal foam on the external shuttle tanks had been replaced with a sweater.

Title needs (2016).

Carter almost destroyed the space shuttle. See the book "Enterprise" by Jerry Grey for history.

I'm not sure you can blame him, though. President Carter is exceptionally intelligent, graduated in the top 7.2% of his Naval Academy class of 820 after studying nuclear engineering and completed graduate studies in nuclear physics and reactor technology. Everyone just assumes Space! We all insist on it, but we all don't have the full picture. The man is practical, understood the costs, risks and value of, as of then, unrealized benefits. The last thing NASA needed in the late 1970's and early 1980's is an uncommonly intelligent President of the United States. It was their bad luck, and yet they lucked out. Give President Carter a break. The man is a saint. Compare to President Clinton, who is also highly intelligent, and yet not a saint. I'm not saying he's bad, just a bad, bad, boy.

The book that I mentioned discussed the context in great detail. Also, smart people do dumb things all the time.

[2016]

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