“Dyna-Soar,” a small but efficient design that could, its designers hoped, fly off into space and return to the ground. Called the “Spiral,” it was much like the U.S. The Soviets had developed, like the United States, a pilot program in the 1960s aimed at building a reusable space plane. Parity is needed, we needed the same type of rocket-space system.”Īt that point, though, a design had not been settled on. “It was said at meetings on various levels that American shuttles, even on the first revolution, could perform a lateral maneuver and turn to be over Moscow, possibly with dangerous cargo. that the Energia-Buran system was ordered from us by the military,” said Yuri Semenov, developer of the Energia booster program. “It is no secret to anyone in our sector. No one in those offices had any doubt about who was in charge. With the need established and the sponsorship firmly in place, word went forth to the design bureaus of the massive Soviet space program. General Alexander Maksimov, a high-ranking Defense Ministry official who ran military space and missile programs, was ultimately given command of the shuttle’s development. Glushko and Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy, two of its top space scientists, at the head of the program, Col. Although the Soviets initially installed V. Two other decrees laying out the military uses of a shuttle were signed later, in May 1977 and December 1981. In February 1976, a decree authorizing the project was finally signed, in secret, in the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the Soviet Council of Ministers. “Brezhnev understood, yes, of course, an alternative weapon is necessary.” “They began to use the shuttle to frighten Leonid Illyich Brezhnev and they explained to him that damned shuttle could zoom down on Moscow at any minute, bomb it to smithereens and fly away,” one Russian journalist wrote in the winter of 1991, just before the Soviet Union went out of existence. Marshal Georgi Grechko, the minister of defense, was one who was opposed to the monstrous outlay of money required, but the VPK and other military leaders had frightened Brezhnev, then in his late 70s. The man who ran the Soviet munitions industry during World War II, he was now the Presidium member in charge of the nation’s defense and someone who could easily see the value of a “space bomber” - in spite of the fact that the Soviet Union and the United States were about to sign a treaty banning nuclear weapons in outer space.Īccording to some accounts, there was no unanimity among the Soviet leaders. Let us make an effort and find the money.’”Īlso backing the plan was the man at the heart of the Soviet military, Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, a Cold Warrior without parallel in the old Soviet Union. He contemplated it intensively and then said, ‘We are not country bumpkins here. The news disturbed Leonid Illyich very much. It is capable, through a side maneuver, of changing its orbit in such a way that it would find itself at the right moment right over Moscow, possibly with dangerous cargo. “Smirnov, from VPK, in his regular report to Brezhnev, mentioned at the end of his report: the Americans are intensively working on a winged space vehicle,” according to a 1991 history of the program printed in “Kuranty,” a Moscow magazine. And that, according to reports revealed years later, is exactly what Smirnov did. It was to the great benefit of the VPK - like its private U.S. The VPK was the body that directed not only the military projects but also laid out strategies for obtaining the technologies. Vladimir Smirnov, head of the Soviet Union’s powerful Military-Industrial Commission, or VPK, was laying out priorities for the next year to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The story begins in 1974 with a secret meeting at the Kremlin. It may also be the first recorded example of spying online. The story of the Soviet shuttle is really the story of the competition between the two great space powers in microcosm, complete with Cold War intrigue and paranoia, mirror-image competition and all manner of spies, both human and electronic. In fact, the first linkup between the Mir and the shuttle Atlantis in 1995 used the very system the Russians designed for their own shuttle. version, designing a Mir linkup for Atlantis and other U.S. But because the Soviet craft was so similar to the U.S. That all-Soviet linkup never took place, and the Soviet shuttle was finally abandoned in 1994. Although the Soviet shuttle flew only once in 1990, it was planned in part as a space ferry to link up with Mir.
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