Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.
(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point.
Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space.
Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper.
It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand.
I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes.
Yes, you're right. I'm not going to pretend that this is a serious proposition. There isn't a lot of evidence to support it.
For me, it's a fun conspiracy theory to engage with. I'm only doing this for the love of the game as it were. Please don't take it that seriously.
But you have to admit, it is a fun theory. A lot of the claims made by the Russians / Roscosmos are most likely false, but if you notice the article says,
> The only concrete document referred to is an intelligence memo that Defense Minister Sokolov supposedly received on February 24 about the assignment of the French astronauts. Whether such a memo really landed on his desk that day is questionable (after all, Baudry’s assignment to 51E had been publicly announced by NASA in August 1984), but the idea that the assignment raised some suspicions in Soviet circles about the objectives of the Challenger mission may not be so far-fetched. There had always been a high level of paranoia in the Soviet Union about the military potential of the Space Shuttle. Misconceptions about the military applications of the shuttle, such as the belief that it was capable of diving into the atmosphere to drop bombs over Moscow, had been a key factor in the Soviet decision to develop Buran in 1976. The Buran orbiter was a virtual carbon copy of its US counterpart in shape and dimensions, exactly to counter the perceived military threat of the Shuttle. Furthermore, a couple of developments in the Shuttle program in early 1985 may have fueled the Soviet paranoia. The Shuttle had flown its first dedicated Defense Department mission (STS-51C) in January 1985 and a controversial laser experiment in the framework of SDI was planned for the STS-51G mission in June.
Whether or not said documentation can be trusted, which bits could be taken as true v. what's just insane paranoia is something that would require more work to discount than most would think. Because, as I've said, the numbers do line up from the article,
> The least one can say is that Salyut-7, which was 13.5 meters long and had a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, would have fit inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay, whose dimensions were 4.6 by 18 meters. In fact, after the final crewed mission to Salyut-7 in 1986, the Russians significantly raised its orbit in hopes that one day it could be retrieved by Buran, which had the same dimensions as the American shuttle.
The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of primary sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.)
Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?
> If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?
While I have no reason to believe this particular escapade, I do expect that there are a thousand such wild stories that have remained secret. Watergate seems obvious and explosive to moderns, but at the time it could easily have gone undiscovered or unremarked. How many other similar scale plots, domestic and international, succeeded or failed without ever being surfaced into the history books? A few? Dozens? Hundreds? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thousands? Millions? Trillions? Hectoseptisquintillions? "Ignorance is not a datum." Teach that as catechism from 1975 and we might have been spared the "rationalist" scourge altogether.
The goals it to fly often - adding a SLS launch to 2027 and a second launch to 2028. This drops the cost-per-launch, which is mostly fixed. It redoes SLS to make it less expensive and more capable. It moves the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon.
And it's budgeted at $10B/3 years, which fits into NASA's budget.
Isaacman took the Artemis program and fixed it. The reckoning came, and it's looking good.
There's a lot of potential in the announced changes and what SLS/Artemis might be able to become. This shouldn't prevent us from being critical of what SLS/Artemis most definitely has been for the previous 10-15 years.
And don't be fooled about the SLS launch cadence. As recently as summer 2025, Artemis III was still a nominally a 2027 manned lunar landing (https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/08/18/nasa-begins-p...). It got moved to a 2028 manned lunar landing in early 2026, before being converted back to a 2027 manned test flight.
The plan for SLS also does nothing to make it more capable (though hopefully less expensive). The cancelled exploration upper stage is being replaced by Centaur V, which is a less powerful stage. Isaacman refuses (I think rightfully) to really pin down on if there a future for SLS past Artemis V. If Isaacman chooses to cancel SLS after Artemis V (which I think is a defensible course of action), then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches.
And characterizing it as "moving the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon" is... kinda falling into the trap. Lunar Gateway was supposed to launch ~2028 (along with Artemis IV - from the era where Artemis III was the first lunar landing). Gateway was a gongshow, and was delayed, and now cancelled. And now the new plan says the habs (the part that people think as an actual base...) happens in Phase 3 starting in 2033. The sort term elements they are trying to reuse from gateway into near term (think ~4 years) base projects are very "ancillary".
It remains unclear if NASA will infact be able to up the launch cadence of SLS to meet the double 2028 launch requirement. While it was clear that Gateway made... very limited sense for great expense, and the new plan is certainly ambitious with what I think is a stronger value proposition, it's also basically exactly as pie in the sky as gateway back in 2019.
The fact that I am doubting NASA's ability to execute now, is the very cost of SLS (and friends).
> then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches
SLS will never be worth it. But I'd discount from that price tag the continuity benefits of keeping the Shuttle folks around, and aerospace engineers employed, across the chasm years of the 2010s.
Yeah, it’d be really nice if we could somehow express the strategic capabilities maintained in these discussions. Because on the face of it, SLS looks terrible, but paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable.
Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there.
> paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable
It’s reasonable to pay something. I’m unconvinced $41bn is the correct amount.
> Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there
There aren’t many. Countries in which farmers aren’t swing voters don’t have farm subsidies. I’ve been looking into buying some farmland and just collecting CRP on it, for example.
The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
Artemis II is not safe, at least by the standards we apply to things. It's the third flight of a capsule, on the second flight of the rocket, and the first flight of things like the life support system.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons astronauts are respected is they understand those risks, and go into space anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize risks - but at some point the risk becomes acceptable, and the cost of reducing it too great.
To paraphrase a quote from Star Trek - risk is their business.
Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.
(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
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