How the Soviets stole a space shuttle

Robert Windrem Senior investigative producer • E-mail

Nov. 4, 1997 - When U.S. space shuttles started linking up with Russia's Mir space station in 1995, both sides owed a small debt to the old Soviet secret police, the KGB. According to documents obtained by NBC News, it was the KGB that successfully stole the U.S. shuttle design in the '70s and '80s.

That theft permitted the Soviet Union to build its own carbon copy of the U.S. system, called the Buran, thus unintentionally laying the groundwork for the compatibility between the U.S. and Russian systems.

Although the Soviet shuttle flew only once in 1990, it was planned in part as a space ferry to link up with Mir. That all-Soviet linkup never took place, and the Soviet shuttle was finally abandoned in 1994. But because the Soviet craft was so similar to the U.S. version, designing a Mir linkup for Atlantis and other U.S. shuttles proved simple and efficient. 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.

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. It may also be the first recorded example of spying online.

Brezhnev's paranoia
The story begins in 1974 with a secret meeting at the Kremlin. 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 VPK was the body that directed not only the military projects but also laid out strategies for obtaining the technologies.

It was to the great benefit of the VPK — like its private U.S. counterparts —to exaggerate any U.S. threat. And that, according to reports revealed years later, is exactly what Smirnov did.

“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. “Such a vehicle is like an aircraft. 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. The news disturbed Leonid Illyich [Brezhnev] very much. He contemplated it intensively and then said, ‘We are not country bumpkins here. Let us make an effort and find the money.’”

Also 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. 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.

According to some accounts, there was no unanimity among the Soviet leaders. 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.

“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. “Brezhnev understood, yes, of course, an alternative weapon is necessary.”

Project authorized in secret
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. Two other decrees laying out the military uses of a shuttle were signed later, in May 1977 and December 1981. Although the Soviets initially installed V. P. Glushko and Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy, two of its top space scientists, at the head of the program, Col. 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.

With the need established and the sponsorship firmly in place, word went forth to the design bureaus of the massive Soviet space program. No one in those offices had any doubt about who was in charge.

“It is no secret to anyone in our sector ... that the Energia-Buran system was ordered from us by the military,” said Yuri Semenov, developer of the Energia booster program. “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. Parity is needed, we needed the same type of rocket-space system.”

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