How the Soviets stole a space shuttle

Choosing a design
At that point, though, a design had not been settled on. The Soviets had developed, like the United States, a pilot program in the 1960s aimed at building a reusable space plane. Called the “Spiral,” it was much like the U.S. “Dyna-Soar,” a small but efficient design that could, its designers hoped, fly off into space and return to the ground. Many in the Soviet space program thought the “Spiral” could be resuscitated as the model on which “Buran” would be built ... but that was not to be.

“When the decision on the development of the Soviet aerospace system was made, the Molniya Scientific Production Association, which Lozino-Lozhinsky heads, and which had been assigned the project, proposed to use its ‘ancient’ (13 years had been lost) Spiral design,” wrote a Soviet military historian in “Red Star,” the nation’s leading military journal. “However, it was rejected with a quite strange explanation: ‘This is not at all what the Americans are doing.’”

Georgi Grechko, the Soviet cosmonaut, later told an American space historian that the decision both to kill “Spiral” and then decide to choose a U.S. design said a lot about the Soviet government.

“The Spiral was a very good project but it was another mistake for our government. They said Americans didn’t have a space shuttle [back then] and we shouldn’t either and it was destroyed. Then, after you made your space shuttle, immediately they demanded a space shuttle. ... It was very crazy of our government.”

And yet the Soviet space program in 1976 was definitely in need of some fresh challenges. That same year, the Soviets quietly ended their manned lunar landing program, and the Apollo-Soyuz link-up, having succeeded the year before, was completed as well. The huge facilities and launch pads built for the N-1 moon rockets stood abandoned at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Something was needed to stand in their place.

Getting the goods
And something else was needed as well — a shortcut to help the Soviets catch up with the United States. The contract for the first two American shuttles had been let four years earlier in 1972, and the Enterprise, a full-scale model which would test the shuttle’s mettle in atmospheric tests, was nearly complete. And so the VPK was put to work, this time, to gather the technologies and materials needed.

The Soviets had two great advantages: Their own space program was world class, with tens of thousands of top scientists and engineers who could be put to work on the program; and, to the Soviets’ great surprise, the United States decided not to classify its program. All the technology that would go into the shuttle would be unclassified — that is, open to the world. The only problem was a management challenge: the United States was turning out reams of material both in hard copy and in database form. The VPK was given the job of managing it.

The United States had long known that the VPK was in the technology transfer business. A classified analysis of Soviet Intelligence Services in 1974 warned of its use of KGB and GRU military intelligence agents to gather critical pieces of military and even commercial projects in the West. It had succeeded in the 1960s in gathering data critical to another failed aerospace project — the TU-144 supersonic transport, whose design had been helped by spying on the British-French Concorde and the Boeing 2707 SST as well.

But what the United States didn’t know at the time — and wouldn’t know until 1981— was the extent of the VPK’s operations and the huge amounts of money it was spending on espionage. A 1985 CIA report noted: “The VPK program ... involves espionage by hostile intelligence officers, overt collection, by East Bloc officials, acquisition by scientific exchange program participants and illegal trade-related activity.”

MORE FROM SPACE

Space Section Front

Shooting stars on the Web   It’s prime time for colorful meteor shower   Space shuttle lifts off amid tons of tweets NASA to begin escape attempt for Mars rover Water discovery fuels hope to colonize moon ‘Significant amount’ of water found on moon World not ending in 2012, says NASA Cosmic Log: Marvelous view ... and a mystery Broken urine recycler may affect space mission   Month in space: What a blast! Space Section Front   Add Space headlines to your news reader: