Atomic Express

It is of course funny to us Cold War folk to see the webosphere get in a flap over the American X-37B unmanned orbiter, which nearly EVERY website keeps referring to as a ‘secret space plane’  months after pictures of the craft were made available by Boeing. No longer secret, yes?

In the early 1960s, long before the X-37B and the 1967 “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies”  (aka the ‘Outer Space Treaty’), it was a given that the US and the USSR would deploy space systems for warfighting purposes. With the virtually unlimited budgets available to both adversaries in those days, engineers and designers had free reign to conceptualize a variety of systems. Some of these were well on their way to becoming reality when financial plugs were pulled in the US under McNamara’s reign at Defense and in the Soviet Union, who signed the treaty.

According to the arms control specialists, the OST:

The substance of the arms control provisions is in Article IV. This article restricts activities in two ways:

First, it contains an undertaking not to place in orbit around the Earth, install on the moon or any other celestial body, or otherwise station in outer space, nuclear or any other weapons of mass destruction.

Second, it limits the use of the moon and other celestial bodies exclusively to peaceful purposes and expressly prohibits their use for establishing military bases, installation, or fortifications; testing weapons of any kind; or conducting military maneuvers.

But nobody said that non-WMD ops couldn’t be undertaken in space….

Let’s get counterfactual, just for fun. What would the American and Soviet space armada’s have looked like in 1975?

In this American corner, there was the…..Boeing X-20 DYNASOAR. Pretty neat: Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne’s tail system bears some resemblance. 

Supposed to be launched from a Titan IIIC booster, the X-20 was a USAF project, not NASA’s. There were seven secret astronauts selected for the program, including Neil Armstrong. As NASA historians noted:

 

“The spacecraft was viewed from two different perspectives during its genesis in the late Fifties: as a research vehicle to explore hypersonic flight regimes or, as the US Air Force preferred, as a fully-functional military glider capable of delivering live warheads with precise, pilot-guided accuracy onto targets anywhere on Earth. Ambitious plans were even afoot for the inspection, and maybe destruction, of enemy satellites in orbit, as well as carriage of reconnaissance cameras, side-looking radar and electronic-intelligence sensors. Assuming a manned flight sometime in 1966, it was hoped that Dyna-Soar would evolve into this operational weapons-delivery system by the mid-Seventies.

This would offer military strategists a route around the problem that conventional ballistic missiles might no longer be able to strike hardened targets with the required accuracy. Moreover, a boost-glide flight profile like that of Dyna-Soar able to cover velocities between Mach 5 and 25 was perceived as a better alternative to using complex, air-breathing turbojet or ramjet engines, which were difficult to develop and could only operate at lower speed ranges. Indeed, according to studies conducted by the Rand Corporation, vehicles flying slower than Mach 9 might be rendered vulnerable to Soviet air defences as early as 1965. 

In the most paranoid days of the Cold War, Dyna-Soar thus provided the United States with a safe and seemingly-invincible means of attacking and snooping on enemy targets from any direction and, when flying at low altitudes, gave barely a three-minute warning of its arrival. Additionally, it could sweep across Soviet territory at altitudes of between 25-50 miles, providing much better imaging resolution than was possible with the best spy satellites and its data could be in the hands of Pentagon officials within a matter of hours.”

 

The implications are intriguing: the USAF could have had a fleet of space bombers launched from underground silos to replace all of those B-52’s and B-47’s, and they would probably have been more accurate in their delivery profiles. Perhaps the US Navy could have adapted a missile-launching submarine to carry a variant? Ahhh well….

 

 

In the Soviet cornerrrr….. The MiG 105. And the Spiral. And the BOR-4. And the 23mm cannon armed space station.

Rather than using ‘pedestrian’ ICBM boosters, the MiG 105 spaceplane was to be launched from the hypersonic Spiral 50-50 aircraft. Of course the Sov…errrr, Russians remain reticent as to what, exactly, the MiG 105 was going to be armed with but a successor spacecraft, the Hurricane, apparently had space-to-space missiles. The MiG 105’s initial layout looked like what a space fighter should look like circa 1960. It evolved into a more traditional lifting-body until it looked like the BOR-4. The Spiral 50-50 looked truly futuristic, almost like a space going B-58 Hustler.

 

Four unmanned remotely piloted BOR-4’s eventually flew in the 1980s: the craft was spotted by Royal Australian Air Force P-3 patrol aircraft during recovery by the Soviet navy in the Indian Ocean. A further five BOR-5 tests were also conducted. All of this data was fed to the Buran shuttle programme, which was essentially a copy of the American Shuttle Transportation System.

 

The MiG 105 Spiral was eventually tested in the 1970s with five manned drop launches from a TU-95 bomber, but there were no space tests that we know of.  

 

Using the Salyut ‘civilian’ space station programme as cover, the Soviet Union deployed three military ‘Orbital Piloted Stations’ in the 1970s. Dubbed ‘Almaz’, these stations were similar to the planned but cancelled USAF Manned Orbital Laboratory, which was essentially a manned spy satellite design.

 

The OPS-2  carried a 23mm cannon which apparently was successfully tested in space against a satellite in 1974. This was a remote test with no crew on board.  OPS-4, which was not launched, was equipped with space-to-space missiles and an improved anti-satellite cannon. The ‘official’ reason for mounting such a weapon was to deter close inspection or seizure of Soviet space ships by “Apollo-type” craft. Hmmm…. these guys may have watched “You Only Live Twice” two too many times.

 

 

 

 

 

For a fantastic website dealing with Soviet space ships, go to http://www.buran-energia.com/  and http://pegaso1701.blogspot.com/2011/08/naves-espaciales-del-futuro-iii.html for more on Almatz. For more on the 23mm gun, go HERE: Austronautix is another excellent site. Credit for all three for the pictures on Soviet systems and the USAF and Boeing for the DYNASOAR and X-37B. And the Royal Australian Air Force for the BOR recovery pic.

 

Cold War Pop Cultural Tidbit: The crash of Colonel Steve Austin’s spacecraft at the start of the 1970s TV series “Six Million Dollar Man” was of a NASA lifting body that descended to some extent from the X-20 program.