I'm not quite old enough, but it was just before my time and there were some stories in the press that it was for shooting their own satellites, at least offici

I'm not quite old enough, but it was just before my time and there were some stories in the press that it was for shooting their own satellites, at least officially. Remember the space shuttle was being pimped as being all things to all people, including the military, right around that time and satellite retrieval could happen to Russian as well as American satellites, after all abandoned non working wrecks and right of salvage at sea and all that. Now it would be a pity if the Russians shot at a decommissioned spy sat while the Americans shuttle on a classified .mil mission was trying to steal that satellite... also run the numbers on low earth orbit satellites, a decent head shot to a low orbit satellite deorbits the main pieces and the little parts have an awesome surface to volume ratio so they naturally deorbit and the precious delicate space shuttle isn't going to fly thru a cloud of satellite parts to steal a russian spy sat, now, is it? The shuttle has enough delta-V that in the old days before advanced surveillance sats its not unrealistic it could have snatched a decommissioned low orbit russian spy sat while out of ground observation range. In fact, how exactly do you know what did or didn't happen during the many classified early missions... There was also a some popular press scientific claims. If "we" think "we" can shoot actively dodging incoming ICBMs out of the sky in the 80s, shooting a "big" asteroid should be pretty easy in the 70s, right? So wait for a close approach, record the spectrograph of the impact, compare to the known composition of the shell, report back on the first direct chemical analysis of a meteor in space before re-entry. This is a little impractical, but ...