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Arguably the Shuttle suffered from this too— instead of being a tightly focused space truck, it needed to be able to do ridiculous things like fly polar mission
by mikepurvis 5y ago
Arguably the Shuttle suffered from this too— instead of being a tightly focused space truck, it needed to be able to do ridiculous things like fly polar missions and grab Soviet spy satellites right out of the air.
- mauvehaus 5y agoPoint of order: if the space shuttle were grabbing satellites out of the air, something has gone terribly wrong with both launching the satellite and the shuttle.
- mikepurvis 5y agoI think the idea was that early spy satellites would use film rather than digital transmission, so it would be at the very least necessary to potentially grab one's own satellites. In any case, this exact question was asked here, and the top-rated response indicates that it's unlikely that the design requirement was ever meant to refer to grabbing an uncooperative payload: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41741/was-the-space-shuttle-ever-actually-intended-for-the-military-to-steal-satellite https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41741/was-the-spac...