The shuttle was marketed to all people as capable of all things, leading to some peculiar .mil requirements, and the fairly reasonable cold war fear was the .ru

The shuttle was marketed to all people as capable of all things, leading to some peculiar .mil requirements, and the fairly reasonable cold war fear was the .ru would "borrow" a shuttle of ours and take a look at the spooky payload. Now this would really piss the DoD off if there were american military personnel on board, but if the taxi between a space station and the ground happened to have no humans but did have some spooky NSA satellite on board they could wiggle in some kind of salvage claim. Maybe the .ru couldn't get away with it politically, but maybe Libya in the bad old days or something... Also I don't know if even the most optimistic "everything for everyone" marketing went this far outside Larry Niven sci fi books, but I could totally imagine if we sold F16 to Pakistan maybe they'd buy a shuttle if it was economic and then India would try to steal it from the ground. Or use a re-entering shuttle as a weapon, 9/11 WTC style. Its not far fetched. The Iranians stole one of our spooky drones a couple years ago by broadcasting very strong GPS signals and the drone designers not using the authenticated stream making this hack possible. If you sell something as "do everything for everyone" then you're going to end up with weird "legacy" requirements.