The whole thing looks like it's straight out of Thunderbirds.Cold war space ping.
The whole thing looks like it's straight out of Thunderbirds.I wonder if any company will start to do astroarchiology and start to recover some of these things in space and bring them back here.
Their non-service based, non-market economy couldn't keep up with ours. Thank you President Reagan.
Move ZIG! For great justice!
Amazing photos. What was the black thing on the back of the ship? Big space gun or lasr or soemthing. Pretty incredible.
Amazing pics, was this a chemical powered laser system? I wonder how well they expected to target with this thing? Or maybe their intention was to target unmoving objects on the ground.
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
Nasty piece of work. Basically to develop ASAT protection for space based nuclear weapon launchers.
Thanks for posting!
Statements made at that time by Gorbachev confirm the impression left by this article and another by General Designer V.V. Pallo of Design Bureau Salyut that the Polyus was indeed a test bed for the Soviet counter measure to the United States "Stars Wars" program, an Orbital Weapons Platform. Platforms of this type would have been capable of delivering nuclear warheads from orbit to any point in the US in six minutes. Gorbachev pointedly called all US SDI technology "space strike" weapons and repeatedly warned that the Soviet response to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) would be "asymmetrical" and that SDI was "destabilising". It appears that the nuclear warhead launch control system for the Orbital Weapons Platforms was being developed in a very rushed manner and the instability of the Orbital Weapons Platforms scared the Soviet leadership.
That passage plus the illustration in the link make it plain that this monstrosity also carried a load of nuke warheads, in absolute, total violation of the 1967 treaty. In addition to the laser, cannon and particle beam countermeasures. I have my doubts as to how capable the laser could have been with early eighties' stolen technology. If the story is really true then I gather it was sheer dumb luck that this unclean thing splashed in the remote south pacific without raising any eyebrows. Am I correct in assuming it's load of warheads lie undisturbed on the abyssal plain?
If anything, it's like the weapon in Space Cowboys. I knew the Energia was launched one time before the one-and-only unmanned Buran flight but no mention was ever made of the payload carried. It does seem a tragedy that Energia is now on the junk heap of history. Here we have a heavy lift Saturn V category booster without having to bother with the damn shuttle. You could put a respectable sized space station up in a single trip (a la Skylab).
Dude, this is the coolest thing I have seen in a long, long time. That thing is BADASS!!!. I'm glad it didn't work though....or did it?