Jan 21 1986
From The Space Library
The first Soviet Space Shuttle, expected to be launched in 1986, would likely look very similar to U.S. orbiters, said scientists. Photographs of a scale model Soviet space plane that splashed down in the Indian Ocean revealed a miniature American Shuttle. Plans for the plane were easy for scientists to obtain as the program was never top secret and sources noted that the Soviets had often copied Western aircraft in the past.
On a similar note, a report concerning the secretive launch from, presumably, the Soviet Union in the summer of 1985 concluded that an antisatellite weapon had gone up. Radar tracked debris that had orbited the Earth before burning up in the atmosphere, and researchers quickly deduced that the metallic scrap had come from a satellite on which the weapon was tested. The illegal launches were the first such unannounced flights by the Soviet Union since testing of orbital thermonuclear weapons. (W Times, Jan 21/86; WSJ, Jan 21/86)
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