It seemed to the Soviets that the United States was positioning itself to build something massive in orbit like a military station or a weapon. It was designed to launch as many as 50 times per year with its 30-ton payload bay full, could return up to 15 tons from orbit, and had an impressive 1,242 mile cross range capability that could support single-orbit missions. But by the Soviet military’s assessment, the shuttle wasn’t economically viable and inexplicably large. There wasn’t much guesswork involved since NASA, being a civilian organization, shared its plans for the new vehicle publicly. A year late, he was not alone in wondering why the Americans were building such a large space shuttle. At the same time, he also took stock of the Soviet’s position in space. In 1974, engineer Valentin Glushko merged the TsKBEM design bureau with his own KB Energomash organization to form a new bureau called NPO Energiya. Instead, different design bureaus managed different projects. Unlike America’s national space agency NASA, the Soviet Union did not have a unified body managing its space activities. But that began to change in the mid-1970s. The announcement of NASA’s shuttle plans didn’t worry the Soviet Union who didn’t have any use for a shuttle there was no need to compete with the Americans on this program. The shuttle would make spaceflight routine while keeping the cost low, thanks in large part to the Department of Defence who would be sharing the cost with the space agency in exchange for using it to launch military satellites.

On January 5, 1972, President Nixon announced that NASA would turn its attention to building a new spacecraft to transform the final frontier, something that could shuttle astronauts between the Earth and an orbital space station, though the station would come later. NASA’s decision to pursue the space shuttle on the heels of the Apollo program came down, in short, to funding.

Destroyed buran shuttle