The other night, I was at dinner, and conversation turned to space exploration and to the earliest days of Soviet Russia’s Sputnik and Lunik satellite launches. What followed was a story so unbelievable, I had to do some digging to convince myself it wasn’t just a folk legend.
From Popular Science, a few years back, soon after the story was declassified:
Sometime between the end of 1959 and 1960, the Soviet Union toured several countries with an exhibit of its industrial and economic achievements. Among the artifacts were a Sputnik and a Lunik upper stage that contained the payload, the latter freshly painted with viewing windows cut into the nose.
Remember, this was the height of the Cold War, and the start of the Space Race. Fear of falling behind was rampant and, given our lack of visible results at the time, was realistic.
So what do you do if you see that your rival is touring the world with their technology? You plan a technapping caper, of course.
Incredible story. Take a few minutes and read it. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. This should be Andy Weir’s next book (he wrote The Martian).
There’s lots of great stories about the space race most people don’t know. One was about how the Soviet Union sabotaged one of our rockets before launch that caused it to go up a few hundred feet, turn around 180 degrees, and crash. I’ve seen the film of it several times. My father had been a counter-espionage agent for the OSS at the end of World War II. He lasted four years and got out (the average life span in his group was two years).
Several years after he quit, and I was born, his former boss asked him to go to Cape Canaveral and track down the spy who had sabotaged the rocket. That was the kind of thing my dad did when he was active, on military bases around the US. He refused the job, because of his new family. So his former boss did the job himself, and he was killed while doing it.
/r/thathappened