It looks like President Carter didn't cancel the Space Shuttle development program in the 1970s because the Space Shuttle was key to monitoring arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, excellent historical reporting from :
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I doubt this is true, whether Carter argued it or not. Monitoring of arms control agreements was done using NRO's Gambit & Hexagon - not launched on shuttle. NRO's later satellites (KH11) may have been. I'm not sure about that.
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Agreed that actual monitoring wouldn't happen from the Space Shuttle, though 1977 is the edge of the era when people thought manned spy viewing platforms in space might be feasible. I think its more about the classified Space Shuttle missions that could be flown, 1/n
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that was the plan at the time, anyway; they sized the cargo bay for HEXAGON. in the end they launched those on Titan instead
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From the viewpoint of 1977 the Space Shuttle was going to carry all US payloads to space (including international customers), whether civilian or military. Of course in the 1980s we discovered the Shuttle really wasn't great for military payloads, but 1977 didn't know that yet.
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Wow, if it wasn’t for war the US would have canceled its space program.
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Actually it’s the opposite: Carter was notably for peace, and if he hadn’t been key to the SALT arms control agreements which lowered nuclear risk we also would have lost the Shuttle. The SALT agreements not only deescalated the Cold War but help keep Shuttle alive.
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My dad worked for DoD and SAC. He speculated back then that something was up with spying on Russians on one of the missions. He didn't think the shuttle specifically was doing spying but shuttle had something to do with spying.
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It would be stupid to cancel the space shuttle at a that point as it was just a year from it's first flight.
The opportunity to axe it and replace it with something else was gone after the tooling for building Apollo hardware was scrapped.
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