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NASA BUSTED!... SAME PROCEDURE AS GARY POWERS U-2.....?
"...Fully a month before the public roll-out of the *Columbia* at the Cape in November of 1980, the Russian Space Command was studying the problem. There was no question about one thing: The *Columbia's* mission could not be allowed to succeed.
Given even a shred of up-to-date reconnaissance data, the Bolsheviks in America were determined to set off a nuclear war. Even so, there was a question about the best way to spoil the mission. Several possibilities were considered, including sabotage or simply blasting the *Columbia* out of the sky. All were rejected because they shared one weakness. Each alternative would halt one Shuttle mission, but it would not stop the Shuttle Program as a whole, and Russia's goal was to completely shut down the Space Shuttle Program.
At last they hit upon the solution. What was needed was a Space Age version of the famous U-2 incident of two decades prior. In the waning days of the Eisenhower Administration, Russia had publicly accused the United States of invading its air space with spy flights. That was before the era of Spy Satellites, and invading other countries' air space was a serious charge in the eyes of the world.
American spokesmen tried to diffuse the growing furor while carefully avoiding a definitive denial of the charges; but the Russians kept it up. Finally President Eisenhower became so exasperated that he flatly denied, in public, that America was flying spy planes over Russia.
That was exactly what the Russians were waiting for. The Russians promptly did what American Intelligence specialists thought they could not do - they shot down a high-flying U-2 on a flight over Russia. The name of the CIA pilot, the late Francis Gary Powers, filled the headlines world-wide overnight. The Russians had made a liar of the President of the United States.
A summit had been scheduled between President Eisenhower and Nikita Kruschev, but the Russians icily called it off. In studying the *Columbia* situation, the Russians decided to make the focus of similar nature. After all, all they would need would be to land that Shuttle intact.
Russia protested continuously about the military nature of the Shuttle Program, and perceived they would be able to shock the world with the truth of it by simply proving it. They would put the crashed Shuttle on public display together with its nuclear-powered, laser-firing Spy Satellite. The Kremlin liked the plan, and agreed to it. To further emphasize the parallels with the 1960 U-2 incident, Russia had recently proposed a summit with the United States. The plan was to withdraw the summit proposal in protest after shooting down the *Columbia.*...
