The Russians were obviously up to something. A Soviet ship out in the middle of the Indian Ocean was struggling to pull some kind of vessel out of the water, though it was unclear exactly what. So while an Australian P-3 Orion spy plane patrolling overhead that day in 1982 made a few passes, intelligence officers snapped photos. The Australians passed the images onto their intelligence counterparts at the CIA, which in turn looped in NASA officials. And together they helped solve the mystery: It was the BOR-4 “an unmanned prototype spacecraft used to test heat-shield ideas for what the Soviets envisioned would be their space shuttle program,” according to a NASA account of the incident. In other ...
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