Meeting the deadline

By January 1986, the Politburo had designated Polyus-Skif as one of the Soviet space program's highest-priority satellites. At one point, more than 70 firms within the Soviet aerospace industry were working on the program. There were no excuses for workers running behind schedule, not even the fact that most involved were also fighting to keep the Buran program from falling further behind.

As the launch neared, Soviet engineers started figuring out the mission’s cover stories. Polyus’ designers knew that when such a huge craft appeared in orbit and started expelling large amounts of gas, it wouldn’t escape notice of the American intelligence analysts. They also knew that the gases expelled from the spacecraft would be a dead giveaway that the system was intended for a laser.

To cover the spacecraft’s true purpose, engineers switched the gas for Skif-DM’s vent test to a combination of xenon and krypton. These gases interact with ionospheric plasma around Earth. If anyone asked, the Soviets could say it was part of a civilian geophysical experiment. Another of Skif-DM’s tests, the laser targeting system tests, called for the satellite to release small inflatable balloon targets it could then track with its radar and pointing laser. The balloons could just as easily be targets in a test of the spacecraft’s automated rendezvous and docking system.

It’s inevitable that test programs experience launch delays, and Skif-DM was no exception. But the minor technical problems that dogged the program paled in comparison to the political ones. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was by then general secretary of the Communist Party, was advocating sweeping economic and bureaucratic reforms. One target was what he saw as “ruinous” levels of military spending, which included Soviet military space programs. Gorbachev acknowledged that the American SDI was dangerous, but he suggested it wasn’t a major threat. Nevertheless, when he and Reagan met at a US-Soviet summit in Reykjavik in October of 1986, talks leading to an arms reduction deal fell apart when the American president refused to abandon SDI.

With failed negotiations available to him, Gorbachev decided to use them as part of a new propaganda plan against the American SDI. Suddenly, the demonstration of gas venting and target sighting fit into this vision. An order came down from the top layers of government to change the mission. All “battle station” experiments were cancelled; the spacecraft could be launched into orbit, but the gas venting system could not be tested and the tracking targets could not be deployed. In January of 1987, with Skif-DM’s launch weeks away, a formal order came from Gorbachev's allies in the Politburo that turned the mission into a passive one.

Early in 1987, the Skif-DM satellite was mated to its Energia booster inside an assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Technicians painted the payload black to maximize solar heating in orbit and then added two names on the spacecraft: "Polyus," how the spacecraft would be introduced to the world after launch, and "Mir-2," the name of the proposed civilian space station that Energia's leadership hoped to build. Finally mated, the rocket was rolled out to the launch pad and hoisted to the vertical launch position.

It sat on the pad for more than three months; the launch was postponed to coincide with Gorbachev’s scheduled visit to the Cosmodrome. He arrived on May 12 for a tour of the Energia facilities and an up-close look at the Energia-Polyus. Throughout the visit, he made several remarks to suggest that his support for the program as a whole was waning. He questioned Buran’s (and, by extension the Energia rocket’s) necessity and voiced his opposition to the militarization of space. But he also gave Skif-DM his official green light for launch. When the Soviet news agency TASS issued a report on Gorbachev’s visit to the Cosmodrome, it mentioned that a new rocket was ready on the launch pad. It was the first the world heard of Energia.

Skif-Polyus takes flight

At 9:30 in the evening Moscow time on May 15, 1987, Energia's engines roared to life for the first time. The giant rocket lifted off the launch pad. It climbed into the sky, pitching 65-degrees on a trajectory that ensured if the worst happened—if the whole thing exploded and rained burning shrapnel from the sky—it wouldn’t fall on foreign territory and become an international incident. But fears of a launch failure were unrealized. Energia performed flawlessly, gaining speed as it rose and arced out toward the northern Pacific. Right on cue, Skif-DM separated from rocket; the spent rocket and the protective shroud over the spacecraft fell away.

Flying on its own, Polyus-Skif had to execute one key maneuver: it had to flip itself over before igniting its engines. Because the satellite was so rushed in its production, the functional block was a repurposed unit originally designed for the Proton rocket. It wasn’t built to sustain the vibrations of the Energia's much more powerful engines. The quick fix had been to mount the spacecraft with the control block at the top of the stack instead of at the bottom near the engines. The spacecraft needed to flip over, putting the control block's engines facing down toward Earth before firing its main engines to achieve orbit.

This one command failed. The rushed production behind the Skif–DM—all the compromises and shortcuts—had left an erroneous line of code in the computer. The spacecraft flipped itself over twice, then stopped with its nose pointing to the Earth. When the engines fired, Skif-DM headed straight back toward the Earth. It broke up and burned as it reentered the atmosphere.

In the end

In the West, the debut of the Energia rocket was reported as a partial success. And this is true. Although the satellite failed to achieve orbit, the rocket operated perfectly. It was a great coup for Energia, but it wasn’t enough to save the Polyus-Skif and Kaskad programs. Skif-DM’s failure, combined with the single mission’s incredible cost, gave the program's opponents the ammunition they needed to kill it. Further Skif flights were canceled. Hardware was scrapped. The laser never got close enough to launching for anyone to judge whether it would have worked against American satellites. None of the hundreds of engineers that had created Polyus and enabled Skif-DM were recognized for their efforts.

As for what happened to the scrapped parts of the cancelled Skif missions, there are rumors that the hardware was appropriated into the International Space Station. The first piece of the ISS launched was the Russian Zarya ("Dawn") module, also known as the Functional Cargo Block. It supplies electrical power and the ability to reboost the station, the same role the Skif's functional block was designed to serve. It’s possible Zarya began life as a spare built for the Polyus program or that it was built off old Polyus blueprints, either of which would explain the fact that Zarya was delivered on time and under budget.

Details about the Polyus launch and spacecraft remain elusive. Records are likely buried deep in inaccessible Russian archives, as are documents recording the Soviet leadership’s reaction to Reagan’s SDI speech. Official government reports about the American reaction to the Polyus-Skif launch are similarly buried. It’s a seldom discussed mission, but it’s clear that the merits and efficiency of space-based weapons were very nearly explored with functioning hardware. It’s troubling to think what would have happened had Polyus-Skif actually made it to orbit, how the Americans might have responded, and what kind of space arms race might have ensued.