5 Soviet Super Weapon Disasters

The Polyus Skif-DM spacecraft was a Soviet orbital weapons system designed to destroy President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative satellites with an innovative and lethal carbon dioxide laser.

While Reagan´s program was known as the Star Wars program, the Polyus was identified by the public as the Soviet Death Star or the Soviet Space Laser.

Both projects were part of the rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev expressly prohibited launching the Polyus because he feared it would trigger an adverse military reaction from Reagan.

But the Soviet military, arguing it was a defensive measure against American dominance in space, launched it on May 15, 1987, from site 250 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

The Skif mounted on the Polyus’s Energia rocket was a small one-megawatt carbon dioxide laser composed of a functional block and a purposeful module. It weighed nearly 90,000 kilograms and was 40 meters long and 4 meters in diameter.

The functional block was equipped with a power system made of solar panels and small rocket engines to place the payload into orbit.

Meanwhile, the purposeful module carried carbon dioxide tanks and turbogenerators to produce the laser. The turbogenerators pumped the carbon dioxide, which resulted in the atoms emitting light.

During the Skif’s final tests, engineers realized the spacecraft would expel vast amounts of carbon dioxide, which would make it evident for Americans to figure out that it was a laser.

To disguise the Skif, the Soviets resorted to a combination of krypton and xenon for its venting system. Upon interaction with ionospheric plasma around the Earth, the spacecraft would disguise itself as part of a geophysics team.

Fortunately for Gorbachev and the whole world, the engines of the Polus failed, and the spacecraft turned to pieces of debris before reaching orbit...

Видео 5 Soviet Super Weapon Disasters канала Dark5