Big honkin’ space guns: New details emerge on Cold War efforts to arm satellites

By Joel Hruska 

One of the staples of the sci-fi genre for more than a century is the ray gun. H.G. Wells pioneered the concept in War of the Worlds, in which Martian invaders use a powerful, invisible Heat-Ray to decimate the Earth. Ray guns, disintegrators, radio guns, lasers, phasers, and plasma weaponry followed thereafter, all described with varying degrees of accuracy and real-world limitations. In reality, our space-based weapon technologies have lagged far behind these futuristic concepts — but that doesn’t mean the topic hasn’t come up. Both the Soviet and US governments explored the idea of space warfare.

Popular Mechanics has a new report on the Soviet Kartech R-23M, the only gun to ever be fired from space. The R-23M was derived from the R-23, a 23mm gas-operated autocannon that could fire up to 2,600 rounds per minute and is the fastest single-barrel cannon ever introduced in service. According to PM, the space-based variant used smaller, 14.5mm shells, but could fire up to 5,000 rounds per minute (the cited range is between 950 – 5000 rpm).

It’s generally understood that the Space Race between the US and the USSR was effectively a proxy battlefield of the Cold War, but the particulars of how these scenarios played out have faded from the public’s consciousness in the last 50 years. As the launch capability and technology of both nations raced ahead, it became obvious that satellites could do far more than circle the Earth transmitting a simple radio signal. The first successful spy satellite mission was Discoverer 14, launched August 18, 1960. Back then, the film the satellite carried was ejected from the satellite and retrieved by planes as it descended via parachute.

Military men on both sides of the Atlantic were well aware of how vital aerial reconnaissance had been during WW2 — but space-based imaging was a new and dangerous frontier. Even advanced spyplanes like the Lockheed U-2 could theoretically be shot down, as the Soviets demonstrated in May, 1960. Satellites, on the other hand, couldn’t be targeted with conventional ground-based weaponry. ICBMs of the day weren’t designed to lock on to a point target the size of a satellite and were ludicrously overpowered for killing satellites in any case. If you wanted to defend a satellite against an incoming attack from a pre-existing enemy satellite, your craft would need its own defenses — and that’s where the R-23M comes in.

The Soviet Almaz / Salyut model.

The Russians developed a plan to create a manned series of spy satellites cloaked behind the same technology and ostensible program goals as the civilian Salyut program. Of the seven Salyut missions, Salyut 2 (the first of the so-called Almaz missions that carried the R-23M cannon into orbit) depressurized in-orbit and was destroyed without ever hosting a crew. Salyut 3 was the first station to carry and fire the weapon, but the Soviets were sufficiently concerned about damage that they only performed the test after the crew had long since returned to Earth.

Firing a gun in space, it turns out, isn’t much like firing it on Earth. For one thing, the entire 20-ton station had to rotate in order to hit a target. For another, the Salyut stations had to fire their own engines to counteract the recoil from the weapon itself. If you want to shoot in microgravity, you have to have something to push against, or you’ll end up destabilizing your own orbit.

The results of the this test remain classified, but grainy TV footage recently shown on Russian TV allowed 3D modelers to create a replica of the cannon’s design, as shown above. To the best of our knowledge, no Russian or US space platform has ever fired on the other, but projects like this show that the two governments took the threat of satellite attacks seriously.