What mainly doomed the shuttle was the DoD requirement that the shuttle be able to pluck a satellite from a polar orbit in one orbit, making it necessary to include the massive wings so that it wouldn't be forced to land in the Pacific as the world rotated underneath it.

No known secret satellites :)

I'm reasonably sure this story was always more of a case of "how do we sell this thing" than "this is something that we can actually realistically do".

What the Shuttle was designed to do in a military context is launch into a polar orbit from the coast of California, release a stealthy spy satellite, and return to Earth immediately after during the very same orbit (so about 90min from launch to landing). It therefore needed the very large wings to be able to glide back to Edwards Air Force Base in southern California, which would have rotated up to 1,500km away from the path of the orbiter. And because of the Pacific ocean, there'd be other landing sites available. This cross-range capability impacted every aspect of the design.

The idea was that big rockets which launch satellites are very easy to track, so it was hard to get a bird up without the enemy knowing its orbital path, and if the enemy knew the orbit they could evade overhead passes. So do a surprise launch on the shuttle, do a little orbit maneuvering while you are up there to maximize the enemy's uncertainty over its orbital plane, then immediately let go and land the shuttle--because otherwise they'd know where it was from tracking the shuttle.

I'm not sure if it was ever used this way, and the requirement is now obsolete anyway. You really can't hide a satellite from modern instruments, which have full global coverage, and its critical that orbits are known to avoid collisions in the much more crowded space up there.

I feel like it's not too outlandish to suspect that some military satellites might have a way to hide themselves from instruments, as well.

The X-37B is a shuttle-like design because it was designed for NASA to be a crew escape vehicle for the ISS. The Air Force only took over the project when NASA cancelled it.

It was also limited by the Shuttle's OMS in terms of delta-v so the orbits from which a satellite could be retrieved was constrained.

If I was a military satellite designer, heaven forbid, I'd definitely include that in a world that included the possibility of stealing satellites. The capability, quietly communicated between the powers, would be enough to ensure that the satellite would never be stolen. And therefore, the billion-dollar kidnapping capability becoming useless.

Of course, military use could do something different, but that's more along the lines of "pack a kilogram of explosives in a pipe bomb".

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/07/us/space-shuttle-poised-t...

Obviously there is the movie about Salyut 7 that depicts the shuttle trying to capture the station. Salyut 3 had a machine gun attached to it.

Retrieving the satellite allows you to safely recover the film, and re-equip the satellite with new film and propellant. The latter is important because it’s useful for spy satellites to be able to change their orbits frequently to observe new targets or evade tracking.

Also bear in mind some spy satellites are huge and incredibly costly. The Hubble Space Telescope is based on a spy satellite series.

(Both Reagan and the Soviet top leadership didn't care about MAD, they cared about practical methods to stop incoming missiles. To get the arms limitations agreements signed, Reagan allowed the Soviets an exception to the anti-ABM ban to allow a ring of anti-ABM sites around Moscow, which exists until today. The "Star Wars" kinetic interception methods are also likely still active, though the laser methods probably never worked well.)