I thought this was some joke involving Bears and Beets. Turns out it is an actual thing [1].

>In 1992, Dan Goldin became the NASA Administrator. Goldin believed in a philosophy of Faster… better… cheaper—i.e., he thought NASA could do more with less. Hence, Goldin did not support the idea of having large EOS platforms in space and in fact once referred to them as “Battlestar Galactica.” He believed smaller, less expensive missions that could be built more quickly were the way to go and supported development of new programs that actually diverted funds from EOS.

[1] https://eospso.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/eo_pdfs/Perspect...

Arguably the Shuttle suffered from this too— instead of being a tightly focused space truck, it needed to be able to do ridiculous things like fly polar missions and grab Soviet spy satellites right out of the air.

Point of order: if the space shuttle were grabbing satellites out of the air, something has gone terribly wrong with both launching the satellite and the shuttle.

I think the idea was that early spy satellites would use film rather than digital transmission, so it would be at the very least necessary to potentially grab one's own satellites.

In any case, this exact question was asked here, and the top-rated response indicates that it's unlikely that the design requirement was ever meant to refer to grabbing an uncooperative payload:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41741/was-the-spac...

I think the joke was that the satellite isn't supposed to be in the "air".

Parent was being overly pedantic in that satellites were likely to be grabbed out of space and not air.