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The Russian Nuclear Satellite that crashed in Canada
On 24 January 1978, Cosmos 954, a Soviet nuclear-powered surveillance satellite, crashed in the Northwest Territories. The crash scattered an enormous amount of radioactivity over a 124,000 square kilometer area in Canada’s north, stretching southward from Great Slave Lake into northern Alberta and Saskatchewan.
My father, Colonel Richard “Butch” Sheffield, wrote the following in his book “Ohio to Supersonic,” available to order here.
This was when Dad was Chief of Space at the Pentagon from 1976 to 1980.
Before he was at the Pentagon, he was a missile wing commander at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. He would leave Minot to go to Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, to launch missiles.
This might have been where they got the plot for the movie “Space Cowboys.”
He recalls;
‘The Russians had orbited a lab that had a nuclear power plant. They had lost control of the lab, and the lab was going to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere.
‘The satellite was intended for long-term on-orbit observation, but by December 1977, it had deviated from its designed orbit, and its flight path was becoming increasingly erratic.
Cosmos 954
‘In mid-December, the North American Aerospace Defense Command [NORAD], which had assigned the satellite the Satellite Catalog Number 10361, noticed Cosmos 954 making erratic manoeuvres, changing its orbit by up to 50 miles, as its Soviet operators struggled to control their failing spacecraft. In secret meetings, Soviet officials warned their US counterparts that they had lost control over the vehicle, and that the system which was intended to propel the spent reactor core into a safe disposal orbit had failed.’
According to Cosmos 954’s Wikipedia entry, which we quote;
‘At 11:53 GMT on 24 January 1978, Cosmos 954 reentered the Earth’s atmosphere while travelling on a northeastward track over western Canada. At first, the USSR claimed that the satellite had been completely destroyed during re-entry, but later searches showed debris from the satellite had been deposited on Canadian territory along a 600-kilometre (370 mi) path from Great Slave Lake to Baker Lake. The area spans portions of the Northwest Territories, present-day Nunavut, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.’
Radioactive materials over the US
The clean-up operation was a coordinated event between the United States and Canada. Dubbed “Operation Morning Light”, the clean-up effort continued into October 1978 and resulted, according to the Atomic Energy Control Board (now the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission), in the estimated recovery of about 0.1 percent of COSMOS 954’s power source.
Sheffield continues;
‘There was a chance that the radioactive materials could come down over the US, so the Carter Administration was worried.
‘One day, Mr. Gus Weiss came to see me. He was a former aide to Nixon and had worked for the CIA; he was on the National Security Council, he had been appointed by the Administration to monitor the lab and to predict where it would return to Earth.
‘He said that while NASA was good at launching things into space, they didn’t know much about predicting where things would come back to Earth because it had little to no experience doing that.
Predicting a re-entry of Cosmos 954
‘He asked for my help.
‘I had working for me the only two people in Washington, DC, who knew how to predict a re-entry of space objects, Lynn Tatum and Dennis Eagan. I called them in my office and told them to do whatever Gus asked them to do. They worked on it until the Russian space lab re-entered.
‘They predicted the point within one half orbit, and it came down over Canada.’
He concludes;
‘Gus and I met a couple of times a year from then on. He became a good friend, and his insights into Washington policies were very enlightening.’
Weiss later died mysteriously in Washington, DC on Nov. 25, 2003.
Be sure to check out Linda Sheffield Miller (Col Richard (Butch) Sheffield’s daughter, Col. Sheffield was an SR-71 Reconnaissance Systems Officer) Twitter Page Habubrats SR-71 and Facebook Page Born into the Wild Blue Yonder for awesome Blackbird’s photos and stories.
Photo credit: Federal Government of the United States
