Space Shuttle Challenger bringing back Salyut-7

Question

We know that on February 11 1985, right after the Soviets lost control of their Salyut-7 station. US Space tracking assets also started noticing that the station was starting to tumble.

Kidnapping a Soviet space station

US space tracking assets had immediately noticed that Salyut was tumbling out of control and, within hours, the Pentagon had come up with a plan too tempting to resist.

At that time the Challenger was undergoing some of its final preparations for an upcomming mission to launch 2 small satelites from it's cargobay into orbit. Instead different plans were made

Why not launch it with an empty cargo bay instead, send it to Salyut-7, and snatch the station from orbit, allowing the US to steal sensitive military secrets from the Russians? Just hours after control over Salyut-7 had been lost, National Security Agency director Lincoln Faurer called President Ronald Reagan in the middle of the night to brief him about the plan. After some hesitation, the President granted his permission.

From the article I can read that they were pretty close to a actual mission. Had it not been for Chernenko dying around the same time

On March 10, the mission was ready to go. But then, with just hours to go in the countdown, news arrived from Moscow that the ailing Chernenko had passed away earlier that day. The news wasn’t unexpected, but couldn’t have come at a worse time. In the power vacuum left by Chernenko’s death, the Soviet response to the Salyut-7 capture became unpredictable and the Americans considered it prudent to call off the mission. Officially, the launch was scrubbed for technical reasons.

I would like to know how feasible this plan actually was.

• How would they have mounted Salyut-7 inside the cargobay of the Challenger that would allow for a atmospheric re-entry without the cargo tumbling around inside the cargobay?
• Would they have to change the landing procedure since the shuttle is much heavier with the cargo inside the cargobay?
• Has any Space Shuttle ever returned from space with a payload that heavy as Salyut-7?
• How would they have moved the Salyut-7 inside the cargobay?

Answer 1

No work was ever done on this in the Shuttle Mission Simulator (SMS), so they were nowhere "close to an actual mission". Not even any testing.

Source: I worked to some extent on all missions in the SMS from 1983-1996, including the classified ones.

Answer 2

From the article I can read that they were pretty close to a actual mission

The article doesn't say this. It reports what a modern documentary claims, and then goes on to say that the documentary's claims seem to be mostly fiction or misunderstanding.

Does this all sound too crazy to be true? Not to the makers of a Russian television documentary called “The Battle for Salyut: A Space Detective”, who present this Hollywood-like scenario as plain fact.

In short,

• most of the Shuttle missions named can be dated as being planned, or changed, well before the Salyut developments;
• there is no evidence a previous Shuttle flight ever tried to rendezvous with Salyut 7, or would have been able to do so without it being obvious to the world;
• there is no documentary evidence from the US side to support it, and only one fragmentary piece of evidence presented from the Soviet side to say that they were worried about it as a possibility.

So it seems overwhelmingly likely that there was never any plan by NASA to try and recover a Salyut, making the question of feasibility a bit moot. In any case, the article discusses this question and concludes it would have been impractical, especially for a single mission without prior preparation. The Salyut hull would have physically fit into the space in the cargo bay, but that was about all:

Nonetheless, it would have taken a lot of work to prepare the station for retrieval. First of all, a number of spacewalks would have been required to remove appendages, such as the huge solar arrays and various antennas from the station’s hull. Next, crews would have had to unload equipment from the station’s interior to make it light enough for the return trip to Earth. The maximum payload return capability of the Space Shuttle was about 14.5 tons (not 27 tons as claimed in the documentary), but Salyut weighed about 20 tons at launch in 1982 and three years later had become even heavier after numerous resupply missions. Among a lengthy list of other problems would have been the absence of grapple fixtures and compatible docking systems to catch and enter the station. While all this would have been challenging enough for well-prepared Russian Buran crews with full knowledge of the station’s design details, it would have been an almost impossible task for a US Shuttle crew and certainly not one that could be accomplished in a single mission.