"Have you looked at the sky lately?" (Part 2) The NASA Death Probe That Could Have Been

Militarized Mars Rover (D3 concept sketch). You know they wanted to. On 20 Aug 1977, the United States launched the space probe Voyager 2 on a mission to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (*snicker*), Ur Mama, Neptune, and the outer reaches of the solar system. Then, evidently realizing they forgot about Voyager 1, another launch was conducted on 5 Sept 1977, which also targeted our far-flung celestial neighbors. This was the team in charge of numbering the Voyager missions But were these dual scientific feats really expressions of just American ingenuity? The fact that we just posed this in the form of a question would suggest they were not. True, the US had been flexing big time with the Apollo moon missions since 1969. But, as noted in Part 1 of Part 4 of this ongoing series (that’s correct, do the math), the timing of these ambitious satellites was suspicious, coming only 8 months after a Soviet Death Probe crashed into the American Midwest which was eventually destroyed by American