Terra-3

During the 1980s, officials within the United States Department of Defense (DoD) suggested it was the site of a prototypical anti-satellite weapon system.

Construction, consisting of a large concrete bunker lined with steel plates, was begun at Sary Shagan, but the facility was far from complete when the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed in 1972, and these efforts ended.

[3] Instead, these experiments demonstrated the inability of the tracking system to point the lasers with the required level of accuracy in order to be effective.

Throughout, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was returning reports on the site that were quite accurate, and at odds with the DoD's public statements.

These observers noted a wide variety of evidence that the system, while intended to research the possibility of an anti-satellite laser capability, had never reached anywhere near the operational stage.

[5] Terra-3 is the topic of a claim that the IR laser was used to target the Space Shuttle Challenger during its 6th orbital mission on 10 October 1984 (STS-41-G).