Yes, you're right. I'm not going to pretend that this is a serious proposition. There isn't a lot of evidence to support it.

For me, it's a fun conspiracy theory to engage with. I'm only doing this for the love of the game as it were. Please don't take it that seriously.

But you have to admit, it is a fun theory. A lot of the claims made by the Russians / Roscosmos are most likely false, but if you notice the article says,

    > The only concrete document referred to is an intelligence memo that Defense Minister Sokolov supposedly received on February 24 about the assignment of the French astronauts. Whether such a memo really landed on his desk that day is questionable (after all, Baudry’s assignment to 51E had been publicly announced by NASA in August 1984), but the idea that the assignment raised some suspicions in Soviet circles about the objectives of the Challenger mission may not be so far-fetched. There had always been a high level of paranoia in the Soviet Union about the military potential of the Space Shuttle. Misconceptions about the military applications of the shuttle, such as the belief that it was capable of diving into the atmosphere to drop bombs over Moscow, had been a key factor in the Soviet decision to develop Buran in 1976. The Buran orbiter was a virtual carbon copy of its US counterpart in shape and dimensions, exactly to counter the perceived military threat of the Shuttle. Furthermore, a couple of developments in the Shuttle program in early 1985 may have fueled the Soviet paranoia. The Shuttle had flown its first dedicated Defense Department mission (STS-51C) in January 1985 and a controversial laser experiment in the framework of SDI was planned for the STS-51G mission in June.

Whether or not said documentation can be trusted, which bits could be taken as true v. what's just insane paranoia is something that would require more work to discount than most would think. Because, as I've said, the numbers do line up from the article,

    > The least one can say is that Salyut-7, which was 13.5 meters long and had a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, would have fit inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay, whose dimensions were 4.6 by 18 meters. In fact, after the final crewed mission to Salyut-7 in 1986, the Russians significantly raised its orbit in hopes that one day it could be retrieved by Buran, which had the same dimensions as the American shuttle.

The Shuttle was an amazing piece of technology with amazing capabilities. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-41-C and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49

and this is one of my favorite missions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A (with my favorite space selfie)

Fun fact, the original deorbit plan for the Hubble was for the Shuttle to bring it back and then put it inside the Smithsonian, https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/orbitaldebris2019/orbital2...

(the Smithsonian part is IRL lore, and isn't mentioned online, AFAICT)