Category: Sabotage

• The Vanguard Sabotage

  The Vanguard Sabotage was the belief that early U.S. rocket failures, especially the December 1957 Vanguard TV-3 explosion nicknamed “Flopnik,” were not ordinary engineering breakdowns but acts of deliberate interference. In the most elaborate version, Soviet moles operating within or around elite American scientific institutions, including the Smithsonian in later retellings, had sabotaged the U.S. satellite effort to preserve the Soviet lead in space.