""Already in 1945, we were talking about satellites," Yuri Mozhorin, a veteran of the Soviet rocket development program, told Popular Mechanics. Mozhorin's older colleague in rocketry, Mikhail Tikhonravov, even thought up a plan to fashion a piloted rocket ship out of the V-2 and launch it to the edge of space. Recently declassified documents reveal that Tikhonravov's bosses within the Soviet aviation industry took his plan seriously enough to send it right to the desk of Joseph Stalin in June 1946. But after a short flirtation with space flight, the Soviet military leadership focused on the V-2's more destructive capability. In fact, at the beginning of the 1950s, any talk of a satellite or space exploration inside the Soviet missile research centers could get you in serious trouble. All space dreams were considered subversive and distracting from the main overarching goal—the military missiles."