Helping the Soviets: The Hungarian State Security’s Involvement in the Space Race

Article

“Helping the Soviets: The Hungarian State Security’s Involvement in the Space Race” by Jákob Horváth
Published in Quest Volume: 32 #1 (2025)

Winner: 2024 Sacknoff Prize for Space History

Abstract

By introducing freshly discovered Communist-era sources from the Hungarian State Security Archives, this paper shows that Hungary’s scientific and technical intelligence agents were actively gathering information about American and European space programs to aid the Soviet Union’s own.

The espionage was conducted through intelligence work aimed at Huba Őry (1927-2015) Hungarian aviation and rocket engineer, who, having emigrated after the 1956 revolution, built a distinguished career in the West German rocket industry. The Hungarian State Security approached Őry through his former colleagues working as undercover agents, who were able to obtain hundreds of pages of secret documents and even material samples of heat shields used on the Space Shuttle and European rockets from the unsuspecting Őry. Through analyzing these secret documents and contrasting them with contemporary American and Soviet sources, this paper evaluates how useful they were to the Soviet space program, specifically for the development of the Buran shuttle.

Citation

Horváth, Jákob. “Helping the Soviets: The Hungarian State Security’s Involvement in the Space Race.” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2025): 3-16.