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Cold War In Space

v1.1.1 / chapter 6 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* Although the launch of Sputnik 1 had set off something of a public frenzy, for the moment the focus of both the US and the USSR remained the urgent race to develop ICBMs and a space reconnaissance capability. The two superpowers even began to perform nuclear tests in low Earth orbit.

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[6.1] MINUTEMAN
[6.2] ARPA / CORONA
[6.3] ATLAS IN TEST / SCORE / POLARIS IN TEST
[6.4] THE ARGUS SPACE NUCLEAR TESTS
[6.5] SOVIET ICBMS ENTER SERVICE

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[6.1] MINUTEMAN

* While the Soviets and Americans played to the public audience with satellite launches, the missile race continued on the fast track. Indeed, developments were moving so fast that older projects were being left in the dust. Navaho was canceled in July 1957, after a series of test flights that were so disappointing that the missile became known as "Never-Go Navaho". However, it had more than paid for itself with the technology it provided for the next generation. Its rocket engine was the basis for most of the new missiles that were now flying downrange over the Atlantic from Cape Canaveral, and its inertial navigation system was the basis for an entire range of applications.

For example, the Navy's new Polaris submarines needed a very precise navigation system so they could launch nuclear-armed missiles and have them hit their targets. A prototype of this inertial navigation system would be installed in the USS NAUTILUS, America's first atomic submarine, and guide it on a record journey from Pearl Harbor to London via the North Pole in 1958.

Polaris in turn was leading to yet another new big missile. General Schriever received a report recommending development of a solid-fuel ICBM, and consequently Schriever had ordered Colonel Edward Hall, one of the godfathers of the Atlas and then in charge of Thor flight test, to investigate such a weapon. Hall was enthusiastic about the idea, since such a weapon could be stored almost indefinitely, with little support staff and maintenance, and would be able to fire almost immediately. He envisioned a multistage missile that could be stored in a concrete-lined hole in the ground, or "inverted silo", and launched in place. It would be much more effective weapon than any liquid-fuel ICBM.

Hall set up a BMD office to define "Weapon System Q (WS-Q)", with the office originally staffed entirely by himself, and buried himself in the job. He defined three weapons: a ICBM named "Sentinel", an IRBM named "Minuteman", and a tactical ballistic missile named "Scout".

A solid-fuel ICBM would require much larger and more powerful solid-fuel rocket motors than those being built for the Polaris, which was an IRBM. Hall awarded development contracts to both Aerojet and Thiokol for big "grains", as solid-fuel rocket motors were known. Aerojet had won the production contract for the Polaris solid rocket motor, and Thiokol's Crosby had been determined to win the production contract for the solid-rocket motors of the new Air Force ICBM. In November 1957, Thiokol lit off a solid-rocket motor weighing 11,300 kilograms (25,000 pounds), the largest built to that time.

Another problem was the guidance system. All the other long-range missiles then in development could use the floating gyro system designed by Draper Labs. It took an hour to bring such a system online and calibrate it, but that wasn't a problem for a liquid-fuel missile, which took at least that long to fuel, nor for Polaris, since the submarine launch platform was generally invulnerable to surprise attack and the vessel's skipper could launch when ready. However, a solid-fuel ICBM would have to be ready for immediate launch at all times, and that meant a guidance system that was either online at all times or could be brought online immediately.

Such a guidance system was already available in prototype form. John Slater, an engineer in North American's Autonetics Division, had designed a new "gas bearing" gyro for the Navaho program. The gas bearing gyro involved a ball the size of a large marble, spinning inside a spherical housing that floated on a layer of gas. This greatly reduced contact and friction, allowing the gyro to run indefinitely. One such gyro had been put into motion in 1952 and was still spinning.

Schriever eventually became enthusiastic for WS-Q, mostly on its merits, but also because the Navy was making noises about a land-based mobile version of the Polaris, threatening to encroach on Air Force turf. In the wake of Sputnik, Schriever and Hall went to Washington in February 1958 to lobby for operational development of WS-Q. They got approval in 48 hours. Sentinel and Scout didn't make the cut, but the Minuteman concept was extended to intercontinental range and moved up to formal development. Money was limited at the time since there was still substantial skepticism that the technology was available to build a solid-fuel ICBM, but Schriever kept up his lobbying efforts, and a year later Defense Secretary McElroy would authorize funding to put Minuteman on the front burner.

The design that emerged for Minuteman was of a three-stage solid-fuel missile. In hopes of ensuring the fastest possible development, a contract for each stage was issued to a different vendor. Thiokol Corporation got the contract for the big first stage, which was to provide 890 kN (90,700 kgp / 200,000 lbf) thrust. It was to have four steerable nozzles to provide flight control.

Aerojet got the contract for the second stage, which was to provide 267 kN (27,200 kgp / 60,000 lbf) of thrust. A relative newcomer to the big solid-rocket business, the Hercules Powder Company of Utah, got the contract for the third stage, which was to provide 156 kN (15,875 kgp / 35,000 lbf) thrust. While the first two stages were designed with steel casings, the third stage featured an innovation, a glass-fiber filament-wound casing. The third stage would provide final boost for an RV with a yield of over a megatonne. The Minuteman (and Polaris) upper stage fuel mix would include a proportion of high explosive. This increased thrust but made the stage a bit more dangerous to handle, and such "high energy" fuels couldn't be safely used for larger grains.

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[6.2] ARPA / CORONA

* Other important changes were in motion in early 1958. President Eisenhower made two important decisions: to set up the new "Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)", and to put the CIA into the spy satellite business.

ARPA was formally created on 7 February 1958, with Roy W. Johnson, a former vice-president of General Electric, as the agency's first head. Eisenhower created ARPA as part of the response to Sputnik. His long experience in the military had taught him how parochial and short-sighted the services could be, and he knew that they were not really the organizations to create great leaps in technology. ARPA was founded to help bring together the competing space projects then in progress.

The CIA was given responsibility for the "film return" spy satellite being developed by Lockheed as part of WS-117L. The Air Force retained control of the "orbital film readout" spy satellite, as well as the missile-warning satellites. The breakup was ordered because Schriever's overloaded BMD was not making good progress on WS-117L, and because the CIA was much more interested in the film return concept than the Air Force.

The Air Force orbital film readout satellite program acquired the name of "Samos", while the missile launch warning satellite program got the name of "Midas". These were said to be acronyms for "Satellite And Missile Observation System" and "Missile Defense Alarm System", but some sources claim the names were picked more or less at random and the acronyms were "backronyms", invented after the fact. The Samos series would also include, apparently as a form of insurance against the failure of the other schemes, some satellites in which the entire optical system would be returned to Earth in a large reentry vehicle.

The CIA program was assigned to Richard Bissell, a CIA officer who had directed development of the Lockheed U-2 spyplane for the agency. In order to ensure secrecy, Bissell formally canceled the agency's spy satellite project and then immediately resurrected it under the codename "Corona", the name being apparently inspired by the Smith-Corona typewriter on his desk.

* The Corona satellites were to be launched by Thor or Atlas missiles and, as mentioned earlier, would be based on the Agena upper stage. In modern terms, the Agena would be called a spacecraft "bus", providing support for a specialized payload. The initial version of the upper stage was the "Agena-A", which led to the "stretched" and more capable "Agena-B".

While most satellites of the time used simple spin stabilization to maintain their orientation in orbit, the Agena provide "three-axis" stabilization. This meant that the satellite could be oriented into any position and stay there without moving, a necessity for aligning a camera on a target. Three-axis stabilization was much more difficult than spin stabilization. The Agena used a gyroscopic system to maintain its attitude, driving a set of thrusters to adjust the spacecraft, and using a horizon sensor and later star trackers for correction. The Agena also provided telemetry, command, and tracking electronics. Power was originally supplied by batteries, but later versions would use solar panels to permit longer-duration missions. A simple sequencing system determined when the cameras took images and when the images were returned to Earth.

The actual payload was a panoramic camera developed by Itek. The Itek camera scanned across the line of flight of the satellite over a 70-degree arc, recording the image on 70 millimeter film provided by Eastman Kodak. The camera was built using a rotating drum that exposed the film from one side to the other, laying down an image in a swath. The scan motion was slightly staggered from one side to the other to compensate for the motion of the spacecraft. Best resolution of this early camera was no better than about 11 meters (35 feet), but later generations would provide finer resolution.

The film was fed to a re-entry capsule that was ejected after the images had been obtained. The capsule, or "bucket" as it would eventually be known, included a thruster maneuvering system, a solid-fuel deorbiting rocket, a telemetry system and beacon to allow it to be tracked, a recovery parachute controlled by a timer system, and a battery. The bucket would fall back to Earth, its ablative heat shield allowing it to survive the heat of re-entry, and then deploy a parachute. It would then be snatched out of the sky by a transport aircraft trailing a harness to snag the parachute, a technique refined by the balloon reconnaissance programs. If the aircraft missed, the bucket would be picked out of the sea by a Navy vessel. The bucket had a salt plug that would dissolve after about 24 hours in the water to ensure that it would sink if it were not recovered in a timely fashion.

* A cover program named "Discoverer" was invented to hide Corona. Discoverer, as the story went, was supposedly a scientific research project, in which payloads such as mice were shot into space and then recovered for study. Even many people working on the project were given the cover story, and generally swallowed it. The satellites would be sent into space from a new launch facility being built in California.

The Air Force had selected Cooke Air Force Base, about 200 kilometers (150 miles) up the coast from Los Angeles, for the facility, and renamed the site "Vandenberg Air Force Base" in honor of USAF General Hoyt S. Vandenberg. Vandenberg was farther north and so a better site than Cape Canaveral for launching a spacecraft into an orbit over the Earth's poles, with such a "polar" orbit allowing it to observe the entire surface of the planet over successive orbits as the planet turned underneath. The Pacific provided an excellent range area where failures could splash down without public damage or observation, and activities on the base were much more secure than they were at Cape Canaveral, though a railroad track did run through Vandenberg, requiring secret activities to be scheduled around trains passing through the base. The Navy acquired the southern part of Cooke AFB to perform their own shots, naming it the "Point Aguello" facility, but it would be absorbed into the rest of Vandenberg AFB during a reorganization in 1964.

Although the CIA was in the driver's seat on the film return spy satellite project, the Air Force was still heavily involved with the implementation. Bissell worked closely with his USAF counterpart, Brigadier General Osmond Ritland, to get the Corona satellites into space. Their relationship was congenial, which was, considering everything else that would happen, at least one stroke of luck.

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[6.3] ATLAS IN TEST / SCORE / POLARIS IN TEST

* By the beginning of 1958, Thor and Jupiter were on the way to becoming operational weapons. The Atlas had performed its first successful flight test in December 1957, and other successful flights followed.

The early Atlas test items were not fully operational vehicles. The Atlas design featured three Rocketdyne engines. Two of the engines, with 667 kN (68,000 kgp / 150,000 lbf) thrust each, were used by the "half stage" that was discarded after the initial boost of the missile. The missile was then to continue powered flight with a "sustainer" engine providing 267 kN (27,200 kgp / 60,000 lbf) thrust. Initial test launches did not have operational sustainer engines, limiting the flights to a mere 960 kilometers (600 miles) range, a tenth of what the operational Atlas was to be capable of.

The first test flight using all three engines took place in mid-July 1958. The Atlas promptly went out of control and was commanded to self-destruct. A successful test flight followed two weeks later, though the missile only flew 3,130 kilometers (2,700 miles), since it was burdened by a heavy suite of test instruments. That was followed in turn by two similar and successful test shots, one in late August and the other in mid-September, both of which flew 4,800 kilometers (3,000 miles).

A full-range test shot without the full load of test instruments was performed on 18 September 1958, to blow up 80 seconds after liftoff. Another half-range shot was performed to work out the bugs, and in late November the WDD crew tried for another full-range shot again. It arced out over the ocean and splashed down in the South Atlantic, 10,140 kilometers (6,300 miles) from Cape Canaveral. America had just performed its first successful full-range ICBM flight. The launch crew threw a wild party that night.

* While the Air Force team got Atlas flying, ARPA was coming up with a scheme to use the missile to hit back against the Soviets in the satellite race. In June 1958, after the launch of Sputnik 3, Roy Johnson visited senior officials of the Convair corporation in San Diego, California, and discussed what could be done to respond to the latest Soviet move. One proposed putting an entire Atlas missile, minus the discarded half-stage, into orbit.

The project, named "Signal Communications By Orbiting Relay Equipment (SCORE)", was also intended to demonstrate communications satellite technology using a "radio repeater" system. The Army Signal Research & Development Laboratory built the SCORE repeater using commercial off-the-shelf equipment, with dual redundant repeater systems installed in the missile's nose and antennas for each system build flush into the nose cone's surface. Each repeater system was built around a tape recorder with a capacity of four minutes; a message could be uploaded to the recorder from one of four ground stations in the southern USA through a receiver system, with the message then played back continuously through a transmitter subsystem. SCORE was what now would be called a "store and forward" or "store and dump" communications satellite.

The SCORE project was kept such a secret that when it the "orbital Atlas" lifted off in late December, some of the launch crew screamed at the range safety officer to destroy it, thinking it was going off course. He knew better and SCORE flew into orbit, with the messages played including a Christmas greeting from President Eisenhower. SCORE was mostly just a big empty missile hulk, but Krushchev couldn't mock the Americans for their little satellites any more.

* In the meantime, the US Navy was going through their own painful learning curve with the Polaris submarine-launched IRBM. An inert test vehicle was ejected from a prototype ship launch tube in November 1957, followed by flights of test vehicles with small solid-fuel loads, known as "short grains", from the California coast in January and March 1958. These two short flights led to the first true launch attempt from Cape Canaveral on 24 September 1958. The Polaris made it to an altitude of 12 kilometers (40,000 feet) before it spontaneously blew up, due to an autopilot error.

Two weeks later, the second launch attempt resulted in the first stage of the missile remaining on the pad, pouring out smoke, while the second stage flew wildly up into the sky like a holiday fireworks rocket. The range safety officer blew it up and the debris fell around the launch site, causing fires. Firefighting was complicated by the large numbers of venomous snakes aroused by the excitement.

The third launch attempt was performed on 30 December 1958. The Polaris seemed to fly happily through most of the first-stage burn, but then it went into a tumble. Radio telemetry showed that the exhaust had burned through the bottom of the missile. The engineers went back to the drawing board.

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[6.4] THE ARGUS SPACE NUCLEAR TESTS

* While the US military worked to develop a US nuclear-armed ballistic missile test, other considerations for the conduct of a "space war" were being investigated, such as the effects of detonating a nuclear warhead in the upper atmosphere or in near-Earth space.

In the spring and summer of 1958, the US military conducted three high-altitude nuclear tests as an element of the HARDTACK 1 series, which involved a total of 33 nuclear tests. The first of the three high-altitude tests, codenamed YUCCA, was successfully performed on 28 April 1958 about 157 kilometers (98 miles) northwest of Eniwetok Atoll, with a balloon-borne W-25 warhead detonated at an altitude of 26 kilometers (16 miles). The W-25 was a very small nuclear weapon with a yield of a few kilotonnes that was used on the Genie air-to-air missile, and the test was to investigate its usefulness as an antiballistic missile interceptor warhead.

YUCCA was just a warmup. The second US high-altitude test in the series, codenamed TEAK, was conducted on 1 August 1958. It involved the launch of a Redstone from Johnston Island, carrying a multi-megatonne W-39 fusion warhead to successfully detonate at an altitude of 77 kilometers (48 miles). The third test, ORANGE, was conducted on 12 August, and was almost a duplicate of TEAK, with a Redstone launched from Johnston Island carrying a W-39 warhead. The warhead successfully detonated at an altitude of 43 kilometers (28 miles).

The three high altitude tests revealed that the flash of radiation emitted by the blast would strike the upper atmosphere and generate a monster "electromagnetic pulse (EMP)" that could disrupt electronics and electrical systems. It also disrupted the ionosphere for a period of time, interfering with long-range radio communications.

* Even as the HARDTACK 1 tests were winding down, the gears were in motion for investigating the effects of true space nuclear tests. Following the discovery that the Earth's magnetic field trapped energetic particles into the Van Allen radiation belts, a researcher at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory named Nicholas Christofilos developed a theory that an artificial radiation belt could be created by detonating a nuclear device in near space, dispersing a cloud of radioactive particles to spread around the Earth. Such a cloud might interfere with radars, communications, and the electronic systems of ballistic missiles and spacecraft.

Today, public outrage would make performing such an experiment out of the question regardless of the actual level of risk, but things were different in 1958. A series of nuclear test blasts were planned under Project ARGUS to check out Christofilos' theory. The tests were conducted in secret, though it appears the secrecy was at least in part because President Eisenhower was discussing a nuclear test ban with the Soviets at the time and didn't want to undermine the talks.

In the summer of 1958, a fleet of nine US Navy vessels, designated "Task Force 88", steamed to a location in the South Atlantic about 1,770 kilometers (1,100 miles) southwest of Capetown, South Africa. The fleet included the Navy's floating launchpad, the USS NORTON SOUND, which was to perform the test shots. The remote location had not been selected primarily for secrecy, though that was a consideration, but because the Earth's magnetic field dipped closer to the Earth's surface above that region, and the magnetic field could support a radiation belt at that latitude.

The test shots were performed with the Lockheed X-17A three-stage rocket, which as mentioned in a previous chapter had been developed to test nose cones. It was fitted with the Genie's "peewee" W-25 warhead.

There were three test shots in all. "Argus I" was launched on 27 August 1958, with the weapon detonating at an altitude of 161 kilometers (100 miles). "Argus II" followed on 30 August, with the weapon detonating at 293 kilometers (182 miles). The last in the series, "Argus III", took place on 6 September, with the weapon detonating at 750 kilometers (466 miles). The tests partly confirmed Christofilos' theory, creating a short-lived radiation belt in the atmosphere, and also disrupting communications. However, the radiation belt was not strong enough to disrupt enemy ICBMs and act as a "missile shield".

The US and the USSR did agree to a test ban, with the ban going into effect on 1 November 1958. The Argus story was finally revealed to the public in the NEW YORK TIMES in March 1959 and seems to have attracted little attention. It was not the end of space nuclear tests.

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[6.5] SOVIET ICBMS ENTER SERVICE

* While the Americans were moving towards an operational ICBM capability, the Soviet Union was fielding Korolyev's R-7, at least in principle.

The first flight of a production R-7 was on 30 July 1959 and was completely successful. On 17 December 1959 Krushchev established an entirely new military service, the "Strategic Rocket Forces (Raketnyye Voyska Strategischeskovo Nachsnacheniya / RVSN)" to deal with the new rockets. Marshal Mitrofan I. Nedelin became the first commander of the RVSN.

Work was then being finished up on a new secret "Angara" launch center for the R-7 at Plesetsk, to the northeast of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and just a few hundred kilometers south of Archangel in the sub-arctic regions of the USSR. The high northern location provided a forward base for launching strikes over the pole on North America. Work had begun in early 1957, the first workers arriving in the middle of a blizzard and extreme cold that was unusually harsh even by the severe standards of the region.

The R-7 was declared operational in January 1960, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) giving it the codename "SS-6 Sapwood". Another ICBM, the "R-9", was in the pipeline, development having been begun in 1958 by Korolyev's design bureau. The R-9 was a two-stage rocket of more conventional configuration than the R-7, also powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen, with a version designed for silo launch. It would later be given the NATO codename of "SS-8 Sasin".

* The USSR was also moving towards an operational SLBM capability. With a typical sense of urgency, the Soviets had begun work on firing long-range missiles from submarines in 1953, performing launches of R-11 "Scud" missiles from a simulated submarine launch setup on land, and then from a few modified "Zulu" class diesel submarines. That was strictly a stopgap solution, and by 1959 the USSR was putting the "Golf" class submarines into service. These were also diesel submarines, armed with the "SS-N-4 Sark" SLBM, which was a liquid-fuel missile with storable propellants. It was substantially bigger than Polaris, and the Golf submarines could only carry three of them, fitted into an extended "sail".

The USSR was working on a nuclear-powered missile submarine similar to the Golf class, the "Hotel" class. Although the USSR's SLBM technology was much less sophisticated and capable than that the US Navy was working on, they at least had operational ballistic-missile submarines. However, it was an unimpressive capability. Not only were the submarines relatively crude, but the West had and always would have clear naval superiority over the Soviet Union. Ballistic-missile submarines operating in the open sea to get within striking distance of the United States were clearly vulnerable. With the activation of the RVSN, Soviet Navy submarine missile force development was put on hold.

* The RVSN work was by no means going smoothly. Although Krushchev boasted in 1959 that Soviet ICBMS were in mass production, the R-7 was far from a robust system, and was an unimpressive weapon even in the best of circumstances. It was a fairly complicated piece of machinery, relatively expensive and hard to build; it had to be fueled almost immediately before launch, a clumsy procedure that made it vulnerable to a first strike; and it could not be fired from a silo. Although the simpler R-9 could be fired from a silo, it still had to be fueled before launch, and really wasn't that much of an improvement.

The R-9 program also proved troublesome. First test launch was in 1961, but about half the test launches were disasters, and it wasn't fielded until late 1964, when it was on the edge of complete obsolescence. Neither the R-7 or the R-9 were fielded in large quantities; as far as weapons went, they were little more than propaganda.

The USSR was working as hard as they could to improve matters. A design bureau run by Mikhail Yangel, one of Korolyev's proteges, was working on a new ICBM, the "R-16", development of which was initiated at the end of 1956. The R-16 was a two-stage weapon roughly comparable in size and capability to the American Titan. However, the R-16 was to be powered by storable propellants, with unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine (UDMH) fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. That would allow the missile to remain in launch readiness for an extended period of time, making it a much more practical weapon.