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Foundations Of Unmanned Space Technology

v1.1.1 / chapter 11 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* While the US and USSR pushed on towards putting a man into space, other work focused on unmanned spaceflight for practical purposes such as communications, weather observation, navigation, planetary exploration, and of course reconnaissance. There was also a short-lived space nuclear arms race of sorts, but the two superpowers finally came to a mutual understanding that it wasn't a good idea.

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[11.1] THE FIRST COMSATS
[11.2] WEATHER & NAVIGATION SATELLITES / PIONEER 5
[11.3] THE BEGINNINGS OF RANGER
[11.4] THE US STRATEGIC MISSILE FORCE
[11.5] CORONA IN ORBIT / GRAB
[11.6] FOUNDATION OF THE NRO / SAMOS & MIDAS
[11.7] THE FISHBOWL SPACE NUCLEAR TESTS / THE TEST-BAN TREATY

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[11.1] THE FIRST COMSATS

* Manned spaceflight was sexy, but the Space Race had started with satellite launches, and satellite launches continued: while many wondered what the practical use putting a man into orbit might be, there were unarguably good reasons to send up automated spacecraft. One of the most attractive was to use a satellite to relay long-distance radio communications.

Work towards a communication satellite dated back to a paper on the subject published by the prominent Bell Labs researcher, Dr. John R. Pierce, in 1955, with the 1958 SCORE mission providing an initial demonstration. A few years later a NACA engineer, William O'Sullivan, came up with the idea of launching a large gas-filled aluminized Mylar balloon into low orbit to perform studies of upper atmospheric drag. Pierce got wind of the idea and realized that such a balloon would also be useful as a "passive" communications relay that could bounce radio signals far over the horizon. The US Navy had used the Moon as a passive relay for microwave communications as far back as 1954, and Pierce felt an "artificial moon" could do the job as well or better.

NASA picked up the project and assigned it the name "Echo", leading to the launch on 12 August 1960 of "Echo 1", a metalized balloon 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter. Echo 1 was the first communications satellite or "comsat". Echo 1 amounted to a proof-of-concept system. The fact that it was a passive relay meant that getting a signal from one place to another required a powerful transmitter and a sensitive receiver, making the ground network very expensive. Although a second Echo would be orbited in 1964, work quickly moved on to "active relays", satellites that incorporated an electronic transmitter-receiver system, or "transponder", that could pick up signals from a ground transmitter, amplify them, and pass them on to a remote ground receiver.

Following up the SCORE flight, on 4 October 1960 the US Army launched an experimental active relay comsat, named "Courier 1B", on 4 October 1960. Like SCORE, Courier used a store & forward scheme, in which information was uploaded into one of five tape recorders, and then played back later when the satellite came into view of a ground station. ARPA was working in parallel on an operational store & forward system named "Advent", but it was too far ahead of its time and was canceled in 1962.

With the Army bowing out of the space effort, the Air Force took up work on comsats. The service was interested in passive relay systems for a time, leading to the "West Ford" project, in which Midas satellite launches on 21 October 1961 and 9 May 1963 carried a secondary payload consisting of 480 million thumbnail-length copper whiskers. The whiskers formed a belt around the Earth, with messages bounced off to communicate from coast to coast. Astronomers didn't like the idea since it threatened to interfere with their observations, but the scheme was a bust in any case -- project researchers underestimated the drag of the thin residual atmosphere in low orbit and the whiskers quickly fell back to Earth. The Air Force moved on to active relay schemes.

* A store & forward satellite was a cheap & dirty approach to satellite communications. It could operate from low orbit, reducing launch costs, but it could only provide communications on a strip of the Earth under its orbital path, and then only at the expense of delays. Ideas for a more capable comsat system were already being developed. In 1945, a young British Royal Air Force officer and spaceflight enthusiast named Arthur C. Clarke published an article in the British radio magazine WIRELESS WORLD. In his article, Clarke proposed placing a space station in orbit over the equator at an altitude of 35,800 kilometers (22,200 miles). At this altitude, the space station would take 24 hours to circle the Earth, exactly matching the Earth's rotation period. The space station would effectively hang motionless over the Earth.

Such a "geosynchronous" or "geostationary" orbit would be ideal for a communications relay, equivalent to a relay tower 35,800 kilometers tall that could cover almost an entire hemisphere of the Earth. Three geostationary comsats could be launched to implement a communications network that covered the entire Earth, except for the polar regions where the satellites would be too low on the horizon.

Clarke clarified his ideas for a geostationary comsat in his 1952 book, THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE. John Pierce rediscovered the idea independently a few years later, outlining the idea in his 1955 paper, and is still credited in some sources as its inventor. However, although the British have an odd habit going back to at least Isaac Newton of coming up with bright ideas and not publishing them, that wasn't the case for Clarke. His ideas were very clearly documented in print and perfectly familiar to British spaceflight enthusiasts, and his success as an internationally popular science-fiction writer made him far more visible to the public than Pierce. In fact, British writers still like to call a geostationary orbit a "Clarke orbit", though the name has never stuck anywhere except in the UK.

On 7 August 1959, a Thor-Able booster had placed "Explorer 6" into orbit. Like its predecessors in the Explorer series, Explorer 6 was designed to study the space environment, and had accordingly been placed in a highly elliptical orbit, ranging from an altitude of 253 to 42,500 kilometers (157 to 26,400 miles). The significance of Explorer 6 was that it could have been easily placed into a geostationary orbit by firing a rocket to "circularize" its path as it approached the high end of this arc, following the principles defined by Walter Hohmann before the war. In technical terms, the satellite was in what would become known as "geostationary transfer orbit". Enthusiasts for geostationary comsats recognized that the technology to achieve their goals was not far off.

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[11.2] WEATHER & NAVIGATION SATELLITES / PIONEER 5

* Other applications for satellites were also being investigated. The idea of a weather observation satellite grew out of early studies for the WS-117L spy satellites, which considered use of TV cameras for reconnaissance spacecraft but rejected the idea because TV cameras didn't have the resolution to reveal adequate target detail. A TV camera would work perfectly well for mapping cloud and weather patterns, however, and RCA, which had participated in the studies, decided with ARPA encouragement to take the idea and run with it. NASA took over the project in April 1959, leading to the successful launch of the "Television & Infra-Red Observation Satellite 1 (TIROS 1)" by a Thor-Able booster on 1 April 1960.

TIROS 1 returned images for two and a half months from low polar Earth orbit, too short a time to make it a useful operational system, but long enough to prove the concept. Nine more first-generation TIROS satellites would be successfully launched into 1965. All these satellites had twin miniaturized vidicon TV tube cameras, while half of them had a "scanning infrared radiometer" to perform thermal mapping, along with an "Earth radiation budget" instrument to measure the amount of radiation received and given off by the Earth.

In the early days of the TIROS program, a reporter asked NASA Administrator Glennan if TIROS images would be good enough to be used for military reconnaissance. Glennan shot back: "If the optics are that good, we will degrade them." NASA was not going to be in the spy satellite game. It wasn't the agency's business, and there was no reason to provoke the military or compromise NASA's civilian standing by even hinting that it was. Of course, there was no way that TIROS as it stood at the time would have been particularly useful for reconnaissance: the program was rooted in military studies, and if the technology had actually been useful for reconnaissance at the time, the military would have never let NASA get their hands on it.

* Another potentially important satellite application was for navigation. Like so many early space efforts, satellite navigation systems were driven by military needs.

During World War II, the US and Britain had developed "radio navigation systems" such as LORAN that used signals sent by networks of transmission towers to allow aircraft to find their way over long distances. As the US Navy deployed their new Polaris submarines, naval brass became concerned about the accuracy of their missiles. Obviously, one important factor in obtaining improved targeting accuracy was to have a better knowledge of the launch coordinates of the submarine at sea. A physicist named Frank McQuire at APL suggested that a network of satellites could be placed in orbit, broadcasting positioning signals from well-known orbits.

The idea migrated up the naval chain of command to Admiral Arleigh Burke, the Chief of Naval Operations, and was approved. The first successful launch of a navigation satellite, named "Transit 1-B", was performed on 13 April 1960, by a Thor-Able with a restartable second stage to allow orbital maneuvering. The Transit program would have its ups and downs, but by the second half of the 1960s the US Navy would have a highly effective navigation satellite system in orbit.

* Space science, the initial application for satellites, was not being neglected either. In particular, the Air Force / STL team under George Mueller and Dolph Thiel that had worked on Pioneers 0 through 2 decided to follow up their efforts with one last shot, "Pioneer 5".

Although both the USSR and the US had already sent spacecraft into orbit around the Sun, they had been actually aiming at the Moon. Pioneer 5 was the first spacecraft to be specifically sent into deep space, carrying a modest payload to perform measurements of the space environment. The "probe" was launched on 11 March 1960, and was tracked by Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank until late June, when communications were finally lost. The probe was 35 million kilometers (22 million miles) from Earth at the time.

That was the end of the military Pioneer probes, but NASA would quickly resurrect the name for their own missions. The second Pioneer series would include deep-space probes that would use the success of Pioneer 5 as a stepping stone to far more impressive feats. In the meantime, NASA continued to fly a diverse series of Explorer satellites for a variety of scientific objectives.

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[11.3] THE BEGINNINGS OF RANGER

* JPL was very interested in deep space probes of their own, but when the lab became part of NASA at the beginning of 1959, the writing on the wall clearly told Pickering and other JPL brass that they would have to focus on the Moon for the time being.

The change in agenda was not entirely due to political correctness, either. Homer Newell, a rocket scientist who had been on the NRL Vanguard program, was the assistant director of space science in Abe Silverstein's Office of Space Flight Development. In the months following the foundation of NASA, the agency's senior officials spent much of their time determining future directions for the organization, and one the things Newell did was set up a group under a physicist named Robert Jastrow, another NRL veteran, to consider the science agenda.

To get started on his job, Jastrow went to the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, to confer with the well-known chemist Harold Clayton Urey. Urey gave Jastrow an elegant pitch on the scientific value of the Moon as a key to the understanding of the early solar system and the formation of the planets. Impressed by Urey's sales job, Jastrow took the chemist to Newell's office a week later, and the two men sold Newell on the Moon as well. In January 1959, Newell established an ad hoc "Working Group on Lunar Exploration", chaired by Jastrow and including Urey, plus three prominent scientists named James Arnold, Harrison Brown, and Frank Press. The group came quickly came up with proposals for probes that would crash on the Moon, land instrument packages on its surface, or orbit around it.

* In the meantime, JPL was wrestling with the issue of launching their probes. They were working on designs for large, sophisticated probes to be named "Mariner", but these spacecraft needed more powerful boosters than were available at the time. The development of the powerful Centaur upper stage was a matter of great importance to them, but Centaur wouldn't be available in the short term.

For the moment, they were banking their hopes on the Vega upper stage system, but the Vega program was being threatened by the Air Force Agena effort. President Eisenhower found duplication of effort between the various factions annoying, and there wasn't enough room for both Vega and Agena. Although Glennan pushed for Vega and even won approval for the program in mid-1959, the Air Force countered by making a good case for preserving the Agena program since in an advanced state of development, and promoted an enhanced "Agena-B" that possessed most of Vega's capabilities.

Glennan tired of the fight and ordered work on Vega halted in early December 1959. JPL not only had to settle for Agena, but the lab was now completely out of the booster business, leaving the lab to focus on probes to the Moon and the planets.

Late in that month, NASA headquarters directed JPL to come up with an interplanetary flight calendar for the next three years. They strongly suggested that five Atlas-Agena B flights to the Moon, carrying a new series of probes called "Ranger", be launched in 1961 and 1962. They also stipulated that the primary payload be cameras for lunar reconnaissance. The camera payload was dictated by the desire for better scientific understanding of the lunar surface; to scout out future landing sites for soft-landing robot probes and possibly manned missions; and for public relations.

Pickering understood the importance of the last item perfectly. Returning photographs of the Moon would be an excellent way to increase public excitement for the space effort. In January 1960, he returned a proposal, specifying that the initial two "Block I" Rangers would be flyby probes, essentially engineering test vehicles to prove the technology. The three "Block II" Rangers would carry TV cameras, as well as a hard-landing seismic probe. They would also be the first space probes capable of midcourse maneuvering.

* Design work for the first two Ranger probes was complete by May 1960. Getting to that stage had been difficult. The Ranger project manager for JPL, James D. Burke, had found himself at the middle of interagency politics, and every time his team thought they had "finalized" the design, some busybody would add new requirements and the design team would have to rework everything again.

They finally came up with a design that seemed to make everyone more or less happy. The probes weighed 305 kilograms (675 pounds) each and looked like ocean buoys, with a "tower" of instruments sitting on a "bus" compartment in the shape of an eight-sided box. The bus contained control and power systems, thrusters, and scientific experiments. Two long solar-panel arrays were attached to the base of the bus, and a "high gain" dish antenna pivoted out from the bottom of the bus to provide communications with home base. The solar arrays and the dish antenna were to be neatly folded up inside the Agena's shroud at launch and then deployed in space. The spacecraft was controlled by a simple digital sequencing system, much less powerful than the cheapest modern pocket calculator.

The design of the spacecraft subtly reflected JPL's agenda. For example, it included a high-gain antenna for long-distance communications, and used solar panels for primary power instead of batteries. There was no particular need to go to such expense for a crash-lander lunar probe, but they were very useful features for an interplanetary probe.

* Pretty plans and models were one thing, actually launching a probe was another, as anyone who had been involved with missile and space activities through the 1950s understood only too well. The Ranger project was afflicted with a number of serious problems, not all of which were JPL's fault.

There was the annoying matter of the perpetual changes in mission definition, which continued to be troublesome. Another difficulty was that the lack of a really powerful booster meant that the design team had to trim weight of the Ranger probes to an absolute minimum, eliminating redundancy that would have improved spacecraft reliability. There was also the broader problem that JPL was growing rapidly at the time and had a number of different projects in the works. That necessarily meant disorganization, and critical design work assigned to novice engineers.

One specific headache that Burke had to deal with was sterilizing the Ranger probes. In 1958, Joshua Lederberg, a well-known biologist and geneticist, had raised the nasty question of what might happen if biological contamination from Earth carried to another world on a space probe interfered with local lifeforms, or survived on its own, to confuse scientists later on. International scientific organizations recommended sterilizing all space probes bound for other planets. Very few people thought there was any life on the Moon, nor that any life carried there by a space probe would survive for very long, but in October 1959 Abe Silverstein established sterilization as policy.

JPL decided that the best way to sterilize Ranger was to heat major spacecraft components to 134 degrees Celsius (273 degrees Fahrenheit) for 24 hours, use alcohol to scrub down components during assembly, ship the probe in a sealed van from Pasadena to Cape Canaveral, and then apply ethylene oxide gas when it was sealed in its Agena payload shroud, sitting on the pad. This was an expensive and troublesome process and worse, it was hard on space probes. Things were proving difficult enough for Ranger, and sterilization could only make matters worse.

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[11.4] THE US STRATEGIC MISSILE FORCE

* In 1960, the US military finally began to put their nuclear deterrent missile force into place. They would continue the buildup at a rapid pace through the decade.

The fielding of America's strategic missile force coincided with a parting of the ways between the military and civilian space programs. Up to 1960, the two programs were deeply intertwined, but after that ICBM development focused on solid-fuel missiles, while space-launch systems focused on refinement of liquid-fuel rockets, at least for booster cores. Furthermore, as NASA came up to speed, the civilian space effort was able to stand on its own instead of ride on the coattails of military programs. To be sure, there would continue to be interaction between military and civilian programs, but it was less difficult to determine where one stopped and the other began.

* Jupiter was deployed to Italy, with the first launch site declared operational in July 1960. The site was staffed and managed by the Italians but the Americans controlled the nuclear warheads. A similar arrangement was set up with Turkey, with the first Turkish IRBM base declared operational in April 1962.

Jupiter did not remain in service for long, however. The Air Force had never been enthusiastic about the weapon, and the presence of IRBMs in Turkey, across the Black Sea from the USSR, made the Soviets extremely nervous since the missiles could hit cities all over the western USSR with very little warning. This anxiety was a contributing factor to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the Soviets tried to set up R-12 and R-14 IRBMs in Cuba in response.

Krushchev thought this would be accepted as basically another move in the strategic chess game. The US had put IRBMs on his doorstep, how could they be too shocked if the USSR put IRBMs on theirs? However, he had not understood the basic American political mindset, established for generations by the Monroe Doctrine, that regarded interference by European powers in the New World as unacceptable. The Americans were shocked. The R-12s could hit targets all around the American South; the R-14s could hit targets up the Eastern Seaboard and deep into the heartland. There would only be a few minute's warning before Washington DC went up in a fireball.

Pentagon brass pushed for bombing the missile sites, but JFK handled the situation with great coolness, instead establishing a naval blockade around Cuba. Even when Soviet forces in Cuba shot down a U-2 spy plane and the military howled for action, JFK counseled patience. As it turned out, the shoot-down had occurred in defiance of direct orders from the Kremlin, and Krushchev, realizing that events were spiraling out of control, moved frantically to order withdrawal of the IRBMs. He was in such a hurry that he publicly announced the decision to withdraw the missiles in a public radio broadcast even before the decision reached Washington DC through diplomatic channels.

The US more quietly agreed to withdraw the Jupiters in exchange. However angry the Americans had been, after undergoing the experience of having missiles in their own backyard they understood how jittery the Soviets were about having IRBMs in theirs. The US IRBMs were redundant by that time anyway. The last Jupiters were withdrawn in April 1963.

Thor had been deployed to Britain as planned, with the first British base declared operational on 22 April 1960. The missile sites were operated by the British Royal Air Force, but the warheads remained under American control. As discussed in more detail below, Thors would be launched in 1962 to perform high-altitude and space nuclear tests. This was the last strictly warlike use of the Thor, since, like Jupiter, Thor was withdrawn from service in 1963. It had never really been intended to be more than an interim solution. However, surplus Thor IRBMs fitted with solid-fuel upper stages and given the name of "Thor-Burner" would be used to launch military satellites, and the Thor-Able would also be the "grandfather" of the extremely successful "Delta" space-launch boosters.

* Although the Atlas-B had been declared an operational weapon, it had to be launched from an exposed surface missile-launching site and required extensive launch preparation, making it of minimal usefulness as a delivery system. The "Atlas-E", which was first launched from Cape Canaveral in October 1960, was a more practical weapon. It was designed to be stored horizontally in a protective "soft coffin", then raised to the vertical position and fueled for launch.

The Atlas E featured improvements such as a new Rocketdyne MA-3 engine system that provided 1,730 kN (176,400 kgp / 389,000 lbf) thrust instead of the 1,602 kN (163,300 kgp / 360,000 lbf) thrust of the Atlas B. The Atlas E also featured a solid-state inertial guidance system, replacing the vacuum-tube system used on the Atlas B. The solid-state system was not only much more reliable but also improved the CEP from 9.25 kilometers (5.75 miles) to a mere 275 meters (900 feet), which was a "bulls-eye" for a fusion bomb.

The final ICBM variant of the Atlas was the "Atlas F", which completed testing in 1962. It was designed to be stored in an underground silo, then raised to the surface, fueled, and launched. By that time, 126 Atlas missiles were in operational service, scattered all over the US. They were withdrawn from service in 1966. Like the Thor, the Atlas was never much of a weapon, but it remained in service with refinements for the rest of the century as a very useful space launch vehicle.

* The fourth Titan I launch, in February 1960, was a full success, with both stages operating properly and shooting 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) downrange. Titan I was declared operational in 18 April 1962. It was fitted with a big 4 megatonne fusion warhead. Like Atlas F, it was stored in an underground silo and then brought to the surface for launching. The Titan I was operated by six SAC squadrons with nine missiles apiece until 1966, when they were withdrawn from service.

The Titan Is had been replaced by the Titan II by that time. The Titan II had performed its first flight in November 1961 and went into service in 1963. Titan II carried a huge 18 megatonne warhead and was hot-launched from a hardened silo. 54 Titan IIs remained in service up to the late 1980s, though by that time they were very obsolete and little more than bargaining chips in arms limitation talks. They were removed from strategic service, with some of them refurbished as satellite launchers.

* On 20 July 1960, the US Navy "fleet ballistic missile submarine (FBMS)" USS GEORGE WASHINGTON performed the first US launch of an SLBM from a submarine. The GEORGE WASHINGTON was declared operational on 15 November 1960, and was followed by dozens of other "boomer" submarines.

The initial "Polaris A1" design would evolve over the decades to the improved "Polaris A2" and "Polaris A3" models; the larger "Poseidon C3" and "Poseidon C4" missiles; and finally the big "Trident" missile, a true submarine-launched ICBM, with a range of 6,925 kilometers (4,300 miles), almost four times that of the Polaris A-1 variant. The Trident remains the backbone of the US submarine-launched strategic missile force.

* The first "all up" test launch of a Minuteman with all three operational stages was on 1 February 1961 and was a complete success. The program did have its troubles, however. Later in that year, a Minuteman launched on a test flight from Cape Canaveral cleared the lip of its launch silo and then blew up with a spectacular explosion whose likes would not be seen again for decades.

However, the first ten operational Minutemen were sitting snugly in their concrete holes on the Great Plains of America by October 1962. Building the silos for the Minuteman was a fairly simple, cheap, and fast process, and by 1967 there were 1,000 of the missiles in place. The silos were normally unattended, covered by a huge blast door to protect them from attack and sabotage, with a single small underground command center staffed by a few launch officers controlling a cluster of silos.

Development of the weapon continued, with the initial "Minuteman I" missile replaced by the improved "Minuteman II" beginning in 1966. The Minuteman II featured a much more accurate solid-state guidance system and "penetration aids" to confuse enemy defenses trying to track the missile's RV. The Minuteman II was followed in turn by the introduction of the still further improved "Minuteman III" in 1971. The Minuteman III featured three "multiple independently targetable RVs (MIRVs)", tripling the weapon's destructive capability. It was the first ICBM to be fitted with MIRVs.

The Minuteman became the backbone of the US land-based strategic ICBM force, which would reach a peak in 1975, with 450 Minuteman IIs and 550 Minuteman IIIs sitting quietly in their silos, along with the 54 Titan IIs. The Reagan Administration did initiate development of a much more potent solid-fuel ICBM, the "MX Peacemaker", in the 1980s, but arms-limitation treaties ensured that only 50 were ever deployed, taking the place of Minuteman IIIs in modified silos. At the end of the century, 500 Minuteman IIIs were standing guard over the US along with the 50 Peacemakers.

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[11.5] CORONA IN ORBIT / GRAB

* While the US was getting strategic missiles into service, the Corona program continued to try to orbit satellites, with launches at a rate of about a pair every two months, and the failures continued. Some Discoverers never made it into orbit, others failed in orbit, and a few almost completed their mission but were lost on recovery. President Eisenhower was supportive and understood that working the bugs out of such a radically new and complicated system would take time and effort. However, with each failure, pressure on the program staff increased.

While the Discoverer program continued to try and fail to orbit a spy satellite, in the meantime the Soviets nullified America's only other source of photographic intelligence by shooting down a Lockheed U-2 near Sverdlosk on 1 May 1960. The US government initially lied about the flights, saying it was a weather plane that had gone astray. The Soviets kept quiet the fact that the U-2's pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had survived and was in custody. When the truth became known, the Americans were caught flat-footed. At a summit meeting in Paris in mid-May, Krushchev lit into Eisenhower, denouncing the overflights at length and expressing his outrage. Eisenhower, who had always had misgivings about the U-2 overflights of the USSR, pulled the plug on them for good, though the U-2 would remain an important intelligence asset past the end of the century.

Some Soviet officials felt that Krushchev overplayed his hand. The USSR spied on the US -- the first Soviet atomic bomb was a copy of the American Fat Man bomb -- and so everyone understood that the US would spy on the USSR. In any case, any knowledgeable leader with much foresight understood that the time was coming soon when aircraft overflights wouldn't be necessary.

During the Paris summit, French President Charles de Gaulle, cool and aloof in the face of Krushchev's outbursts, suggested that Krushchev was overreacting. De Gaulle observed that "yesterday, that satellite you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France eighteen times without my permission. How do I know that you do not have cameras aboard which are taking pictures of my country?"

Krushchev replied: "As God sees me, my hands are clean."

"Well then, how did you take those pictures of the far side of the Moon which you showed us with such justifiable pride?"

"In that one I had cameras."

"Ah, in that one you had cameras." In fact, Krushchev was telling the truth; the launch that de Gaulle referred to, on 15 May, was actually the first test launch of a Vostok manned space capsule, described earlier. However, since the Vostok was also to be used as a reconnaissance system, carrying cameras instead of a warm body, de Gaulle's question was closer to the mark than he possibly realized.

In any case, however much trouble the US was having over space reconnaissance technology, America was still well ahead of the Soviet Union. Finally, on 10 August 1960, Discoverer XIII was successfully launched into space, performed its orbits, and discarded its bucket on 12 August. Attempts to snag the bucket in the air with a C-119 Boxcar transport failed, but a helicopter recovered it from the sea about 480 kilometers (300 miles) northwest of Hawaii. The vice commander of the 6594 Test Wing, USAF Lieutenant Colonel Charles "Moose" Mathiesen, had not been briefed on Corona and believed the Discoverer cover stories were true. He played up the recovery in the news media, going so far as to open up the capsule himself.

Since the capsule was a test item and had nothing in it but an American flag, this unwitting farce was harmless enough and helped enhance the Discoverer cover story. US government officials up to President Eisenhower played along, with the president announcing to the press that the capsule was part of a scientific research effort to study space environmental conditions. The Discoverer XIII capsule ended up the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. The Lockheed Corona project staff threw a big party at a hotel in Palo Alto. All the senior officials were tossed into the swimming pool, and pictures show them soaking wet in their dark suits and narrow ties, grinning from ear to ear.

* Discoverer XIV, a fully operational satellite, was launched on 18 August 1960. The spacecraft worked superbly and sent back its film capsule, which was snatched from the air as planned. There was no fanfare this time. Discoverer XIV returned 3.9 million square kilometers (1.5 million square miles) worth of imagery. A fifth of the Soviet Union had been imaged. Intelligence photo interpreters were "flabbergasted" and called the images "terrific, stupendous".

There were still bugs to be ironed out, but the Corona program was finally on track and flights eventually became "milk runs", as Bissell put it. He added that imagery was so good that photo analysts could determine the makes of cars in Red Square. It is said that the US embassy in Moscow painted registration marks on their parking lot as an aid to photo-interpreters.

By the summer of 1961, the US had flown four successful Discoverer missions, and on 21 September 1961 the CIA released a secret document titled "National Intelligence Estimate 11-8/1-61". Using the spy satellite intelligence, the agency concluded that the USSR had no less than 10 and no more than 25 ICBMs in service, and weren't building up their ICBM force at any fast rate. There was no missile gap.

When the US government released classified documents relating to Corona and related intelligence matters of the time in 1995, a retired major general of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces named Anatoly Bolyatko participated in the release ceremony. Recounting a boast made by Krushchev in 1959 that Soviet ICBMs were in mass production, Bolyatko commented: "But 100% of those ICBMs were junk."

* Interestingly, it wasn't publicly known until 1998 that Discoverer XIV wasn't the first successful spy satellite mission. The US Navy had launched a "signals intelligence (SIGINT)" satellite designated the "Galactic Radiation And Background (GRAB)" experiment on 22 June 1960. It was launched along with a Transit navigation satellite on a Thor-Able Star booster; even though US space launch vehicles had limited lift capability at the time, the satellites tended to be small and it was nothing unusual to launch two, three, or more at a time.

GRAB had been proposed by NRL for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in the spring of 1958, and was authorized in 1959. The basketball-size GRAB, based on and with a strong resemblance to the Vanguard satellite, was placed into an orbit with an altitude of 800 kilometers (500 miles). It "sniffed" or "grabbed", signals from Soviet radars and relayed them directly to ground stations on the borders of the USSR. It had no real capability to pinpoint the location of radar sites.

The GRAB designation was a cover, though in fact the satellite did carry a useful solar radiation experiment, and in fact it had the alternate designation of "SolRad". The acronym was later changed to "GREB" since "GRAB" seemed like too big of a hint.

GRAB was by no means as sophisticated or capable as the Corona satellites and so does not diminish their achievements. GRAB continued to operate until August 1962. There were five GRAB launches, but only two were successful, including the first, so the Navy's distinction as the first to put a spy satellite in orbit was a matter both of the relative simplicity of GRAB and a good deal of luck. The Air Force launched satellites that seem to have been conceptually similar to GRAB as secondary payloads on CORONA flights through the rest of the decade.

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[11.6] FOUNDATION OF THE NRO / SAMOS & MIDAS

* By this time, US space reconnaissance was under the control of an entirely new government agency, the "National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)". Problems with the Air Force Samos spy-satellite program led Eisenhower to establish a review committee for the program in June 1960. The committee concluded that the Air Force was leaking information on the Samos and Corona programs to help further their status as a "space force", and so the program should be assigned to a new office that reported directly to the Secretary of the Air Force, a civilian. The generals were to be taken out of the loop.

It was done within weeks. On 31 August 1960, not long after the first successful Corona flight, the Eisenhower Administration established the "Office of Missile & Satellite Systems". The top leadership was provided by the Undersecretary of the Air Force, Joseph C. Charyk, with a deputy from the CIA, who unsurprisingly turned out to be Richard Bissell. The spy satellite effort went completely secret, and a disinformation campaign was conducted to perform damage control against the leaks. Even the terms "Samos" and "Discoverer" were soon suppressed.

At roughly the same time, the photographic intelligence organizations of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and CIA were consolidated into the "National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC)", which reported to the CIA and so wasn't under the control of the generals, either. NPIC took reconnaissance imagery provided by the Office of Missile & Satellite Systems, analyzed it, and passed it on to end users.

The Office of Missile & Satellite Systems became the NRO on 6 September 1961. It was so secret that even its name was not publicly revealed until 1992. Bissell left the NRO in 1962, leaving Charyk as the effective sole boss. Unfortunately, Bissell had run things informally using his big "old boy network", and after he left the interservice squabbling over space reconnaissance intensified. The services didn't like having their intelligence filtered down through another organization, particularly one under civilian control. They needed their intelligence quickly and from people who were closer to their mindset. Ironically, the CIA thought the NRO was a tool of the Air Force, while the Air Force thought the NRO was a tool of the CIA. The Navy pulled out to implement space reconnaissance systems on their own.

By 1965, the bickering resulted in the establishment of the NRO as an independent agency within the Department of Defense. This increased the control of the CIA over the NRO, since the CIA was granted the charter to establish national intelligence collection requirements and priorities and the NRO was simply charged with implementation.

* The NRO space imaging reconnaissance systems became known by "KH (Keyhole)" code numbers, along with program names. The original Corona satellites up to early 1962 had designations "KH-1" through "KH-3".

A number of Samos satellites were also flown in 1960 and 1961. Most were film-readout satellites, though a few were Zenit-style film-and-camera-return spacecraft. Details are still classified and the program remains somewhat mysterious; in fact, the Zenit-style film-and-camera-return spacecraft appear to have been partly developed, under Bernard Schriever's direction, as a means of giving the Air Force an option of flying an astronaut if the service had so desired, in much the same way that Zenit operated as a "cover" for Vostok. If so, that aspect of the program was conducted with extreme discretion.

It appears Samos was very unsuccessful, though it was played up in the press as America's official space reconnaissance program to distract attention from Corona. Some authors have suggested that it the main reason Samos remains classified after all this time is that nobody involved wanted to remember it, much less say anything about it.

The first Midas missile early warning satellite was launched on 26 February 1960 but failed to achieve orbit, and although Midas II was successfully launched on 24 May 1960, its telemetry system failed two days after launch. Midas III was finally successfully launched in 12 July 1961. A total of 12 Midas satellites were launched into 1966, but it appears that this program wasn't very successful either, with infrared sensors that picked up glints of sunlight off clouds as missile launches. Details are unclear since the Midas program also remains classified. In any case, the military used the experience to consider better solutions.

* Despite the secrecy, the Soviets knew perfectly well what was going on, complaining about satellite overflights and threatening to destroy the satellites, though they did not have the capability to do so at the time. They did eventually build decoys to fool spy satellites, however, such as an inflatable submarine that reconnaissance cameras observed bent in half in a storm. More informally, staffers at the Baikonur launch site stomped out insults in the snow for the satellites to photograph.

The tight secrecy was not to fool the Russians, but to fool everyone else. The Americans didn't want to embarrass the Soviets by crowing about the overflights and provoking them into doing something about them. The matter was kept quiet, the Soviets didn't lose face, and everyone went about their business.

BACK_TO_TOP

[11.7] THE FISHBOWL SPACE NUCLEAR TESTS / THE TEST-BAN TREATY

* Although the US and the Soviet Union had agreed to a nuclear weapon test ban in late 1958, in September 1961 the Soviets abruptly discarded the agreement and began a new series of tests that lasted two months and detonated over 40 weapons, with the exercise including high-altitude shots. The Soviets didn't respond to American suggestions to restore the ban, and so the US initiated their own new weapons tests efforts.

The main series of tests was codenamed DOMINIC, which began in the spring of 1962. DOMINIC involved 36 test shots, including a sub-series of high altitude and space detonations codenamed FISHBOWL. The FISHBOWL tests were mostly intended to study the effects of the EMP pulse and ionospheric disruption caused by the shots on electronic systems. There were eight FISHBOWL tests, four of which were successful:

• The first test was codenamed BLUEGILL, which involved a Thor launched from Johnston Island on 3 June 1962, carrying a W-50 warhead with a yield in the megatonne range. The shot got off the pad with no problems, but then the Johnston Island tracking system failed. With the tracking system remaining offline, the range safety officer had no idea where the nuclear-armed Thor was, and so gave it the self-destruct command just before warhead detonation.
  
  
• The second test was codenamed STARFISH, with a Thor missile launched from Johnston Island with a W-49 megatonne-class warhead on 20 June 1962. The Thor lost engine thrust about a minute into its flight, and was destroyed by the range safety officer. The warhead did not detonate, but some plutonium contamination of uninhabited islands was discovered.
  
  
• A replay of STARFISH, codenamed STARFISH PRIME, was performed on 9 July 1962 and was successful, with the weapon detonating at an altitude of 400 kilometers (248 miles).
  
  
• A replay of the BLUEGILL shot, codenamed BLUEGILL PRIME, was performed on 25 July. It was an even worse disaster than BLUEGILL, with the Thor malfunctioning before it could get off the pad. The range safety officer ordered the Thor to self-destruct, and it did so with a vengeance, demolishing the launchpad and scattering plutonium debris about. The FISHBOWL shots had to be suspended while the mess was cleaned up and the launchpad rebuilt.
  
  
• The Johnston Island launch site was back in operation by the fall, and on 15 October 1962 another replay of the BLUEGILL test, codenamed BLUEGILL DOUBLE PRIME, was performed. This time the Thor did get off the pad, but it began to tumble after about two minutes of flight. The range safety officer sent the self-destruct command to destroy the missile. Some radioactive debris fell back on Johnston Island.
  
  
• The next test, codenamed CHECKMATE, was performed on 20 October 1962, with an XW-50X1 munition launched with an XM-33 test rocket to detonate at an altitude of 147 kilometers (92 miles). The warhead had a yield in the tens of kilotonnes.
  
  
• Yet another replay of the BLUEGILL test, codenamed BLUEGILL TRIPLE PRIME, was performed on 26 October 1962, and this time it went right. The warhead detonated at an altitude of 50 kilometers (31 miles).
  
  
• The last of the FISHBOWL tests, codenamed KINGFISH, was performed on 1 November 1962. The shot was basically similar to BLUEGILL TRIPLE PRIME, with a large W-50 warhead detonated at an altitude of 96 kilometers (60 miles).

The FISHBOWL tests were spectacular to watch. Although only those at low altitude generated a bright fireball, they all produced vivid, colorful, and persistent lightshows that include auroral displays. Some of the shots were seen in Hawaii, 1,290 kilometers (800 miles) away, and even Kwajalein, 2,580 kilometers (1,600 miles) away. The shots disrupted communications all over the central Pacific, and the EMP from some of the bigger shots, particularly STARFISH PRIME on 9 July 1962, knocked out street lights, tripped circuit breakers, and blew fuses all over Honolulu.

The space radiation produced by the shots also apparently disrupted the operation of a few satellites, and may have damaged some of them. That was actually regarded as a positive lesson of the FISHBOWL shots, since it demonstrated that spacecraft needed to be "hardened" to protect them from such radiation. There were also worries that the radiation produced by the shots might be a threat to American and Soviet manned orbital missions. A shot that was to be detonated at an altitude of 800 kilometers (500 miles), codenamed URACCA, was canceled because of such concerns.

The FISHBOWL shots in the fall of 1962 were also all basically high-altitude tests, not space tests. However, it is important to realize that the Cuban Missile Crisis was in progress while the final FISHBOWL shots were being performed. It is unsettling to think that people were firing live nuclear-armed missiles into space and detonating them at a time when the two superpowers were worrying about a nuclear exchange, and in fact the Soviets were also conducting high-altitude tests at the time. In addition, both sides continued to perform ICBM tests during the crisis. It is unclear now if such activities particularly added to the tension, but in the aftermath of the missile crisis the pressure for some limits in nuclear testing began to reassert itself.

The result was the "Partial Test Ban Treaty", signed on 5 August 1963. As the name implied, this was not a complete ban on nuclear testing. Although it was partly implemented as a demonstration of restraint and a step towards more comprehensive arms-limitation measures, its primary rationale was to reduce radioactive contamination of the environment by stopping US, British, and Soviet nuclear tests in the atmosphere, under the ocean, and in space.

There were news reports decades later that the US had secretly detonated a nuclear warhead in the Van Allen belts in 1964, but the reports were quickly discounted. There was absolutely no way a nuclear weapon could be detonated high in the sky without being detected or leaving traces of itself. The stories appear to have been inspired by test launches the US "System 437", which was based on the Thor missile with a satellite inspection payload or a small nuclear warhead for satellite interception.

KINGFISH was actually the last nuclear weapon to be detonated in space, but the whole space nuclear test exercise wouldn't be forgotten by any means. Over the following decades, space would become increasingly important for military purposes, and military space planners remained perfectly aware that setting off a nuclear weapon, even a relatively small one, in low orbit could disable many satellites immediately with its initial flash of high-energy radiation and subsequent EMP, and disable many more with the radiation belt left in orbit for a year or so. The radiation belt would also force the suspension of manned spaceflights for the duration. Critical satellites had to be radiation hardened with EMP shielding, robust electronics, and alarm systems to shut down critical satellite elements to allow them to ride out the storm.