Jul 07, 2009, post by Artur Nowak
During the early years of the American space program, while NASA was flying John Glenn and Scott Carpenter and other astronauts around the earth in the Mercury spacecraft, the United States Air Force had its own large, pressurized, recoverable space capsule. Developed in secret, the Samos E-5 spacecraft flew with a reconnaissance camera, but it was clearly an Air Force effort to develop a manned military spacecraft to rival Mercury. Classified for decades, only now is the truth coming out, that the US Air Force hid a military man in space program behind a classified intelligence mission, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
In the wake of Sputnik, many American military officials simultaneously panicked and salivated at the opening of the space frontier. In particular, US Air Force leaders envisioned developing satellites for a broad range of missions, with their ultimate goal being flying an Air Force officer, or “blue suiter,” into space. President Eisenhower and his aides struggled to hold back over-eager military leaders and prevent them from pursuing many of their ambitious schemes.
Classified for decades, only now is the truth coming out, that the US Air Force hid a military man in space program behind a classified intelligence mission, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
But the early space age is filled with examples of civilian and military officials being told not to do something and then doing it anyway, in secret. The most notable example was Wernher von Braun’s team in Huntsville losing the decision to develop the first American satellite and then secretly approaching scientists to provide instruments for what ultimately became Explorer 1. When the Air Force lost the manned spaceflight mission in 1958, Air Force officials sought to develop a spacecraft that could be transformed into a manned version with a minimum of additional work. Although some Air Force officials claim that it was Lockheed engineers who were primarily interested in developing a manned spacecraft, Lockheed could not make any major technical decisions concerning the spacecraft without justifying them to the Air Force. Furthermore, plenty of Air Force officers made no secret of their desire for a manned military spacecraft during this period.
The primary Air Force space project prior to Sputnik was the WS-117L reconnaissance satellite program. Officially started in 1956, WS-117L had been starved of funds for years, a fact that had annoyed the dozen or so Air Force officers who directly worked on it and even helped prompt one of them, a young lieutenant named Jack Herther, to leave the service, seeking work in industry. But only a few months after Sputnik the funding floodgates opened and WS-117L began to receive all the money it could use. By early 1958 the Air Force split WS-117L into three main programs named Discoverer, Midas, and Sentry. They each shared common components and launch vehicles, but had different missions.
Discoverer was the first spacecraft scheduled to fly. Although it was officially an engineering project, this was actually a ruse, a cover story for the CORONA reconnaissance satellite. CORONA had received formal approval from President Dwight D. Eisenhower in February 1958. Eisenhower directed that CORONA be run by the same joint CIA-Air Force team that had managed the highly-successful U-2 spyplane program. Richard Bissell, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans, headed this new project. The official cover story was that Discoverer was intended to develop new space technologies and fly mice and monkeys into space to conduct biomedical research. CORONA was a covert program, which meant that unless someone was officially approved, they were not allowed to know that it even existed, and its name never appeared in unclassified documents. In the lingo of the intelligence community, CORONA was “black,” and practically everybody who came in contact with the unclassified Discoverer project thought that it was an innocent technology program, although some suspected otherwise.
CORONA was to be launched atop a converted Thor Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) and utilize a camera system built by the newly-created Boston-based Itek Corporation, where Lieutenant Jack Herther had gone to work after leaving the WS-117L program in disgust at its lack of progress. The CORONA camera took images on 70mm film that was deposited in a small reentry capsule that would parachute to earth and be snagged in midair by a passing aircraft. During flight, the camera and reentry vehicle would be attached to the same spacecraft vehicle that served as a second stage during launch, a vehicle that would eventually be named the Agena and was built by Lockheed.
Midas was an early warning satellite, designed to spot the hot exhaust of Soviet ICBMs and warn of their launch. Although it was to be launched atop the more powerful Atlas rocket, the Midas spacecraft used the same Lockheed-built Agena upper stage as Discoverer/CORONA, relying on this stage for stabilization and power while in orbit. Unlike CORONA, Midas had no CIA involvement and was solely an Air Force program, managed by a special satellite office inside the Air Force’s Ballistic Missile Division, or BMD, in Los Angeles. BMD had become a large organization with an important job: developing the Atlas and Titan ICBMs.
The third and largest component of WS-117L, Sentry, was also an entirely Air Force project and like Midas used the Atlas rocket and Lockheed Agena upper stage. Despite the existence of CORONA, Sentry was in many ways the primary American reconnaissance effort and the direct descendant of the original WS-117L program. It was the biggest space project in the satellite office at BMD. To everyone, including its managers, CORONA was only an “interim” program until the more ambitious and complex Sentry spacecraft entered service, which was supposed to happen in 1960 or 1961. Whereas before Sputnik WS-117L program managers had begged for funds, Sentry’s program managers soon had all the money they needed, a budget that jumped from $10 million in Fiscal Year 1958 to $159.5 million the following year—although it came with exasperating bureaucratic strings attached. Unlike CORONA, Sentry was an acknowledged, overt program. It was “white,” or at least a shade of gray: Most details about Sentry were classified, but its existence and reconnaissance purpose were openly acknowledged in press releases.
The bureaucratic strings attached to the Sentry and Midas programs were pulled by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. President Eisenhower had created ARPA in the wake of Sputnik as an independent Department of Defense agency to oversee military space programs managed by the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Based in Washington, ARPA officials controlled the Sentry and Midas purse strings and therefore approved all major decisions made by the Air Force satellite office at BMD in Los Angeles. Throughout 1958 and most of 1959, they asserted this authority to the perpetual annoyance of the Air Staff in the Pentagon—the Air Force’s senior military leadership—and to the program managers at Ballistic Missile Division. ARPA was not very popular with the Air Force.
Lockheed’s ambitions
For several years, in addition to the WS-117L reconnaissance program, the Air Force was also funding contractor studies for a Man In Space Soonest, or MISS, program to place an Air Force pilot in space in a relatively short time. Several companies had been doing research on this subject, although it was low-key and the service did not push its development until after Sputnik. In January 1958, Lockheed submitted a proposal for a large, cone-shaped manned space capsule, nine feet (2.7 meters) in diameter and 14 feet (4.3 meters) long using an Agena upper stage, which was only slightly more than half the capsule’s diameter. The spacecraft/rocket combination would have been a mushroom head shape during launch, which was something that early satellite designers sought to avoid because of concerns that it would present aerodynamic problems in flight. The Air Force did not approve the actual production of a manned spacecraft at this time.
The reason that Lockheed’s manned Sentry proposal did not get a warmer reception at the Air Force was that the overall “man-in-space” program was in considerable flux between the spring and summer 1958.
In late April 1958, Lockheed proposed a manned “aero-medical recovery configuration” Sentry vehicle. It would place a man inside a cramped space capsule atop an upgraded Agena vehicle. This time Lockheed’s engineers kept the capsule the same diameter as the Agena—five feet, or 60 inches (1.5 meters). Because of the tight space, the astronaut would have to sit in a crouching position with his feet tucked up underneath him, unlike the sitting position ultimately adopted by operational American spacecraft, where the feet were level with the knees. The spacecraft would be launched atop an Atlas rocket and use the Agena for stabilization and power. Solid-propellant retrorockets mounted at the base of the Agena would be used to decelerate the entire spacecraft before separating the recoverable capsule.
Lockheed’s proposed manned Sentry vehicle was to be simply the next step in the aero-medical research that the Air Force hoped to conduct as part of the Discoverer program. Discoverer already included at least one small primate flight, although the leaders of the CORONA program viewed that flight solely as a cover for their reconnaissance mission. This new Lockheed proposal for a manned Sentry vehicle, like the earlier January proposal, was also not approved at this time.
The reason that Lockheed’s manned Sentry proposal did not get a warmer reception at the Air Force was that the overall “man-in-space” program was in considerable flux between the spring and summer 1958. The Air Force effort lacked focus, and officers were more interested in the winged Dyna-Soar spaceplane and advanced manned space projects than they were in the initial manned ballistic capsule, which many felt was boring. Various aerospace engineers were also unsure about even basic design criteria for such a spacecraft, such as which configuration would be best for reentry. In fact, the Atlas ICBM had only about a 75% success rate, and the ICBM office saw no need to improve its reliability. This led the space program officials to evaluate other rockets for launching a vehicle into space, despite the fact that they would be unavailable until after the Atlas. With so many unknowns, and a general lack of focus on a ballistic capsule, the Air Force was unwilling to commit to any specific proposal.
A Mann stereo-comparator used to determine dimensions from stereo satellite photos. (credit: CIA)
The limits of readout
Throughout 1958 the design for the Sentry reconnaissance program took firmer shape. Unlike CORONA or Midas, Sentry consisted of several different payloads, including both visual and electronic intelligence sensors. By late 1958 the Air Force was developing two different Sentry camera systems, originally referred to as the “Pioneer” and “Advanced” cameras, but soon known as the E-1 and E-2, both manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. The Air Force was also studying the E-3, a more advanced system. The designation “E” derived from an early administrative decision to label each major satellite subsystem with a letter, starting with A: A was airframe, B was propulsion, and so on. “E” simply designated a camera system. The E-1 was primarily a crude demonstration camera, able to see objects on the ground—known as “ground resolution”—around 100 feet on a side (roughly 30 meters). The E-1 camera had a six-inch (15 cm) focal length, the distance from the aperture of the camera to the focal point—the larger the focal length, the more powerful the camera. E-1’s main job was to prove that the spacecraft and the ground system would work.
The E-2, with a 36-inch (91 cm) focal length, was more refined, theoretically capable of spotting objects as small as 20 feet wide (approximately six meters) on the ground. The satellite would take approximately five minutes to pass over its target, taking as many photographs as possible in that short time. The E-2 could achieve stereo photography by slewing its camera forward and back along its ground track, taking pictures of a target from two different angles. This provided photo-interpreters with a method of accurately measuring the targets. But the camera could not look far to either side of the ground track, which limited the amount of territory that the satellite could cover during each orbit to that directly below the spacecraft.
The E-1 and E-2 both used a technique called film-readout. The film would be exposed and then as it moved through the system it would be pressed up against another film called a “web” and coated with developer and a fixing agent. After the film had dried out, it would then be scanned with a light beam and the light and dark spots on the film converted to electrical impulses that would be transmitted to the ground over a 6 megahertz transmitter. The benefit of this approach was that imagery could be sent to the ground within hours, and the satellite could stay in orbit for weeks. But this came at a price: the total number of images that could be transmitted was small, only a few dozen per satellite per day. In fact, several photographs during each pass over the Soviet Union would have to be discarded because there was insufficient time to transmit them to the ground when they were in sight of a ground station in the United States. In order to compensate for this low number of images, the Air Force would have to orbit several satellites simultaneously, dramatically increasing the number of ground stations to control them as well as the overall cost of the project.
The E-3 was still only a paper concept in 1958, although it would have had a more powerful camera than the E-2. But the major difference between the E-3 and the other cameras was that the E-3 used an exotic electrostatic tape system to store its images in order to improve transmission time. E-3 was more popular with ARPA’s leadership than it was with the Air Force officers at Ballistic Missile Division responsible for managing the satellite effort. The ARPA officials had less faith in the proven, but limited, film readout approach than the satellite managers at Ballistic Missile Division, and felt that the E-3’s untested electrostatic tape offered a better solution, promising to return more images per satellite than the E-2.
In January 1959 NASA selected McDonnell Aircraft to build the Mercury spacecraft. Lockheed was apparently out of the running to build a manned spacecraft.
No matter what camera was used, E-1, E-2, and E-3 would all photograph relatively small areas below the satellite, which pointed nose down at the earth, stabilized by gravity. This was the primary spacecraft stabilization mode that Lieutenant Jack Herther had been responsible for overseeing in his capacity as head of the guidance and control part of WS-117L from 1955 until 1957. Herther, however, was never convinced that this stabilization system would be completely successful.
In contrast to E-1, E-2, and E-3, the CIA-directed CORONA system returned all of its film to the ground in a small capsule. Photo-interpreters could not look at an image immediately after it was taken—they had to wait up to several days—but they had many more images to look at. A CORONA camera could image up to 1.5 million square miles (3.9 million square kilometers) of the Soviet Union in a single day, compared to only 64,000 square miles (166,000 square kilometers) for the Sentry E-2.
In late 1957 Air Force reconnaissance advisors at the civilian RAND Corporation in the suburbs of Los Angeles had suggested that a recoverable capsule could be used for larger cameras, bigger than that soon chosen for the CORONA, and perhaps as big as 120 inches (3 meters) focal length. But for over a year following Sputnik, the Air Force satellite office ignored this suggestion and CORONA, with its 24-inch (61-cm) focal length camera, was the only approved recoverable reconnaissance program.
Sentry Man In Space
In early 1958 ARPA and Air Force officials started discussing cooperation on a manned spacecraft called Man-In-Space, or MIS for short—the “Soonest” having been dropped from the name. But when it became clear in the summer of 1958 that a new civilian space agency would be created out of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), officials at the Pentagon and White House agreed that this civilian agency would be responsible for the manned spacecraft program. By August 1958, NACA had issued a preliminary definition of the civilian spacecraft, which it soon named Mercury. By October, the newly-created NASA solicited bids from several dozen companies to build the Mercury spacecraft.
In August 1958, Lockheed submitted to the Air Force a revised “Sentry Man In Space” proposal in the form of several briefing slides. The space capsule would weigh 3,072 pounds (1,394 kg), flying atop a 7,928-pound (3,596-kilogram) Agena upper stage. This was identical to Lockheed’s April proposal and would have used two solid propellant retrorockets providing 16,000 pounds (71,200 newtons) of thrust for four seconds, a maximum acceleration of 4.5 g’s. Lockheed proposed a manned capsule 84 inches (213 cm) long and 60 inches (152 cm) wide, using a “blunt body” design for reentry. One briefing slide proposed a heat sink reentry shield whereas another proposed a “refrose ablation material.” The proposal did not include an emergency escape system for lifting the capsule clear of an exploding rocket.
Although decision makers in Washington had pretty much decided that NASA would develop the manned spacecraft, Lockheed engineers in Sunnyvale, California were clearly looking to expand their company’s business. In August 1958 they also proposed that the Air Force develop a data relay satellite, a weather satellite, and upgraded versions of the Agena upper stage with increased diameters and even an additional upper stage atop the Atlas-Agena. None of these proposals were adopted by the Air Force at that time, but clearly the company wanted to expand beyond reconnaissance satellites.
Only a few months later Lockheed entered NASA’s manned spacecraft contract competition. Lockheed’s Mercury spacecraft proposal looked like NASA’s suggested configuration, a shortened cone, or “frustum,” topped by a cylinder containing the parachutes and recovery equipment. It would not use an Agena upper stage to reach orbit or for on-orbit stabilization and power, and because it sat directly atop the fatter Atlas rocket and not the thinner Agena, it could have a larger diameter, up to 80 inches (203 cm) as opposed to the 60 inches (152 cm) of Sentry MIS. The August Sentry MIS proposal was apparently little more than a few presentation slides for the Air Force, whereas the company’s December Mercury contract submission was a detailed proposal. The two proposals, although produced only a few months apart and undoubtedly by many of the same people, bore little relationship to each other.
In January 1959 NASA selected McDonnell Aircraft to build the Mercury spacecraft. Lockheed was apparently out of the running to build a manned spacecraft. But despite the fact that they had no formal approval of a military manned space program, Air Force officials did not completely abandon the idea of developing their own manned spacecraft, and neither did Lockheed’s engineers.
The need for higher resolution
While all of these changes were occurring in the manned space program, there were new developments in the reconnaissance space program as well. In September 1958 the Air Force intelligence community issued a revised version of General Operational Requirement 80 (GOR 80), a document that formally stated the service’s requirements for satellite reconnaissance. The first version of GOR 80 had been issued in 1955, before the WS-117L satellite program even officially existed. The revised GOR 80 contained several addenda, including one for the “Visual Reconnaissance System.” The addenda stated that: “Development of the visual satellite will involve the progression from lesser to greater resolution as the state-of-the-art improves in satellite reconnaissance in order to realize an operational capability at the earliest date.”
The addenda also established some operational characteristics for the satellite, which it stated were not mandatory requirements but “ultimates” and could be sacrificed in favor of early availability. GOR 80’s authors explained the target goals for how much the satellite could see on the ground and the reasons behind them: “Resolution of photographic/visual images of low contrast objects from 20 feet to 5 feet [6.1 to 1.5 meters] in length on a side is required for production of most intelligence information, air navigation and target materials. Resolution of photographic images of low contrast objects one foot [0.3 meters] on a side on the ground is required for the production of technical intelligence.” GOR 80’s authors did not claim that this kind of resolution was achievable with a satellite system, only that it was what was required to provide quality intelligence.
Whereas this new reconnaissance document had indicated that higher resolution satellites were useful for intelligence purposes, it omitted a key piece of information. GOR 80’s authors failed to state a requirement for the amount of territory that needed to be photographed by such a satellite, both in terms of how much it could image in each photograph, and how much total territory it could photograph in a day or week or year. But they did declare a need to image areas off the ground path of the satellite, something that the existing Sentry film-readout cameras, which essentially pointed straight down, could not accomplish.
Exactly why the members of the Ballistic Missile Division decided in the fall of 1958 that they needed a large recoverable capsule is unknown and remains one of the important mysteries in this story.
GOR 80 did not represent a clear and unambiguous Air Force statement of need for a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite, but instead clarified the kinds of intelligence that could be derived from imagery of varying resolution. If the reconnaissance satellite was to provide useful intelligence, it would have to achieve relatively high resolution—at least 5–20 feet (1.5–6.1 meters). But none of the camera systems then in development was capable of achieving this kind of resolution. CORONA was expected to produce images of approximately 25 feet resolution (7.6 meters). Sentry E-1 was much worse. E-2 and E-3 were at the bare acceptability level for intelligence needs. But while they would not be much better than CORONA, they would also photograph a much smaller patch of ground. In effect, GOR 80 told the Air Force leadership that if they wanted to conduct higher-quality intelligence collection from space, they needed a new satellite to do it.
Around the same time that GOR 80 was revised, members of the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division (BMD) office that managed the Sentry satellite program in Los Angeles became convinced that they also needed to develop a recoverable satellite, like CORONA. Unlike CORONA, however, whose recovery vehicle was so small that it could fit inside an oil drum, they wanted a larger recovery vehicle.
Exactly why the members of BMD decided in the fall of 1958 that they needed a large recoverable capsule is unknown and remains one of the important mysteries in this story. But the decision to build a large recoverable satellite was apparently not explicitly driven by the new resolution requirements established by GOR 80. It may have been a coincidence that this new requirement for a large recoverable capsule emerged only a few weeks after Lockheed proposed a manned recoverable capsule and at the same time that NASA was undertaking Mercury. But the leaders of the Air Force space program, particularly Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever, clearly coveted the manned spaceflight role, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were covertly trying to develop their own manned spaceflight capability.
In late September 1958, Air Force leaders in Washington, DC, undoubtedly acting upon the advice of members of BMD in Los Angeles, issued a directive that “consideration… be given to the use of a recoverable satellite in order to achieve maximum accuracy, information content, reliability of receipt of collected data, and reuse where economically feasible.” This was a rather vague set of requirements for a new satellite, but it provided high-level Air Force approval of an entirely new satellite system in addition to the ones already underway.
Despite this declaration by senior Air Force leaders that a new recoverable satellite program was necessary, the Air Force could not simply start building it. ARPA still had overall authority for military space. Air Force officers managed Sentry on a daily basis, but ARPA could ultimately approve or reject any decisions, and ARPA officials controlled the budgets—money allocated to military space projects did not actually belong to the military services that managed these projects. In fall of 1958 ARPA officials in Washington were apparently less enthusiastic about recovery techniques for Sentry than were officials at either Air Force Ballistic Missile Division or Air Force Headquarters.
By mid-December 1958, ARPA Director Roy Johnson approved a three-phase approach for Sentry that included film recovery, electronic intelligence (or “ferret”), and readout systems. He also tentatively approved an Air Force recoverable reconnaissance satellite. But Johnson apparently still saw the highly advanced E-3 system, and not a recoverable satellite, as a solution to the shortcomings of the E-1 and E-2.
This new recoverable satellite therefore posed a bit of a dilemma to the Air Force leadership. Because it represented an alternative technology to film-readout, and because film-readout had some glaring limitations, Air Force officials had to be careful that by arguing for the recoverable capsule they did not undercut the justification for the existing readout system. They had to sell the recoverable satellite to Washington, but be careful that they not justify it on the shortcomings of the E-1 and E-2.
By January 1959, with ARPA approval, the Ballistic Missile Division issued a revised “development plan” for Sentry that formally established the goal of developing a large recovery capsule, 60 inches (1.5 meters) in diameter, weighing 1,200 pounds (540 kg), and carrying a 600-pound (270-kilogram) payload. The spacecraft could use an ablative heat shield and had to be capable of being snatched out of the air by an aircraft, just like CORONA. Surprisingly, the BMD plan mentioned almost nothing about actual reconnaissance requirements, a significant detail that should have driven the spacecraft design. In many ways the Air Force was designing this new reconnaissance system backwards—defining the capsule first and leaving out the details of what would fit inside of it and, most importantly, what it would do. It was like designing a product to fit the box rather than a product that would actually sell.
Over these few weeks officials at BMD apparently decided that the new recoverable capsule would actually support two missions: mapping and high resolution photography. Their goal for the latter system was five-foot (1.5-meter) ground resolution, considerably better than any of the other reconnaissance satellites then in development and capable of meeting the requirements established by GOR 80.
The Air Force’s approach to the new recoverable satellite was totally unlike the CIA’s approach to designing the CORONA spacecraft. In March 1958 Richard Bissell, at the strong urging of his advisors, had abandoned CORONA’s initial spin-stabilized design that would have returned the entire camera to the ground in favor of a three-axis stabilized spacecraft that returned only the film to the ground inside a small recoverable capsule. Bissell did this in order to adopt a bigger and better camera, designed by the Itek Corporation. He told his people to design the spacecraft to meet the reconnaissance requirements and not the other way around. Bissell decided that the camera was the most important part of a reconnaissance satellite and everything else must support it. But the Ballistic Missile Division’s Sentry Program Office was approaching the task in the opposite direction, subordinating the camera considerations to the recoverable capsule’s design.
The Air Force had approved the recoverable satellite without even picking a camera to go inside of it. Without requesting competitive bids, the Air Force Sentry program office in Los Angeles awarded the recoverable satellite development contract to Lockheed. Lockheed was the “systems contractor,” which meant that instead of the Air Force negotiating separately with a launch vehicle provider, a spacecraft provider, a camera contractor, and so on, it signed a single contract with Lockheed which then was responsible for pulling all of these other components together. Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever, the former head of Ballistic Missile Division and now head of the Air Research and Development Command with overall responsibility for all advanced Air Force development, had advocated the systems contractor approach and it was now common for most Air Force space and missile contracts. Lockheed officials had to find a company capable of building a camera to put inside its pressurized capsule, and in early 1959 they set out to find one.
The Air Force’s approach to the new recoverable satellite was totally unlike the CIA’s approach to designing the CORONA spacecraft.
There were roughly half a dozen manufacturers of aerial photography cameras in the United States, but only three of them had any experience working on satellite cameras. These were Eastman Kodak, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company, and the Itek Corporation. Lockheed approached Itek, which was then overseeing the development of the CORONA reconnaissance camera. In March 1959 Itek agreed to develop a camera for the new recoverable reconnaissance satellite. For Itek it was a big win, solidifying the small company’s position as a major satellite reconnaissance camera provider and expanding its customer base from the CIA to include the Air Force.
This camera was soon designated the Sentry E-5. But work on the project could not proceed until after April 3, when Ballistic Missile Division provided ARPA with a formal development plan for the overall Sentry program.
A Samos E-5 spacecraft on the launch pad. (credit: USAF)
Selecting a recoverable capsule design
In April 1959 Lockheed outlined for the Air Force the flight objectives of the Sentry recovery capsule for both the high resolution camera and the mapping camera. The capsule had to have a diameter of five feet (1.5 meters), a payload capacity of approximately 500 pounds (225 kilograms) of film for the high-resolution mission, and a reentry accuracy of 30 miles (48 kilometers). It had to be recovered by air, but capable of surface ship recovery as a backup. The 30-mile reentry accuracy was a demanding requirement. By contrast, the reentry field for the CORONA was 60 nautical miles wide by 200 nautical miles long (111 by 370 kilometers).
Assuming that both the mapping and high resolution cameras utilized the same spacecraft, Lockheed engineers envisioned that the mapping version would weigh 4,390 pounds (1,990 kilograms) and the high resolution version would weigh 4,630 pounds (2,100 kilograms), with the primary difference being the weight of film carried. The actual payload, however, would weigh 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) for the mapping version and 1,809 pounds (820 kilograms) for the high resolution version. Lockheed stated that the camera objectives were for 30 by 30 nautical mile (56 by 56 kilometer) photographs of specific targets at 5-foot (1.5-meter) resolution and 60 by 60 nautical mile (111 by 111 kilometers) photographs at 10-foot (3-meter) resolution. The camera also needed stereo capability and should be able to determine the location of its targets on the earth within one nautical mile (1.85 kilometers). First flight would be in January 1961, only 20 months away.
Before Itek could perform any work on designing a high-resolution camera for the recoverable capsule, Lockheed engineers sought to flesh out the capsule design. They proposed three different approaches. The first design would have used a rounded cone-shaped reentry vehicle, like a small Apollo capsule, with a highly unusual retrorocket system. The retrorockets, and small spin rockets intended to spin up the vehicle for stabilization prior to retrofire, would have been mounted atop a telescoping boom at the front of the vehicle. After the reentry vehicle had been ejected from the Agena, this boom would have extended out and the vehicle spun up. When the retrorockets fired, their exhaust would have traveled down past the sides of the vehicle. The boom would have ejected and the vehicle pitched up to enter blunt end first. After reentry, it would have ejected a parachute for recovery. This capsule could have carried either the mapping camera or a high resolution camera looking out the side of the vehicle, but it would have been a cramped fit for the latter. Lockheed’s preliminary design for the capsule would have placed the film supply and takeup reels inside the capsule, next to the camera, against the ablative heat shield.
The second proposed capsule was much bigger and consisted of a rounded cone atop a cylinder. It too used the telescopic retrorocket design. The cylinder would have contained the camera, which would have looked out the side of the vehicle, with the film supply and takeup reels on either side of the camera. This capsule would have been much larger than required for the mapping camera, but would have provided more room for the bigger high resolution camera. It also looked similar to Lockheed’s earlier manned Sentry proposal of April 1958, but with a larger diameter. Both the first and the second capsule proposals would have returned the cameras inside the reentry vehicle.
Lockheed’s third proposal was even stranger. A truncated cone-shaped reentry vehicle would have been mounted backwards, underneath a nosecone. Attached to its rear, under the nosecone, would have been the telescopic retrorocket. Unlike the two other designs, however, the reconnaissance camera would have been outside the reentry vehicle, between it and the Agena spacecraft, looking out the side of the spacecraft. Like CORONA, the camera would have been disposed of at the end of mission along with the rest of the spacecraft, a very expensive piece of trash. Although the briefing slides provide no justification for this design, clearly one major advantage was that it allowed for a simpler and smaller reentry vehicle and presumably a larger camera, at the cost of discarding the camera after each mission. All of the spacecraft would have been actively stabilized in three axes, using the same control system that was developed for CORONA.
At some point in this process, Lockheed added another requirement to the spacecraft design—the capsule had to be pressurized. “It was just specified: Thou shalt pressurize,” camera designer Jack Herther explained. This requirement had nothing to do with the reconnaissance mission, and whether Lockheed had added it at Air Force request or not remains unclear. Pressurization only complicated the spacecraft design. The pressure shell and pressurization system added weight that could have been devoted to payload.
Pressurization was unneeded for a film return system—CORONA was unpressurized. But the pressurization requirement allowed the Air Force, and Lockheed, to develop key technologies necessary to a manned space program. Although the Air Force was out of the manned space effort, building a large pressurized capsule capable of carrying a man kept the Air Force half a step behind NASA—as opposed to out of the race completely. They were cloaking a manned spacecraft program in the veil of a military reconnaissance satellite.
Cancellation
In April 1959, after reviewing the BMD development plan, the ARPA leadership gave specific approval to the new higher-resolution Sentry E-5 camera system and its recoverable capsule. But by implication ARPA withheld authorization for the mapping and charting camera that the Air Force also wanted to build. What was unknown to many Air Force and Lockheed officials was that at that same time the CIA was acting to incorporate a budding Army mapping satellite program known as VEDAS into the CORONA management system, where it was renamed ARGON. ARPA’s disapproval of the Air Force’s mapping camera was undoubtedly due to the CIA negotiations over VEDAS.
On May 25, 1959, ARPA formally canceled the Air Force mapping camera. Barely a month later, on June 23, ARPA also canceled the Sentry E-5 recoverable satellite program, directing that it be “deferred” pending a complete program review. ARPA also cut the Sentry budget by $25 million for 1960.
ARPA had become very unpopular in the sixteen months since its creation in early 1958 to manage military space programs. ARPA decisions had often seemed capricious and contradictory to leaders in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Exactly why ARPA officials made this decision killing the Sentry E-5 is unknown. According to an official history of the satellite program, ARPA cut both programs due to budgetary concerns, diverting the money to other space projects, although the history also implied that ARPA officials were not satisfied with Lockheed’s recovery approach. Even though the high resolution system had been proposed as an adjunct to the E-1 and E-2, it still represented an entirely different way of returning data and was a direct competitor for funding. ARPA director Johnson and others perceived shortcomings to the E-1 and E-2 and saw the E-3 camera—and not the high-resolution recoverable camera—as the solution to these shortcomings. Money for Sentry was finite, and since ARPA officials were more interested in the E-3 than the recoverable capsule, they canceled the recoverable capsule.
Air Force officials were incensed by ARPA’s decision to terminate the E-5 camera. Major General Osmond Ritland, Commander of Ballistic Missile Division, complained to Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White. Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever, the head of BMD’s parent organization, Air Research and Development Command, and a former commander of BMD, also complained to White. Schriever sent a letter to White declaring “should the ARPA decline to continue the recovery program… it is recommended that the Air Force immediately support this urgent development.” In other words, with ARPA refusing to fund the Sentry E-5, the Air Force would have to find additional money in its own budget to pay for the recoverable capsule, taking it from another non-space program. More importantly, because ARPA was officially in charge of all military space money, Schriever was essentially advocating a bureaucratic reorganization to remove ARPA from control of military space programs.
Responding for General White, Deputy Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay told Schriever “I am completely sympathetic with your point of view and have taken action through Secretarial channels to restate the Air Force requirement to the director of ARPA and request reconsideration of its support in FY 60.”
LeMay took the issue to the member of the Air Force civilian leadership who was most knowledgeable about space issues. Air Force Assistant Secretary for Research and Development Dr. Joseph Charyk was then rapidly rising through the civilian Air Force leadership. Charyk, who had a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering from Caltech, had previously served in an advisory role to Generals White and LeMay as the Air Force Chief Scientist, and had just taken over the position of Assistant Secretary for R&D. Charyk was an engineer with years of experience in missile guidance and rockets and was the chief Air Force civilian contact for the CORONA reconnaissance satellite, working closely with CIA official Richard Bissell to keep the program on track. Although his technical qualifications were impressive, Charyk also proved to be a skillful manager and an able bureaucratic warrior.
As Schriever’s letter indicates, ARPA had become very unpopular in the sixteen months since its creation in early 1958 to manage military space programs. ARPA decisions had often seemed capricious and contradictory to leaders in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Director Roy Johnson also had an annoying habit of changing his mind about the projects under his authority. But opposition to ARPA was reaching critical mass in the Department of Defense.
In 1959 a law reorganizing the Defense Department had created the Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E), which like ARPA, was another independent Department of Defense organization. But ARPA had been created only through an executive order by President Eisenhower, whereas DDR&E had been created by a law, and was given greater power and authority. DDR&E was created to oversee all advanced research and development programs among all the armed services, whereas ARPA was consigned to space programs. In late August Charyk took his complaint about the recoverable capsule to the head of DDR&E, Dr. Herbert F. York. He pointed out that the recoverable capsule program was then the only way to meet the higher resolution requirements established by the Air Force’s GOR 80 intelligence statement in September 1958, and would only cost an additional $17 million in 1960, an amount that he argued was not extreme.
Apparently Charyk’s complaints to York worked, for on September 4, 1959 ARPA approved award of an E-5 camera contract to Itek, but did not approve the development of the Lockheed recoverable capsule. After further complaints by the Air Force, ARPA also approved development of spacecraft subsystems, including the recoverable capsule.
Meanwhile, in August, the Sentry program had been renamed Samos, apparently in order to de-emphasize the military mission of the reconnaissance system. The delays between March and September 1959 meant that Samos E-5 had made relatively little progress. General Schriever, with ample justification, blamed this on ARPA.
But the Pentagon agency’s resistance to the E-5 had not been completely without merit. ARPA officials apparently had qualms about the recovery approach selected by the Air Force, probably because the spacecraft was so much bigger than the existing, although still unproven, CORONA, and because a bigger spacecraft was naturally more complicated.
In November 1959, responding to the overwhelming complaints from the various military services, the Secretary of Defense formally removed control of military space programs from ARPA and turned the agency into a small technology development organization, which it remains to this day. But Air Force leaders found little time to rejoice, for the Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering, staffed with a number of highly-trained scientists and engineers, immediately took ARPA’s place with responsibility for making major program decisions for advanced space systems. What was worse was the fact that DDR&E Herbert York was a better bureaucratic warrior than ARPA’s Roy Johnson.
The struggle between readout versus recovery was beginning to break out into open conflict.
As York began to flex his bureaucratic muscles, the Samos E-5 spacecraft’s prospects improved, but not in a way that made Air Force officials happy. Whereas E-5 had been created to supplement the E-1 and E-2, York essentially viewed the primary question to be which form of data return—recovery or readout—was most likely to prove successful. In other words, E-5 now posed a threat to the readout spacecraft, which many in the Air Force still strongly supported. In November York ordered that the Air Force place primary emphasis on the E-5, and relegate work on the E-1 and E-2 to secondary status.
Ballistic Missile Division objected to this increased emphasis on recovery over readout, claiming that it would delay availability of an early operational satellite reconnaissance system—a readout system based on the E-1 and E-2—by 14 to 20 months, or until the first half of 1963. BMD asked for more money for the E-5 to keep it on track without jeopardizing the E-1 or E-2.
In January 1960, BMD submitted a revised development plan that was really a half-hearted effort to conform to the new directive from DDR&E. In essence, BMD kept the original E-1 and E-2 plan and simply added seven E-5 flights. The struggle between readout versus recovery was beginning to break out into open conflict. But in the meantime, the optical and engineering wizards at Itek, like Jack Herther, had started work on the E-5 camera. They were having their own problems.
