Keyhole satellite projects

I'm not very impressed by his list of sources.

For the mission lists, he should have used Jonathan McDowell and Gunter Krebs.

And there are a billion primary sources to use, so relying on books is not going to the source material.
 
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I see your point. I know you are quite busy but, at a cursory glance, do you think he got most of the story right ?

It amuse me to no end that circa 1960 SAMOS E-5 and Vostok, Schriever and Korolev got the same idea, independently. "A capsule big enough to recover a camera can also recover an astronaut..." Vostok 2K became Zenit-2, Vostok 3K was Gagarin's spaceship. The Soviets made the E-5 ploy work for real.
 
Archibald said:
(...) Schriever and Korolev got the same idea
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Korolev was forced to have such idea.

Soviet resources for space progam was utterly scarce (compared to the US counterpart) so the only way Korolev could have his manned space program was to sell it to Polibjuro as also reconeissance military program.

The idea to recover not only the film but also the (big) camera was appealing in a system aimed to spare resources as much as possibile.
Keep both camera and film in a pressurized enviroment would make things even easier.
Last but not least, Soviets didn't achieved the same level of miniaturization as US counterpart so it implied big rockers carrying big spacecrafts.
This policy had its payback in the first phase of Space Exploration, the R-7 rocket was far bigger and capable than the Atlas and Vostok 1K/3K were three times than Mercury. The Zenit 2K/4K satellites followed the same feat.
But, on the long run, the American efforts in terms of money and cutting-edge technologies had their payback.
The CORONA family increased its performance from one year to another and despite the new Yantars, Soviets never got anywhere near HEXAGON and KEYHOLE capabilites.
 
More random thoughts. It is quite remarkable that, with the SAMOS E-4 mapping satellite the Air Force managed to piss the Army, ARPA and the CIA altogether. In the end the three made a kind of alliance to create the KH-5 ARGON, which prevailed. Eventually, the mapping mission was taken over by "secondary" cameras on the CORONA and HEXAGON spysats.

The SAMOS program was such a hodgepodge of recovery systems and mission requirements.
 
archipeppe said:
Korolev was forced to have such idea.

Soviet resources for space progam was utterly scarce (compared to the US counterpart) so the only way Korolev could have his manned space program was to sell it to Polibjuro as also reconeissance military program.

The idea to recover not only the film but also the (big) camera was appealing in a system aimed to spare resources as much as possibile.
Keep both camera and film in a pressurized enviroment would make things even easier.
Last but not least, Soviets didn't achieved the same level of miniaturization as US counterpart so it implied big rockers carrying big spacecrafts.
This policy had its payback in the first phase of Space Exploration, the R-7 rocket was far bigger and capable than the Atlas and Vostok 1K/3K were three times than Mercury. The Zenit 2K/4K satellites followed the same feat.
But, on the long run, the American efforts in terms of money and cutting-edge technologies had their payback.
The CORONA family increased its performance from one year to another and despite the new Yantars, Soviets never got anywhere near HEXAGON and KEYHOLE capabilites.
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Well to be honest they got good enough to see my butt from space :)
(According to the formal complaint it was a "line" of butts from space but... :) )

Randy
 
blackstar said:
For the mission lists, he should have used Jonathan McDowell and Gunter Krebs.
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I actually cross-checked the mission list with Gunter Krebs' site, and didn't find discrepancies. But maybe I accidentally missed some.

blackstar said:
And there are a billion primary sources to use, so relying on books is not going to the source material.
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Well, yes, of course there are. I did not intend to write a scholarly work, but a relatively brief summary of the program, building on (and quoting as sources) existing secondary sources.

TBH I fail to see the problem with that approach.
 
I will add that the data that indicates that Samos E-5 came from an Air Force desire to keep their hand in the astronaut game is thin. I think there are only two pieces of supporting data. One is a CIA memo that says this is why they are doing it (in only a single sentence, not the focus of the entire memo), and I think the other is the official Samos history. Also, I think there is a line drawing of the USAF MISS concept that shows a capsule that is the same shape and size as that eventually built for the Samos E-5. I think there is a document indicating that USAF wanted to do a chimpanzee flight in a pressurized capsule. And then there is the simple fact that there was no good reason to pressurize the E-5 capsule. It was not done with the other reconnaissance systems. Why do it for E-5 and not GAMBIT?

From a historian's standpoint, that's okay data, but not great data. It is either circumstantial evidence, or somebody like CIA who was not directly involved in the decision claiming that they knew why USAF was doing it. Great data would be a USAF memo saying "we want to eventually put a human in the Samos E-5 capsule, that is why it is pressurized."

That said, it seems highly likely. Remember that USAF was pushed out of the early man-in-space program when NASA was created. But USAF was approved to develop the more advanced Dyna-Soar. If you look at it from the perspective of 1960, General Schriever could see Dyna-Soar coming along in maybe 1964, but NASA would be flying starting in 1961. Schriever would have wanted something that could keep USAF in the game. Maybe if Richard Nixon won as president, he might tell USAF "Go fly your own astronauts" and Schriever would have had a pressurized space capsule already under development.

One of the frustrating things about researching this topic (reconnaissance and military space history from 1959-1963) is that the documentation on Samos at this time is crappy. We have tons of program memos saying do this or do that. We don't have much in the way of technical material. There are almost no photos of Samos E-5 or E-6, particularly the spacecraft and the cameras. They launched five E-5 capsules, and we don't have any photos of them sitting on the ground, or in the integration building or under construction. Nothing other than the capsule on top of the rocket. That really stinks, because it's hard to understand the equipment (even harder with the Samos E-6). I'd love to have the technical documentation for those two systems, but we have almost nothing. And they were not the most classified systems at the time.
 
The SAMOS E-6 reentry vehicle seems pretty baffling by itself. It wasn't an E-5 "big capsule" and it wasn't a CORONA film bucket either.

But some very different shape, pointy rather than blunt, which apparently made it fail and burn each time. WTF was the Air Force thinking ?
...
And then, just to add insult to injury, SPARTAN suggested to match an E-6 camera with (drums rolling) a CORONA film bucket, which worked reasonably well since DISCOVERER 13 and 14 in August 1960. (Facepalm)
...
I have this sneaking suspicion the Air Force just did not wanted to use the CORONA film bucket, no way, bleh.
SAMOS E-1 / E-2 / E-3 would use readout instead of that bucket - so no, thanks.
SAMOS E-4 / E-5 would return the entire camera so bigger capsule needed than the CIA's film bucket - so no, thanks.
SAMOS E-6 much like CORONA would use a film return bucket - still no, thanks, they used a different one (double facepalm)
 
Let's start from aerial reconnaissance cameras.
https://www.designation-systems.net/usmilav/jptds/k.html

There were five major camera companies involved in the National Reconnaissance Program, not only spysats but also spyplanes and drones.
-Kodak
-Itek
-Perkin-Elmer
-Fairchild
-Hycon

1- The U-2 and A-12 each had a collection of cameras by different contractors.
2- Hycon never worked on spysats and mostly concentrated on drones, like the Ryan 147 Fireflies and D-21B.
3- Fairchild worked on satellites but not much, they specialised in lower resolution mapping cameras.

More to come. It's like a jungle...
 
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Archibald said:
3- Fairchild worked on satellites but not much, they specialised in lower resolution mapping cameras.
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I'm going to quibble a bit with the "not much" part of your sentence. They made a lot of mapping cameras. If you count how many were on CORONA and some GAMBIT missions, it added up.
 
blackstar said:
I'm going to quibble a bit with the "not much" part of your sentence. They made a lot of mapping cameras. If you count how many were on CORONA and some GAMBIT missions, it added up.
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Yep sorry wrong formulation by me.
Fairchild's cameras
- KH-5 ARGON
- CORONA - DISIC mapping camera
- KH-9 HEXAGON mapping camera
So yes they were prolific.
 
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archipeppe said:
I had the immense honour to get in touch with the late Phil Pressel....
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Phil was a friend of mine. But he worked on the HEXAGON camera for Perkin-Elmer. The Mapping Camera was made by Itek and attached to the front of some satellites (I think it was 12 out of 20). Eventually, upgrades were made to the main camera system that allowed those images to be used for mapping, and the Mapping Camera was no longer necessary. This is probably covered in the HEXAGON Mapping Camera History, which is online and is a pretty good history doc.
 
Archibald said:
Let's start from aerial reconnaissance cameras.
https://www.designation-systems.net/usmilav/jptds/k.html

There were five major camera companies involved in the National Reconnaissance Program, not only spysats but also spyplanes and drones.
-Kodak
-Itek
-Perkin-Elmer
-Fairchild
-Hycon

1- The U-2 and A-12 each had a collection of cameras by different contractors.
2- Hycon never worked on spysats and mostly concentrated on drones, like the Ryan 147 Fireflies and D-21B.
3- Fairchild worked on satellites but not much, they specialised in lower resolution mapping cameras.

More to come. It's like a jungle...
Click to expand...

In my opinion, it's not that hard to keep track of the manufacturers of the satellite camera systems. There were less than two dozen different systems, and less than a handful of manufacturers. As long as you are not trying to get into the issue of subtle differences in models, it's easy to list them.

What I've never tried to do, but would be great to have, is a good spreadsheet of all the different aerial reconnaissance cameras and what platforms carried them during the Cold War period. That would be quite difficult to compile, although I suspect that the info is available if you're willing to do the legwork (i.e. visiting archives) in addition to internet research. For instance, there were a lot of tactical reconnaissance aircraft like the RF-101, RF-8, RF-4, RF-5 as well as strategic platforms (heck, even the B-36 and B-52 had reconnaissance variants), and they could often carry many different cameras. Probably the only good way to compile a lot of these would be to find the operator's/maintenance manuals for these aircraft and finding out what cameras they carried.

I don't think anybody has tried to write a comprehensive history of tactical and strategic reconnaissance systems. They usually just list the airplanes and leave it at that. But it was the sensors (mostly cameras) that mattered.
 
KH-11KENNEN designation, as Blackstar knows well, covers several generations of spacecrafts.
First one, as depicted into my artworks, was for sure similiar to HST with a Lockheed service module in the rear and two solar panels. Further evolution could encompass different arrangement.
 
Michel Van said:
interesting view on KH-11 block IV
https://twitter.com/x/status/2095637433639477259
View: https://twitter.com/someastrostuff/status/2095637433639477259


Artistic interpretation
https://twitter.com/x/status/2095937219429052738
View: https://twitter.com/Element115art/status/2095937219429052738
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Just to be clear, we have some blurry photos of the satellites in orbit. Element115 has drawn his interpretation in Blender. I really like what he has done, but I'm not sure of the accuracy.

To be honest, I have not kept close track of the recent stuff, but there are indications that the KH-11 line (i.e. descendants of the KH-11) was retired some years ago and replaced by a new system that may have a larger diameter mirror. I assume that one of the reasons to have a larger diameter mirror is for better low-level light and IR performance. So it can see in the dark. Probably not great, but probably way better than what we think.

This December is the 50th anniversary of the first KH-11 launch. It would not surprise me if NRO declassifies something about it. Then again, they are under new management, and maybe they'll declassify nothing.
 
Archibald said:
SAMOS E-1 / E-2 / E-3 would use readout instead of that bucket - so no, thanks.
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I just stumbled upon a declassified Samos document with information on the E-3. I had not seen any information on the E-3 before, so this was a surprise. I'll post it later. (The doc has been declassified for awhile, but I have not looked at everything.)
 
Archibald said:
Yep sorry wrong formulation by me.
Fairchild's cameras
- KH-5 ARGON
- CORONA - DISIC mapping camera
- KH-9 HEXAGON mapping camera
So yes they were prolific.
Click to expand...

Just to follow-up on this, I think that some of Fairchild's mapping cameras were carried on GAMBIT-1s. But I don't know if we have a good source about which missions carried those mapping cameras. A few years ago I interviewed a Kodak guy who worked on the GAMBIT-3 (KH-8) and he mentioned that there was extra room in the spacecraft, and the Kodak guys were always trying to figure out how they could take advantage of that extra room. That's how he thinks the 5-inch camera came to be--they had room, and somebody said "Hey, what if we stick a second camera in here that has 5-inch wide film?" and they proposed it.

(Aside: You may have noticed that on that other site, Mr. Cow got put into timeout a few weeks ago and has not returned.)
 
Would another benefit of a bigger mirror be higher operating altitude, for more frequent revisits?
This is ofc, assuming that atmospheric effects limit resolution and in addition to IR benefits.
 
chimeric oncogene said:
Would another benefit of a bigger mirror be higher operating altitude, for more frequent revisits?
This is ofc, assuming that atmospheric effects limit resolution and in addition to IR benefits.
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Would higher altitude provide for more frequent revisits?
 
I thought spy sats were planted in sun-following orbits, so they'd be over the same place on earth at the same time every day? That is, it's functionally a 24hr orbit, and there's not really any good way to get coverage more often.
 
(Aside: You may have noticed that on that other site, Mr. Cow got put into timeout a few weeks ago and has not returned.)
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He has been put to pasture (ha ha) for at least a month. He should return around September 26, and you can bet he will again be an obnoxious PITA. The forum is a much better place without his aggressivity. He knows nothing, including arguing politely. But SpaceX and Heilon... Elon can't be wrong and will bring rainbows, ponies and unicorns.

But that's off topic for this forum, albeit - a nod for the moderation here, who finally banned @publiusr.
 

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