by Dwayne Day
Schematic and size comparison of the CORONA variants. The “C” model, or KH-1 (KH-2 and KH-3 were similar), was only five feet in length and achieved its first successful mission in 1960. The “M” (“MURAL” or KH-4) first flew in 1962 and contained a second camera. The “J-1” (KH-4A) contained a second reentry vehicle and was first launched in 1963. The “J-3” (KH-4B) was the ultimate CORONA design and incorporated the Constant Rotator camera. It first flew in 1967 and was the last CORONA to be launched.
The National Reconnaissance Office, formally established in September 1961, was intended to oversee all U.S. reconnaissance satellite programs. By 1963 the CIA had largely lost interest in CORONA; the agency had a single representative at AP involved with managing CORONA, and he was detailed to the agency from the Air Force.101 The CIA was not performing any other work on satellite reconnaissance at the time. By late winter of 1963, Pete Scoville was frustrated with both his undermanned directorate and his attempts to preserve the agency’s presence in overhead reconnaissance.102
As a result of the CIA’s inattention, the Air Force assumed more and more responsibility for CORONA within the framework of the highly classified NRO, while continuing to conduct a myriad of other military space missions outside of it, like the development of communications satellites, the Dyna-Soar spaceplane, and cooperative work with NASA on the Gemini program. Many in the Air Force felt that the service should simply take over CORONA completely. The fact that the CIA barely participated at the AP facility meant that this would not be a big step.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was opposed to duplicating effort within the military bureaucracy and sought to eliminate it wherever he could. But he was also opposed to duplicating effort within the entire government, and frequently suggested eliminating programs in NASA or elsewhere because they paralleled others underway within the Department of Defense. This belief led him to pursue the TFX fighter plane in 1961–62, to propose that the Air Force completely take over the Gemini program from NASA in late 1962, and to eventually cancel the Air Force’s Dyna-Soar spaceplane in favor of the NASA-developed Gemini manned spacecraft in 1963.103 In this environment, it is not surprising that soon many within the Office of the Secretary of Defense were attempting to eliminate the CIA’s involvement in satellite reconnaissance.104
In August 1963, Dr. Albert D. “Bud” Wheelon became head of the newly created Directorate of Science and Technology. Wheelon was a relatively young man with a Ph.D. in physics, who had agreed in 1962 to work for the CIA in Washington at the behest of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) John McCone, Pete Scoville, and President Kennedy’s science advisor, Jerome Wiesner. He agreed to take a job with the CIA for no more than three years, so that he could eventually return to a home on the West Coast and a career in private industry. Wheelon took over the directorate after Pete Scoville’s resignation in March, but only with strong preconditions. He argued to McCone that reconnaissance was the most important mission that the CIA could perform. Reconnaissance, he felt, was a more powerful and useful “force multiplier” than even the hydrogen bomb, for reconnaissance allowed a president not only to fight a war, but, more important, to avoid it. The CIA could serve an important role as a “competing” satellite intelligence center to the Air Force.105
If Wheelon was going to assume Scoville’s job, he wanted McCone’s assurance that he would have the DCI’s full support in the reconnaissance field. McCone assured him he would have it. Wheelon asked for, and received, far more authority over scientific and technical resources at the CIA than his predecessor, building the Directorate of Science and Technology into a major directorate at the CIA. In addition, he argued successfully for the creation of a higher pay scale with which to attract young scientists and engineers to the agency, particularly for reconnaissance work. While building his directorate, Wheelon angered many within the agency, as well as within the Air Force, but he established a powerful and impressive development and engineering organization.106
Wheelon soon revived the CIA’s lagging interest in satellite reconnaissance and started three new intelligence satellite initiatives that remain classified.107 He found that his plans conflicted with the wishes of Director of the National Reconnaissance Office Brockway McMillan and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, both of whom were attempting to push the CIA out of the intelligence satellite field in order to consolidate it under Air Force control within the NRO. Wheelon, with McCone’s support, fought these battles and gradually won most of them.108 (See chapter 2 by Wheelon and chapter 6 on the National Reconnaissance Office.)
Although these skirmishes generally concerned other satellite programs and whether the CIA would retain a role in the satellite intelligence field, the conflict spread to CORONA.109 Communications between the CIA and the Air Force became very poor, to the point where those responsible for Agena operations as well as overall systems integration for CORONA launches complained that they could not get information from those at the AP facility. AP told them that they did not have a “need to know.”110 In late 1964, apparently after a technical dispute over the spacecraft, the Air Force made a concerted effort to take over the CORONA program, culminating in McMillan suddenly reassigning the Air Force officer detailed to the CIA to oversee payload integration at the AP facility. The CIA immediately sent an agency employee out to California to take over that function.111 During the course of about a year, as the war over funding and control of CORONA was being fought, the main contractor, Lockheed Missiles and Space, did not get paid for the payloads.112 The firm absorbed the costs of CORONA while the two sides worked things out. Eventually Lockheed was paid for its work.
The relationship between the Air Force and the CIA, especially at Advanced Projects, improved, particularly after Al Flax took over as director of the NRO in 1965. From that point on, there was always significant CIA representation at Advanced Projects, and the agency did not let its attention to CORONA lag again.113 The Air Force and the Department of Defense relented in their opposition to a CIA role in satellite reconnaissance, and the agency continued its work on CORONA and other programs. Despite this frequently bitter and raucous fight, actual CORONA activities never suffered, and the two organizations launched and operated the satellites successfully.114
KH-4B AND THE CONSTANT ROTATOR
The last KH-4A satellite, Mission 1051, flew in May 1969, but its replacement was already in operation, having been first launched almost two years before. In the spring of 1965 CORONA engineers began looking at new modifications to the spacecraft design. Representatives from the CIA, Air Force, Lockheed, General Electric, and Itek met to discuss the potential for improving the basic design. They established a series of design goals for a new camera for the spacecraft. These were:
Improve photographic performance by removing reciprocating scan arms and reducing vibration from moving components.
Improve the velocity-over-height (Image Motion Compensation) match to reduce image smearing.
Improve photographic scale by accommodating proper camera cycling rates to enable altitudes as low as 80 nautical miles (the J-1 camera operating altitude was 100 nautical miles).
Eliminate camera failures due to film pulling out of guide rails (an occasional problem with the J-1 camera system).
Improve exposure control through variable slit selection to get greater performance at low sun angles (as opposed to the J-1, which had only a single exposure for the entire mission).
Allow handling of different film types and split film loads through addition of an in-flight changeable filter and a film change detector.
Enable use of ultrathin base film, yielding a 50% increase in area coverage with no increase in weight.115
The C‴ camera had separated the heavy part of the camera—the lenses—from the scan arm, which contained the aperture that exposed the film.116 The “lens cell” rotated a full 360 degrees while the scan arm rocked back and forth through a 70-degree arc. As the lens cell completed its rotation it
would connect with the scan arm and then slide through 70 degrees of arc while exposing the film. This design eliminated the high vibration of the original C camera, but still suffered from vibration when the scan arm moved back and forth and came to a full stop at the end of each scan. The MURAL and J-1 cameras were essentially two C‴ cameras connected together, which doubled the scan arm vibration. Vibration “smeared” the image on the film enough to lower resolution from the best that could otherwise be achieved with the cameras.
To solve this problem, engineers designed a panoramic camera that connected the lens cell and the scan arm and placed them in a drum that rotated a full 360 degrees. This was known as the Constant Rotator, or CR, and it was possible only because of the increased diameter of the payload that came with increased performance from the Thor rocket. Film was still exposed during a 70-degree angular segment of the drum’s rotation, but the vibration due to stopping and reversing the scan arms was eliminated. This dramatically improved ground resolution and added greater versatility in use. Each camera had two changeable filters and four changeable exposure slits that would allow different films and lighting conditions to be exploited. The new camera system was designated the J-3 (there was no J-2). The proposed ultrathin base film was abandoned due to variable imagery quality and failures in ground tests, but all other aspects of the camera proved spectacularly successful.117
Changes were made to the spacecraft as well. The earlier Index and Stellar-Index cameras, designed and built by Itek, performed quite well on the KH-4 and KH-4A and were used until the advent of the KH-4B system. But the Index camera had a 1.5-inch focal length, which was less than ideal for cartography work. It was replaced by a 3-inch camera nearly identical to that flown on ARGON, but with a dual-looking stellar instrument for star-sightings.118 ARGON had not been very successful, but the new Dual Improved Stellar Index Camera (DISIC) worked quite well.
The film path for the KH-4B spacecraft. The film-supply cassette is on the left.
The J-3 camera worked perfectly from the start. The first KH-4B mission with this new camera was launched on September 15, 1967, and given the designation Mission 1101. Resolution with the new camera improved to as good as six feet (compared to the best possible resolution obtained under laboratory conditions, which was four feet). Because of the flexibility of the camera settings, the satellite could be taken down to altitudes as low as 80 nautical miles.119
In addition to better resolution, variable exposures and filters on the cameras allowed special color and high-speed, high-resolution black-and-white films to be carried.120 A CORONA J-3 Ad Hoc Committee was convened by the director of the NRO on December 4, 1967, and began formal meetings in February 1968 to evaluate the potential of these new film types and techniques during a series of five flight tests. The committee was specifically interested in the intelligence uses of such film for new purposes, such as the detection of camouflage. Infrared film was flown on Mission 1104 and used to photograph the Vandenberg AFB area. Color film was flown on Mission 1105 and 1108.121 The committee recommended further testing and also recommended the establishment of a special subcommittee of the Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation (COMIREX, which had replaced COMOR on July 1, 1967) to evaluate the utility of color satellite photography.122
By 1970, the CIA had concluded that color film’s decreased resolution made it relatively useless for intelligence purposes—black-and-white film had a resolution approximately twice as good as high-resolution color film.123 But color film could be useful for mineral resources exploration. CIA thus offered a subcontract to a geology firm to evaluate the use of color imagery for mineral resources exploration. The study resulted in a report, “Appraisal of Geologic Value for Mineral Resources Exploration,” which evaluated a film known as SO-242 flown on Mission 1108 in December 1969. It concluded that the color film had limited military-oriented intelligence utility, but could be of use to the nonmilitary Intelligence Community, such as the Offices of Basic and Geographic Intelligence and Economic Research at the CIA.124
NASA began its Earth Resources Technology Satellite program in 1969 and launched the first spacecraft in July 1972. The name was changed to Landsat before the second satellite’s launch in January 1975.125 Landsat used a light-sensitive electronic sensor that was far more advanced than the film-return cameras on the KH-4B, but had much lower resolution (due both to technology and political restrictions). The role that the CORONA J-3 Ad Hoc Committee and the KH-4B test flights played in early civilian earth resources policy and technology development is still largely unknown.
Various satellite reconnaissance programs contributed greatly to other, nonmilitary space programs. CORONA lenses found their way into a camera system used on the last Apollo missions. At least part of the SAMOS system was used for the Lunar Orbiter, which searched for Apollo landing sites. In addition, some of these systems and lenses were utilized on other reconnaissance platforms, such as the U-2 and SR-71.126
CORONA COMES TO AN END
By 1969, the CIA was no longer managing the procurement of CORONA equipment; it had turned over its responsibilities to the Air Force. Lockheed had also moved production from the AP facility to its main complex in Sunnyvale. The agency was busy working on other programs, including a CORONA replacement. The CIA began looking at a follow-on for CORONA in 1963 when CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology Wheelon asked a group headed by Sidney Drell of Stanford to investigate whether CORONA could be upgraded to provide significantly higher resolution (on the order of two feet) for much vaster amounts of territory. The Drell group quickly determined that CORONA was limited in the degree to which it could be improved. Since the cameras ran through the diameter of the satellite, and since the satellite could be made only so wide, CORONA could be improved only so much before a new system was needed. The group recommended the development of a replacement. The CIA began this program in the mid-sixties and it first flew on June 15, 1971.127
There were still three more KH-4Bs in storage however. Charlie Murphy, who worked in the NRO’s “Mushroom Factory” that was responsible for planning CORONA missions, heard a rumor that the last KH-4B spacecraft was going to be preserved for a museum. He thought that such a valuable piece of equipment should not go unused, and recommended to DNRO John McLucas that the remaining CORONA satellite be launched.128 The data was still useful and the hardware was paid for. McLucas agreed, and the final KH-4B mission, Mission 1117, lifted off May 25, 1972. This was the last CORONA built. Even qualification models were refurbished and flown; by the time the program was ended there were no spare satellites.
Using the last film-return bucket returned from CORONA, along with the developmental model of the J-3 camera and photographs from the various missions, in 1972 a classified museum display of a CORONA spacecraft was set up inside the headquarters of the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington, D.C. At the dedication ceremony for the museum display, DCI Richard Helms discussed the importance of satellite reconnaissance and expressed the hope that the display could some day be turned over to the Smithsonian Institution.129 Efforts at declassifying the CORONA program reached their final states before being vetoed at high level. It was not until February 1995 that the KH-4B model was displayed at a ceremony at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The model is now on display in the National Air and Space Museum.130
The Thrust Augmented Thor launch vehicle used to launch later CORONA satellites. The three solid rocket motors at the base (one is obscured by the rocket itself) provided additional thrust. The protective shroud at the very top of the rocket is not inflated at this time. It was connected to an air conditioner and kept the payload cool. It also concealed the payload from outside observers and Soviet reconnaissance satellites. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force)
CONCLUSION
CORONA was a classic example of Cold War military, industry, CIA, and think-tank cooperation. Satellite reconnaissance was conceived and nurtured by RAND, managed by the A
ir Force, adopted by the CIA, and made a reality by a combination of CIA-Air Force-contractor personnel, all working in consort to achieve spectacular results.
CORONA is as much testimony to the urgency of intelligence needs and the commitment of political leaders as to the hard work of the CORONA Pioneers. The program continued even after a string of failures and mis-starts. It was intended only as an interim solution to the need for intelligence and yet lasted 12 years. CORONA involved 145 launches, of which over 120 could be considered partially or totally successful.131 The CIA’s involvement in space-based intelligence collection was only supposed to be temporary; CORONA’s success secured it a permanent place in the national security space program.
But while CORONA was created in part because of President Eisenhower’s distrust of the Air Force, it also would not have been possible without Air Force involvement. CORONA relied heavily on equipment and techniques developed by the Air Force—mostly for programs not associated with space. The Air Force developed and managed the highly successful Thor launch vehicle which made CORONA possible, turning a ballistic missile into a successful space launcher. The Air Force was also responsible for the ambitious and difficult Agena upper stage, whose three-axis stabilization offered many advantages over simple spin stabilization. In addition, the aerial recovery technique for CORONA was a result of the Air Force’s balloon reconnaissance program and relied exclusively on Air Force personnel and equipment. Even the reentry vehicles owed more to the Air Force than the CIA, since they were a direct outgrowth of ICBM technology.