by Dwayne Day
During my years with the Land Panel, we met typically several times a year for two or three successive days, either in Washington or in the field. In either location we would hear from government sponsors about the recent performance of systems in operation, look at the development of new systems, and hear proposals for more advanced systems. We shared in much of the anguish that accompanied these programs during their early days and also in some of their joys of success. Occasionally we would meet at a contractor’s facility and sometimes in the magnificent boardroom at Polaroid where Din Land’s cook might provide us with dinner, although as I recall sometimes at 11 P.M. Once our Land Panel meeting did not adjourn until dawn. That was unusual, but it was not unusual to work until midnight and then to be invited to Din Land’s personal laboratory for a half-hour demonstration of his latest work on color vision.
The Land Panel would also sometimes meet in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, where we reviewed programs and proposals, and looked at some of the most recent images. Din Land inspired us and kept us on track. Our job was not primarily to invent solutions, because there were usually plenty of those to exhaust budget resources. Rather, our task was, as quickly and surely as possible, to separate the wheat from the chaff and to encourage the wheat. We tried hard to increase the research and development effort in the Intelligence Community in nonsystem areas, and occasionally, in addition to helping to choose between various systems, we did contribute valuable technical innovations.
Examples of the “corona” film problem encountered in orbit. The camera’s film rollers built up static electricity and discharged, exposing the film. The usual result was film fogging, but occasionally the phenomena produced the spectacular patterns seen here. The problem was solved through a methodical trial-and-error process. (Photo courtesy of A. Roy Burks)
The Land Panel often worked at a very technical level, and some of these technical considerations had a major impact. For instance, during the mid-1960s, when Donald F. Hornig was Presidential Science Advisor, the Land Panel undertook a study of the potential performance and utility of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program for strategic reconnaissance—which was the primary, although classified, goal of the program. We arrived at the very definite conclusion that humans in space would have harmful effects on strategic reconnaissance, and this report was presented by Don Hornig to Secretary of Defense Robert F. McNamara. It was instrumental in the demise of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program.
In a draft of a Land Panel report on March 1, 1965, I tried to reflect the panel’s philosophy. “The panel is very much disturbed that continuing low-level research is not performed at the necessary scale in this field. Conservatism is certainly a virtue in the later stages of development of an operational system, but if it is to be practiced there, then there must be adventuresome exploratory development, an advanced development program, and a short feedback cycle to address problems that appear during the development phase.”
These strategic reconnaissance programs were often characterized as wasteful and inefficient, if not worse. But that was not so for most of them. I was extremely pleased with the quality of the leaders of the technical programs and their willingness to listen to advice and criticism from the outside—and then do something about it.
James Plummer (left) was Lockheed’s program manager for CORONA during its early years. Here he is after being thrown in the swimming pool during the celebration for the success of Discoverer XIII. Also shown are Aub Grey (center) and Bill Wright. (Photo courtesy of James Plummer)
Like Garwin, Plummer traces CORONA’s origin and evolution from his own perspective. As previously noted, Plummer was the manager of Lockheed’s CORONA development team. He discusses here how Lockheed recycled its early work on the WS-117L for use in the CORONA program, traces his role in designing CORONA’s payload system, and recounts the steps he had to take to insure the program’s secrecy. He also recalls the difficult schedule required to keep CORONA on time, and how he and many of the CORONA pioneers viewed the program’s early failures. Overall, Plummer feels
fortunate to have been at Lockheed during the early days leading up to the WS-117L program, and to have had the opportunity to join the small group of people working on the final draft of the Lockheed proposal. Our proposal was not very thick or detailed by modern standards, but at least we won the proposal. That contract marked the beginning of the space group at Lockheed.
In 1956, it was kind of a stop-and-go situation because there was a great deal of concern throughout the entire system as to what was really to be done. Could it be done? How much was it going to cost? What kind of schedule were we going to have, and where would the funding come from? So it was the typical thing of plan and replan. There was not much physical progress during that period.
Still, at approximately the same time, a small group of engineers working in this small division at Lockheed, which was originally located in one of the research labs in Palo Alto, designed a launch vehicle. This vehicle would later be called the Agena. So we actually had a mockup of an upper-stage vehicle that you could go look at. We also had pretty much figured out all of the basic technical factors of a readout-based satellite reconnaissance system. We had never done any of this, but we had figured out what had to be done. And that’s where I think two individuals deserve a tremendous amount of credit. The two individuals at Lockheed that I give extreme credit to are Willis Hawkins, who was at the time the vice-president in charge of space, and Fred O’Green, who was essentially the program manager of the WS-117L.
When Sputnik was launched, all of a sudden satellites became a big issue for the Air Force and the country. We essentially received total funding to go and create the system as fast as we could. We started making a great deal of progress.
Then, in 1958, at a time when I was responsible for the payload end of the WS-117L program, I got a big surprise. I was summoned to my boss’s office and he said, “Jim, are you willing to take on a new job?” And although I was kind of disappointed because I liked the job that I was on, I said, “Sure.” And he said, “Well, we want you to go underground.” And I didn’t know what underground really meant, but he said, “We want you to head up a totally covert program. We want you to disappear from Lockheed and all your friends, and not tell anyone where you’re going, and go off—take these three or four drawings” that they handed me “and go off and build that thing.” It was a design that had come out of some of the original work at RAND by Amrom Katz and Merton Davies. It essentially called for a large football-like unit with a camera in the middle, which was based on a Fairchild camera that already existed. It also had a retro-rocket in the back and a sphere taken from the Atlas ICBM instrumentation capsule built by GE.
Well, I had to just disappear. I had no place or people to work with. So I went out and rented a motel room up on El Camino Avenue and started to look over these drawings. I was then given authority by my superiors to go out and find a factory. I found a very handy spot in an essentially unused prototype facility at Hiller Helicopters. Hiller was willing to rent that facility to us. It had a shop, offices, telephones, and other things that we needed. So we took it over and told Hiller, “From now on you can’t enter the building.” It was a totally closed building, and very few people at Lockheed knew that we were doing our work there. My superiors even told me to take a circuitous route from home each day so that people couldn’t track me.
Well, we worked on that design for some time and thought that maybe it could be done. Then, all of a sudden, we were confronted by the top leaders, General Ritland, Mr. Bissell—“Mr. B” as we called him—and told that we were going to drop work on the football design and go a new route. It was kind of refreshing, but certainly a shock to us. At that time, they handed us this work statement that was a page and a half of written material, together with a schedule, and that was the basis of the CORONA program. All it said was it’s going to be a satellite, it should be based on WS-117L as much as you
can, and it should be compatible with an overt biomedical payload for cover. Photographs should be obtained at 25 feet or better, and get the maximum ground coverage that you can. We were also supposed to make sure that the film capsules were recoverable within a range of plus or minus 200 nautical miles of latitude and plus or minus 75 miles of longitude. And that was all there was to it. They also specified that we would use Itek and General Electric as the two basic subcontractors.
The Lockheed CORONA engineers celebrating after the success of Discoverer XIII. James Plummer is at right. (Photo courtesy of James Plummer)
Then they attached a schedule. The design release was to be accomplished in two months, and the prototype was to be accomplished two months later. The first flight units were to be delivered ten months from the starting date, and the first flight was scheduled for eleven months from the starting date. Well, if we had not had the wonderful team that we did at Lockheed, and the strong teams that we had at Itek and General Electric, we never could have made it.
Only a select few were briefed on CORONA, and that made it a little bit difficult for us because we had to get things done without telling anyone what we were doing, and sometimes without authority. Sometimes we’d even have to go to a really smart physicist or dynamist and say, “Do this for me, but we won’t tell you why we want it.” It was difficult from that point of view.
It was also difficult because there were a lot of failures. So we had to take them to higher levels in Washington, like Dr. [Joseph] Charyk—who was the director of the National Reconnaissance Office and our primary reporting point—and explain it to him. Fortunately, he was very, very patient and listened to us. He was also a very strong technical person and could keep up with us. But sounding exactly like the prime contractor that I was, we looked at these failures as a bunch of engineering successes. I really do mean that, because there was an engineering achievement to every one of them. There was an achievement even in the failures because we learned to diagnose problems that never could have been done before, especially since this was the first time that a long-lasting vehicle of any kind had to work perfectly without any person there to check it out and bring it back home, as is typical in airplane design. So, it was very, very difficult from that point of view.
Film-return buckets were wrapped in a light-tight plastic bag before being placed in a steel drum and transported to the United States for film processing. Here a bucket is being removed at the Advanced Projects facility before final shipment to the processing facility. At left is Bill Snyder, Operations Manager. Center is Ken Perryman, Lockheed Reentry Vehicle Test and Integration Manager. At right is A. Roy Burks, who was CORONA’s technical manager in the mid-1960s. (Photo courtesy of A. Roy Burks)
Walter J. Levison worked as the Itek Corporation’s first program manager on CORONA. His responsibilities included overseeing the development of the CORONA camera system and, in 1958, all of Itek’s aerial surveillance. Before joining Itek, Levison served as the assistant director of Boston University’s Physical Research Laboratories—the laboratories in charge of developing the Air Force’s specialized reconnaissance programs.6
Levison begins his discussion with a brief history of the camera used during the WS-46IL reconnaissance balloon program (CORONA’s forerunner), and then delves into the history of Itek and its role in the construction of CORONA’s lenses and cameras. He also details many of the technical specifications of the program’s other photographic equipment, as well as how he and his fellow engineers solved the challenges and problems presented by the cameras, lenses, and film system. Levison stresses that panoramic cameras
have been around for a long, long time. But they were never thought of as aerial cameras until Dick Philbrick—who was the Air Force liaison officer at the Boston University Physical Research Laboratory during this period—modified a strip camera and put it into an airplane. The camera rotated around the longitudinal axis of the aircraft while the film moved synchronously with the rotation of the camera. It took a very dramatic photograph of Manhattan from an altitude of 10,000 feet and caused quite a stir because you could see the entire island beautifully. The photograph appeared in Life magazine.
You could ask the question of why we used panoramic photography? Well, it’s very difficult to get wide-angle coverage from a lens and still get high resolution. But with a panoramic camera you just have to cover a very narrow angle and sweep the rest of the picture mechanically.7 This was the thought that we had when we got the 461L contract, which was the balloon camera that was part of the GENETRIX program. While working on the GENETRIX at Boston University’s Physical Research Laboratory, we designed a 12-inch f/5 triplet lens camera. We designed it to be a very simple and lightweight unit because of the constraints of the balloon. We didn’t even paint it because we were trying to save every ounce we could. It was essentially a nineteenth-century “circuit” camera design, the type photographers used to photograph long rows of people. We now call it a direct scanning panoramic camera. It was originally designed to be flown at 100,000 feet. There were 40 of them made, but only three were deployed.
As a result of our efforts, for the first time in history an aerial camera consistently produced 100 lines per millimeter. That was incredible quality when you consider that up until that time World War II photography had maybe 10 lines per millimeter, or maybe 15 lines at the most. Just to give you a feel for the quality of these photographs, if you started out with a negative that was two inches wide by 25 inches long, and you enlarged that photograph 20 times, it turned out to be a print three feet wide by 42 feet long, and if you looked at it from one end to the other, it would have appeared sharp to the unaided eye.
Amrom Katz was so impressed by the quality that we had achieved that he actually wrote me a letter, and I still am proud that I have that letter. It says, “I think this is one of the top achievements in the history of aerial photography … a truly magnificent achievement.”
A schematic of the HYAC balloon camera. This panoramic camera served as the basis for the CORONA camera system. For CORONA, the focal length was doubled, the scan angle decreased, and the film-supply cassette and take-up reel moved from above to beside the camera.
Itek Corporation was formed in the fall of 1957 by Dick Leghorn, and on January 1, 1958, it acquired the laboratories at Boston University. Leghorn had long been an advocate of prehostilities reconnaissance and was a major contributor to the Open Skies proposal that President Eisenhower had introduced at the Geneva Summit of 1955. The notion that aerial reconnaissance could be used, as it eventually was, to promote peace and verify disarmament, was one that interested me deeply.
At Itek, we had a contract to build part of the data-processing equipment for the WS-117L. We were aware that the camera was a spin-stabilized 6-inch focal-length panoramic camera—very much like the camera that Philbrick had originally modified and flown over Manhattan. We also knew, of course, about the balloon camera, having designed it. We knew what its potential was. And so we proposed, on an unsolicited basis, a 24-inch Tessar f/5 camera and narrowed the scan angle down to 70 degrees. We thought we could probably get 20–25-foot ground resolution from satellite altitudes and fortunately that proved to be correct. The project office funded both projects for a very short time, but inside of a month—probably due to the influence of Din Land—the project office switched over to the longer focal length camera. Itek became the prime contractor for the camera system; we built the lenses, while Fairchild got a subcontract from us to manufacture the camera.
We were fortunate to have a very small but excellent photogrammetric group at Itek, first under Claus Aschenbrenner and then under Ron Ondrejka. Throughout this entire program, they were very helpful in getting things like horizon and stellar cameras incorporated into the system, in addition to developing equipment to help in photo interpretation. There was a piece of equipment called the Gamma Rectifer, for example, which produced a very large, near-vertical, map-like reproduction of the terrain from these pan
oramic photographs. It was extremely flexible because it compensated for the earth’s curvature, the stereo-angle, image motion, and the pitch and roll of the spacecraft. They also built a very large rear-projection photo-interpretation viewer.
All of CORONA’s subsystems had their problems, and the camera was no exception. The most notable camera problem was the film breakage caused by the hostile environment. The acetate film became very, very brittle and had to be treated with the utmost care if it was ever going to survive. Well, it didn’t survive. The film constantly broke in orbit and, as a result, the launch schedule came to a grinding halt. The film and the camera would never really successfully work until Eastman Kodak came up with the polyester-based film. That’s what really put that particular problem to rest.
Although we were somewhat disappointed with the results of the first successful CORONA mission—it only had about a 35-foot ground resolution compared to the design objective of 20—we were still very encouraged by it. The system had worked, and what’s more, we knew that we could improve it. So, we went through a series of improvements. In the long run what we wound up with were two cameras. We changed the lens to a 24-inch Petzval f/3.5 design. Now a Petzval lens, interestingly enough, is a very old lens design. It was used in portraiture. It’s what we call a soft focus lens and it suffers from extensive field curvature. But what we recognized, or what Bob Hopkins of the University of Rochester who designed the lens recognized, was that extensive field curvature is not that much of a problem in a panoramic camera because you can put a very lightweight cyclindrical field flattener in the focal plane and get essentially diffraction-limited resolution. So it was this ability to take an old lens design, the Petzval, modify it with a field flattener, and use it in the slit of a panoramic camera, that made even higher resolution possible.