Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites

by Dwayne Day

  iVAFB is Vandenberg Air Force Base. NMFPA is Naval Missile Facility, Point Arguello. NMFPA became part of VAFB in 1964. In 1966 the pads were renamed as follows: Complex 75-3 became SLC-1 (Space Launch Complex 1). Complex 75-1 became SLC-2 (Space Launch Complex 2). Complex PALC-1 became SLC-3 (Space Launch Complex 3).

  jThe launches were referred to both by nicknames (until 1967) and by OPS number. After 1963, the OPS number was also used to refer to the orbiting satellite in open sources; thus CORONA flight 145 appears in the NORAD satellite catalog as OPS 6371.

  kThe orbit is given with perigee and apogee in kilometers followed by inclination to the eastward equator in degrees. The orbital heights for flights 1 to 118 are taken from the Vandenberg launch summary reports and are slightly different from the values given in the Royal Aircraft Establishment tables which are usually quoted.

  lThis is the international designation assigned by the World Data Center, Rockets and Satellites for COSPAR.

  mNotes on individual launches:

  1. Flight 1 may not have reached orbit. It did not carry an SRV.

  2. Flights 19 and 21 were infrared sensor tests and did not carry SRVs. Flight 21 demonstrated on-orbit restart of Agena, raising apogee by 300 km.

  3. Flight 37 carried the last KH-3 camera in an engineering model of the KH-4/Mural spacecraft; the launch photograph clearly shows the distinctive KH-4 spacecraft bus.

  4. Flights 54 and 99 carried scientific payloads with no SRV.

  5. Flight 64 suffered a payload power failure and took no pictures.

  6. Flight 78 Agena reentered over Venezuela with both SRVs still attached on May 26; SRV-1 survived reentry.

  USAF Program Numbers:

  Flights 1 to 39 were under the DISCOVERER program. Flights 40 to 48 were under Program 622A.

  Flights 49 to 78 were under Program 162. Flights 79 to 112 were under Program 241. Flights 113 to at least 118 were under Program 846.

  Note: The author would be pleased to hear from any reader who can provide corrections or fill in the missing spacecraft masses. Contact Jonathan McDowell, Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Johnson’s talk was not recorded and there are differing accounts of exactly what he said. This account, except for the last sentence, comes from William Burrows, Deep Black (New York: Random House, 1986), viii. Evert Clark’s New York Times article of the event does not contain this quote, however (“Satellite Spying Cited by Johnson,” March 17, 1967, 13). The last sentence of the quote is from an account by the National Photographic Interpretation Center contained in a briefing chart and listed as “The Nashville Address.”

  2. National Science and Technology Council, The White House, “Fact Sheet: National Space Policy,” September 19, 1996, 7.

  3. The term photoreconnaissance as used in this volume means obtaining imagery in the visual range from earth orbit. In the early years of the U.S. photoreconnaissance program, this imagery was recorded on film in the orbiting satellite, and then returned to Earth. Since at least the mid-1970s, as acknowledged by a September 19, 1996, National Space Policy statement, imagery is returned to Earth electronically in “near real-time.” The space policy statement also acknowledged that the United States, in addition to conducting photoreconnaissance from orbit, carries out “overhead signals intelligence collection” and “overhead measurement and signature intelligence collection.” Ibid., 7–8. This volume discusses only the origins and evolution of U.S. photoreconnaissance activities.

  4. Another version of this story is that the name came from the Corona brand of cigars; however, the most frequently cited version is the typewriter story.

  5. All of this film is now available for viewing at the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA). See Appendix B for a complete listing of CORONA missions.

  6. By comparison, the total land area of the Soviet Union was 8.6 million square miles and the total land area of the earth is 58 million square miles.

  7. Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957 (Washington, D.C.: National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, 1997).

  8. Kevin Ruffner, ed., CORONA: America’s First Satellite Program, Center for the Study of Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995), xiii.

  9. Kevin Ruffner, “CORONA and the Intelligence Community,” Studies in Intelligence 39, no. 5 (1996): 62.

  10. Ibid.

  11. “Executive Order 12951 of February 22, 1995: Release of Imagery Acquired by Space-based National Intelligence Reconnaissance System,” Federal Register 60, no. 39 (February 28, 1995): 10789–90.

  12. Kenneth Greer, “CORONA,” as reprinted in CORONA, ed. Ruffner.

  13. See chapter 2, “CORONA: A Triumph of American Technology,” by Albert Wheelon.

  CHAPTER 1. STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE AND U.S. SECURITY

  1. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), remains the best survey of American strategic debates in the period, but is partially superseded by Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: The National Security Policies of the Eisenhower Administration (forthcoming).

  2. “NIE 11-6-54: Soviet Capabilities and Probable Programs in the Guided Missile Field,” in Estimates on Soviet Military Power, 1954 to 1984, ed. Donald Steury (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996).

  3. “NIE 11-8-60: Soviet Capabilities and Probable Programs in the Guided Missile Field,” in Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950–1983, ed. Donald P. Steury (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996).

  4. “NIE 11-8/1-61: Strength and Deployment of Soviet Long-Range Ballistic Missile Forces,” in Intentions and Capabilities, ed. Steury (Air Force Intelligence dissented, insisting that Soviet ICBMs were and would be more numerous, but it was alone in this view).

  5. “NIE 11-8-62: Soviet Capabilities for Long-Range Attack,” in Intentions and Capabilities, ed. Steury.

  6. “NIE 11-8-64: Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Attack,” in Intentions and Capabilities, ed. Steury.

  7. Kevin Ruffner, ed., CORONA: America’s First Satellite Program, Center for the Study of Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995), 24.

  8. “Photographic Interpretation Report: KH-4 Mission 1042-1, 17–22 June 1967,” in CORONA, ed. Ruffner, 261–88.

  9. See U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 14: Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993), passim.

  10. This is a point developed in a book by Timothy Naftali and Alexander Fursenko analyzing both the American and Soviet sides of the Berlin and Cuban missile crises. See “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khruschev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997).

  11. National Security Council Executive Committee meeting, October 25, 1962, John F. Kennedy Library, President’s Office Files, Presidential Recordings Collection: Meeting Recording No. 37.4 (declassified October 1996).

  12. The best account of U.S. force planning and arms control negotiation is McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988).

  CHAPTER 2. CORONA

  Note: Based on the keynote address by the author presented on May 23, 1995, at “Piercing the Curtain: CORONA and the Revolution in Intelligence,” conference sponsored by the George Washington University and the Central Intelligence Agency.

  1. Edwin Land, personal communication to Albert D. Wheelon, n.d.

  2. J. E. Lipp and R. M. Salter, “Project Feed Back Summary Report,” RAND Corporation, Contract No. AF 33(038)-6413 (March 1, 1954).

  3. RCA was responsible for developing the television sensor system but recommended that it be abandoned in August 1957.

&
nbsp; 4. It is significant that it was Land who informed Bissell that he had been given responsibility for the CORONA project, thereby indicating the extraordinary influence that these advisors wielded.

  5. The SAMOS system that many hoped would replace CORONA was canceled a few years later.

  6. Two SR-71s reentered Air Force service in the mid-1990s.

  7. Then known as Camp Cooke and now called Vandenberg Air Force Base. The 672nd Strategic Missile Squadron (Thor) was based there. Range instrumentation and tracking facilities were also available.

  8. At the time, it was referred to as the Hustler.

  9. Their HYAC camera was developed for the Air Force WS-461L Balloon Reconnaissance Program and is now on display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It was a panoramic camera with a 12-inch focal length.

  10. This was more difficult than the previous plan of using a spinning spacecraft to provide attitude control through gyroscopic stability, although the camera was simpler and alaready proven.

  11. 175 line pairs per millimeter at 2-to-1 contrast.

  12. I. G. Kolchinskii, “Optical Instability of the Earth’s Atmosphere According to Stellar Observations,” originally published in Russian in Naukova Dumka (Kiev, 1967); translated into English by the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, St. Louis, Missouri (February 1969).

  13. R. E. Hufnagel and N. R. Stanley, “Modulation Transfer Function Associated with Image Transmission Through Turbulent Media,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 54, no. 1 (January 1964): 52–61; V. I. Tatarskii, “The Effect of the Turbulent Atmosphere on Wave Propagation,” translated from Russian and issued by the National Technical Information Office, U.S. Department of Commerce (1971).

  14. In the early years of CORONA, there was great concern about the reserve of control gas available in the Agena, and also concern about potential damage to the film-return capsule from impact with particles in space. To minimize these risks, the Agena performed a 180-degree yaw maneuver immediately after achieving orbit. Thus, a 60-degree tilt down was the maneuver required to de-orbit. As more was learned about space and the reliability of the Agena improved, the yaw maneuver was eliminated and the recovery tilt down became 120 degrees. This allowed the main Agena engine to be restarted, if desired, to accomplish a change of orbit during the flight.

  15. The rocket was fired after tilting down 60 degrees from the forward direction to minimize the influence of alignment errors on the impact zone.

  16. This daring concept had been attempted in recovering reconnaissance balloons, usually with discouraging results.

  17. Ironically, this first film capsule was returned on August 18, 1960, the same day that Gary Powers was sentenced in Moscow for the last U-2 overflight of the USSR.

  18. The breaking of the German cipher machine codes produced communications intelligence of extraordinary importance and was also known as ULTRA.

  19. The first U.S. thermonuclear device was exploded during the Mike test on November 1, 1952, at Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. This weapon weighed 60 metric tons, and could not be carried by an airplane. On August 12, 1953, the Soviets tested a device with a yield of 400 kilotons, about 25 times smaller than the Mike test. While technically not a hydrogen bomb, this boosted-fission weapon could be made into an operational bomb far more easily than the American version. On November 20, 1955, the Soviets tested their first true thermonuclear bomb, which was dropped from a Tu-16 bomber. The test had a yield of 1.6 megatons, but the bomb easily could have been modified to yield twice that. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 299–315.

  20. When 1961 arrived, we found only six Soviet ICBMs deployed. Kennedy realized that we were well ahead. The United States had frightened itself through ignorance.

  21. “Piercing the Curtain.”

  22. William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (New York: Random House, 1986), 207–9.

  23. Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson became the only casualty of this crisis. Anderson was shot down by a Soviet-operated SA-2 in a CIA U-2, just as Gary Powers had been downed two years before.

  24. There is some dispute about who solved this problem. Frank Madden of Itek believes that Itek’s materials department was primarily responsible for the solution. See chapter 3 for further details.

  25. Albert D. Wheelon, “Antisatellite Weapons and Space Warfare,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 489 (December 26, 1986): 38–47, from the symposium, “The High Technologies and Reducing the Risk of War,” held on May 7–8, 1986.

  26. The Soviet ASAT succeeded in eleven of twenty-two tests against orbital targets.

  CHAPTER 3. THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPROVEMENT OF THE CORONA SATELLITE

  Note: The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following people who reviewed copies of the manuscript at various points during its preparation: Jim Plummer, Robert Hopkins, Bob Leeper, Walter Levison, Bill King, Charlie Murphy, and Frank Buzard. He is particularly indebted to Frank Madden, whose history of the camera development at Itek was invaluable.

  1. Richard Bissell, in “A Point in Time,” CIA-produced CORONA documentary filmed in 1972 at the end of the program. This documentary video was declassified in 1995 and is available to the public through the National Technical Information Service.

  2. Kenneth E. Greer, “CORONA,” Studies in Intelligence, Suppl. 17 (Spring 1973): 1–37, in CORONA: America’s First Satellite Program, ed. Kevin C. Ruffner, Center for the Study of Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1995), 8.

  3. Greer, “CORONA,” 9–10.

  4. James Plummer, comments at “Piercing the Curtain,” a joint symposium held by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence and the George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., on May 23–24, 1995.

  5. Frank Buzard, letter to Dwayne Day, November 1996.

  6. WS-117L also included another program that was used for infrared early warning of ballistic missile attack and was eventually named MIDAS. Two of the Discoverer launches were then allocated to serve as radiometric vehicles which would ostensibly be used for space navigation purposes, but whose data would actually be used for the development of MIDAS.

  7. The launch windows generally opened around noon for the early missions. As the spacecraft’s lifetime increased, the launch window depended more upon the area of primary interest, which had to be well lit when the satellite overflew it. Charlie Murphy, who was eventually responsible for satellite launch operations at Vandenberg, states that the railroad schedule was not as big a problem as people thought. According to Murphy, one of the first things the new launch officer did was to go to railroad headquarters in San Francisco and try to convince the railroad scheduler to be more flexible. The scheduler would usually pat the young man on the head and ignore him. Murphy does not recall a single mission that had to slip to another day because of a train passing through the base.

  8. The Agena was originally named Hustler, after the Bell Hustler rocket engine that Lockheed had selected to power it. The rocket itself was named after the B-58 Hustler aircraft. It was supposed to power a weapons pod underneath the aircraft, but the pod was eventually canceled. The upper stage was renamed Agena sometime in 1958 (there are no records of this decision), apparently by an ARPA committee.

  9. The spacecraft had to provide a temperature range of plus or minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit from the optimum design temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Frank J. Madden, “The CORONA Camera System: Itek’s Contribution to World Security,” self-published monograph, October 1996, 10, 20.

  10. Buzard, letter to Day, November 1996.

  11. Greer, “CORONA,” 13.

  12. Bob Leeper stated that this signal was very distinctive, sort of a high-frequency repetitive sweeping sound that could be picked out of the background noise. Bob Leeper, letter to Dwayne Day, November 23, 1996.

  13. There was at le
ast one incident where this did not work as planned. During an early CORONA mission the recovery vehicle came down off-target, landing in warm waters near Christmas Island. The plug dissolved faster than planned and the bucket sank before a recovery crew could retrieve it.

  14. Each of the launches was given an operational name. Examples were: FLYING YANKEE, FROGGY BOTTOM, CHILI WILLIE, and GIANT BANANA. (See Appendix B.)

  15. Greer, “CORONA,” 14.

  16. Frank Buzard, interview by Dwayne A. Day, June 21, 1996.

  17. “A Point in Time.”

  18. Greer, “CORONA,” 16.

  19. N. F. Twining, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Memorandum for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, “Discoverer Capsule,” April 25, 1959, NARA, JCS Files.

  20. A. Roy Burks, interview by Dwayne A. Day, May 1996.

  21. For instance, the thickness of the film determined how much could be packed into the bucket. More important, the lifting capability of the Thor-Agena combination established a rigid limit on how much film could be carried regardless of the size of the film-return bucket. In addition, the bucket would have provided no evidence of the width of the film; early versions of CORONA carried only one film spool, whereas the KH-4 and later spacecraft carried two—one for each camera.

  22. This episode, as two superpowers frantically searched for a photoreconnaissance satellite vehicle lost in the Arctic, later served as the basis for the book and movie Ice Station Zebra.

  As for the Soviet fishing trawler? “That same trawler could have ‘suddenly left port’ on schedule every Saturday afternoon.” Buzard interview.

  23. Greer, “CORONA,” 17.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Merton E. Davies and William R. Harris, RAND’s Role in the Evolution of Balloon and Satellite Observation Systems and Related U.S. Space Technology, R-3692-RC (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1988), 81.