Spaceflight Book Thread

[Blackstar]

How is it that that website lists the publication date as February 2011 and also that the book is "in stock"?

[Drkskywxlt]

A Man on the Moon, by Chaikin.

The best, bar none.  His "A Passion for Mars" is also excellent. 

[sivodave]

Has anyone read "How Apollo Flew to the Moon" by W. David Woods?

This book is absolutely fantastic...it's very well written and you can really understand how the CSM worked. If you haven't done it yet, buy it...it's worth of every single cent spent for it.

Davide

[JosephB]

Regarding Amazon.com Wizards of Langley:
The reviews suggest a rather dry account of politics & personalities. However, one review implied there was some insight into MISTY.
Has anyone else found this to be so?
Richelson is highly regarded so I was surprised by the reviews.

As an aside, “By Any Means Necessary: Americas secret Air War in the Cold War” W.E. Burrows is an excellent read.
Has anyone read “Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping”?

[Blackstar]

Regarding Amazon.com Wizards of Langley:
The reviews suggest a rather dry account of politics & personalities. However, one review implied there was some insight into MISTY.
Has anyone else found this to be so?
Richelson is highly regarded so I was surprised by the reviews.

As an aside, “By Any Means Necessary: Americas secret Air War in the Cold War” W.E. Burrows is an excellent read.
Has anyone read “Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping”?

Richelson is a little dry as a writer, but there is great stuff in Wizards.  For instance, the story of "Acoustic Kitty," a cat that was implanted with a listening device.

As for Burrows, he is a good writer, but Richelson is a much better researcher.

As for Chatter, although I have not read it, I'm familiar with it and I have some problems with the author's approach to the subject.

[JosephB]

Thanks Blackstar, earlier in the thread I saw the distinction you made between a writer’s research skills and “readability.” Good things to keep in mind when reading a review.

If you wouldn’t mind, could you elaborate on the approach to Chatter?

[pagefrac]

when i first downloaded this book for my nook, i figured i had nothing to lose.  i got the nook as a present and a gift card to buy the book.  but as i got into it, i really enjoyed it. 

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.  it's easily digestible, funny and informative.  it has some great interviews with currrent and former astronauts and cosmonauts concerning the less than "heroic" aspects of living and traveling in space. 

http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life/dp/0393068471

[Blackstar]

If you wouldn’t mind, could you elaborate on the approach to Chatter?

It's been awhile, so I don't remember the specifics and I'd have to go dig through notes.  I vaguely remember that he was rather dismissive of the topic of the science and technology used to gather the information, preferring to focus on the politics and ethics.  I also vaguely remember him writing something to the effect that he "didn't care about code words."  There are problems with that, because you cannot simply assume that this stuff--signals intelligence collection--"just happens."  In order for it to happen, people have to propose, design and build the equipment to make it happen.  And tracking code words is important because it gives you a way of putting down a marker, determining how things are collected and determining the limits of the collection capabilities.  He also didn't avail himself of a lot of material that is available.  But it's been awhile, and so I don't remember anything more specific than that.

[JosephB]

Thanks Blackstar. From the review I got the impression he focused on the big brother aspect a bit much. What are some of your fav readings that tell the sigint story well?
P.S. Very broad topic I'm sure but like to hear your input. Thanks.

[Blackstar]

Thanks Blackstar. From the review I got the impression he focused on the big brother aspect a bit much. What are some of your fav readings that tell the sigint story well?
P.S. Very broad topic I'm sure but like to hear your input. Thanks.

There really aren't any good sources that tell the sigint story very well.  Matthew Aid, who knows the subject better than anybody, somewhat missed the mark with his book, The Secret Sentry.  The subtitle of his book is "The Untold History of the National Security Agency."  But it's not really a book about the NSA as an organization.  It's mostly a history of communications intelligence, primarily what was collected.  He has very little on the organization, the ground stations, the satellites, or the other kinds of intelligence collection, like intercepting and analyzing electronic signatures.

Bamford, although he writes best-sellers, ignores a lot of topics.  Look at the first two of his big NSA books (The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets), go to the index, and look up the word "satellite" and you'll be surprised at the fact that satellites--despite the fact that they are a primary method of intercepting signals--don't get any attention at all.  I've put more information on signals intelligence satellites into one article than he had in both books, and his second book missed a number of important sources published after the first one.  His most recent book, The Shadow Factory, is more of a political diatribe than an account of signals intelligence.

One thing that really gets missed a lot is the difference between sigint--primarily elint--and comint.  Most of these guys prefer to focus on comint, because that makes for a more colorful story.  After all, they are reading other peoples' mail.  And the subject of comint is understandable.  But a vast amount of signals intelligence consists of monitoring the electronic emissions of things like radars, and that has been very important during the Cold War.  And it is arguably very important during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military wants to detect--and jam--the signals used to detonate improvised explosive devices.

Richelson's iterations of The U.S. Intelligence Community provide a lot of information on signals intelligence.  But he's covering a much bigger topic, so sigint is only one small part.  And he's interested primarily in technology and systems and less in the product of the systems.

There is a relatively recent book on technical intelligence collection that I have not gone through yet.  I'll post an update shortly.

I'll provide a caveat here: I'm not a sigint expert.  I don't focus on that subject.  I have written quite a few articles on sigint satellites, which probably makes me the closest thing there is to an academic expert on that subject.  (But people like Bamford tend to ignore my articles, so there you go.)  I know very little about the ground stuff.  It just doesn't interest me.

[Blackstar]

The new book is by Robert M. Clark and is titled The Technical Collection of Intelligence.  It features chapters on signatures, electromagnetic sensors, collection platforms, optical imaging and radiometry, spectral sensing and imaging, active sensing-radar, imaging radar, passive RF collection, missile and space intelligence, non-EM signatures, materiel and materials collection and exploitation, and managing technical collection.

http://www.amazon.com/Technical-Collection-Intelligence-Robert-Clark/dp/1604265647/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293510764&sr=1-1

This is essentially a textbook on the subject.  I have not read it, but a well-known intelligence historian is reviewing it and apparently thinks highly of it.

[Blackstar]

To answer a question that was sorta asked earlier, and which I sorta addressed earlier, there is a hole in the literature on sigint and NSA.  To date, there is really no good history of the NSA.  The Bamford and Aid books don't really cover the NSA as an organization.  They don't cover things like:

-its creation and organizational evolution
-the development of its headquarters
-development of its ground stations
-development of other collection platforms (aircraft, satellites, other systems)
-the evolution of codebreaking and encryption
-the relationship between the NSA and other intelligence agencies like CIA and FBI
-the relationship between the NSA and the military
-elint and sigint collection and analysis

There's a lot of stuff to cover there.  To take one subject area: the US Navy was involved in tracking Soviet warships around the globe during the Cold War. They did this partly via satellites in orbit, and partly via ships flying off of aircraft carriers, both intercepting the emissions from Soviet ship radars.  What role did the NSA play in this?  The Navy was apparently responsible for bringing all that intelligence together and using it to plot the locations of the Soviet ships, but what did the NSA do in all of this?

Similarly, the NSA put sigint vans on Navy ships that cruised off the coasts of various countries, like Vietnam.  What was the division of responsibility between the Navy and NSA?

A little story: back in the late 1980s a guy I went to college with told me about his uncle, who worked for the NSA.  His uncle had a plaque on his wall at home that said something like "For meritorious service" and then it had an image of a Soviet Su-27 Flanker interceptor on it.  The uncle could not tell him what he had done, but obviously it had something to do with the Su-27, and obviously the NSA was involved.  What kinds of signals was he analyzing?  And how were they collected?

Now the lack of attention to this subject is not that surprising, because it mirrors a similar issue in the espionage literature.  There is no really good history of the CIA.  Everybody tends to cover the agency in terms of its spies or covert action, but ignores vast areas of CIA effort, such as intelligence analysis and technical collection.  They all want to write about James Bond, when that is only a portion of what CIA does.  Similarly, when it comes to the NSA, everybody wants to write about listening to telephone conversations, but nobody says anything about analyzing radars, even though thousands of people were involved in that during the Cold War.

[JosephB]

Thanks Blackstar. Your posts were really helpful in providing a framework for all the various literature out there. Went to the library today mainly to see if I could get my hands on Spaceflight magazine but to no avail. However, if you know the article title and issue, the article can be scanned and loaned from another library. I was quite pleased about that despite the possible “week or so” lag time.

I also wanted to see if they had The Technical Collection of Intelligence but it was too new. The librarian was kind enough to suggest and submit a “request to buy” form to the library but with an Amazon price of 77 bucks it could be sketchy.

They did have a decent Intelligence section and walked out of there with
Wizards, Puzzle Palace, Secret Empire and Chatter.
The library and their interlibrary loan program works out pretty well for those on a tight budget. The only problem when even the old literature is new you have to choose between reading & sleep. Thank goodness for caffeinated coffee… and Blackstar’s recommendations of course.

[Blackstar]

Dunno what article from Spaceflight you're looking for.  All my articles are listed on my Wikipedia page.  I can generally scan and send them, if you want.  (Something that I've been meaning to do for awhile now is scan all my old articles and put them on the web.  But that's a heck of a lot of work.)

As for Technical Collection of Intelligence, there's no way that a librarian will buy that.  Your best bet is Inter Library Loan.

As for the books you have, I suggest starting with Wizards.  Puzzle Palace is dated by now.  You could easily get a used copy for the cost of postage (listed on Amazon.com as starting at one cent!). 

I have... issues with Secret Empire.  I'm sure that I've complained about it here somewhere, because it is one of the chips I have on my shoulder, but there is a difference between academic historians (like Richelson and myself) and journalists who write history (like Bamford, Taubman, and Burrows).  The academics spend years on a subject, collecting information, building up data, etc.  The journalists tend to pick a book topic, research it for a year or two, and then write a book.  They tend to write better than academics, and they have better ties to the publishing industry (so they get book advances, go on tour, get on the Charlie Rose Show, etc.).  But their depth of knowledge is limited.  Now this might not be a problem for their book per se--the book might have good information and be well-written and readable.  But when you compare the book to what has already been written, it may not add significantly to the subject.  It may not advance our overall understanding of the subject much.*

Secret Empire was like that.  Taubman worked for the New York Times (he was an editorial writer for them--go read their editorials and you'll understand what that means), and he got a book contract and the NRO was helpful to him.  But his biggest problem was that he didn't know what the unanswered questions were, what the missing pieces of the puzzle were(are).  So Secret Empire is basically a compilation of what had already appeared in a number of books on Corona and the U-2.  What was missing was the stuff that had not appeared in the books.  There was almost nothing on Samos, nothing on Gambit, nothing on Hexagon.  And when he wrote that, he could have certainly gotten some material on those programs.  It was available, and he was interviewing people and could have asked them.

Contrast that to Wizards of Langley.  Richelson knew what the unanswered questions were and he managed to get a lot of new stuff on the Hexagon and the KH-11 and even some other programs.




*Hey, look!  A footnote!  There is an exception to this, which is William Burrows' book Deep Black.  It is extremely out of date now, but when he wrote it, he did have new information that had not previously been published.  Now a fair amount of the book was speculative, and some of it was just wrong (adaptive optics on spysats), but some of it was golden.  A few years I asked him about that and he said that he had written much of the book and realized that he was lacking something.  So he went back to one of his sources and essentially said that he really needed some good stuff, in other words, he needed some secret stuff.  So the source gave it to him.  That undoubtedly made people at the NRO mad, but it meant that his book was not simply a repeat of the other books that had been written earlier.

[JosephB]

How in the world does that happen?

"hey, I'm writing a book and I need some NRO secrets"
Don't people go to jail for that?

Edit: It's great that some stuff gets out but one would think the source would get proper approval first.