Satellite signals intelligence in the 1960s

[LittleBird]

Interesting to see this symposium. No sats yet as far as I can see, but some interesting stuff on ground based antennae such as the famous Wullenweber https://onthesquid.com/2013/05/the-elephant-cage-antenna/ used at Chicksands among other sites. Perhaps early SIGINT sats might feature in a future such event ?

[LittleBird]

Moving a couple of posts about CANYON's upper stage(s) here as they fit better than in the re-usable Agena thread. First a question to Jim

Ok. For an agena related q, can we return to that pic upthread of a reusable agena with a kick stage. Does anyone know if any of the Agenas flown to GEO actually used a kick stage or would this have had to be a new development? Several docs from late 60s mention it as an option but as far as i know it was never actually done ?

Not a separate one.  There were some integrated into the spacecraft

Looking at the rather Hughes 3xx series-like
satellite in the shuttle cargo bay in the pic that Blackstar posted, do we know how that would have circularised its orbit (assuming its bound for GEO not HEO) ?

buried SRM

… And  Rhyolite and its successors presumably used the liquid (and apparently pintle injector based) TRW multi mission stage as a space craft.

So thinking of what else NRO might have wanted to use an Ascent Agena derived tug to GEO for, what about Canyon and its successors? Does going to an inclined synchronous rather than a stationary orbit mean that you don’t need a kick stage, just a second burn of the Agena (or transtage) at high altitude?


And was the kick stage in the Lockheed studies mainly about planetary missions that needed a very high initial injection velocity?

[LittleBird]

Second post, responding to Jim with some open source evidence that CANYON separated from its Agena after apogee burn.

So thinking of what else NRO might have wanted to use an Ascent Agena derived tug to GEO for, what about Canyon and its successors? Does going to an inclined synchronous rather than a stationary orbit mean that you don’t need a kick stage, just a second burn of the Agena (or transtage) at high altitude?


And was the kick stage in the Lockheed studies mainly about planetary missions that needed a very high initial injection velocity?

Canyon would have needed an apogee boost system either like Rhyolite or like Hughes.
Inclined synchronous is not much different than stationary, just a little less delta V
Transtage always did the apogee boost.
I don't think Ascent Agena ever did a second burn.

Thanks Jim. I defer to your knowledge of course but if Canyon had a kick stage wouldn’t its Agenas still be in GTO, as Rhyolite’s still are-unless decayed by now ? In 2017 the ESA DISCOS tables showed Canyon’s in synchronous inclined orbits like the satellites themselves, a striking difference from Rhyolite’s. I had a post mentioning this in the  Rhyolite thread-link is https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37169.msg2294863#msg2294863

[As an aside, it's surprisingly difficult to find these ESA  tables anywhere other than astronomer.ru or some rather malware infested sites like docslib. There is fortunately at least one edition (1999's) behind a paywall in a journal https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1013399804776  though and 2017's  is  on Researchgate so i will append some grabs later to illustrate the difference between RH and C.


Compare for example, in first grab, Canyon 1 with Hughes' ATS 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS-3  which was also Atlas-Agena D launched and had an internal AKM.  Unlike Canyon 1 the ATS  has no Agena along with it, having left it in GTO I assume.

See also Rhyolite 1 in second grab-behaving like a system with a built in AKM as we now think it did indeed have.]

[LittleBird]

A little bird pointed me at Wikipedia (always a reliable source) and the entry on the ATS-6, and it says this about the antenna:

“It weighed 182 lbs at launch and stowed into a toroidal volume (doughnut shaped) approximately 6 feet in diameter and 10 inches thick”


So it's not impossible to believe that there was also a 30-foot diameter dish that was perhaps only 4 feet in diameter and 20 inches thick that fit inside the smaller payload shroud for CANYON. (the ATS-6 payload shroud was about twice the diameter of the CANYON payload shroud.)

Also, it turns out that the ATS-6 antenna was built by Lockheed, and Lockheed built CANYON. So there's a possibility that Lockheed developed the dish technology for the earlier program and then used it for ATS-6.

Bumping this old post because

i) a full size ATS 6 antenna is now on display at NASM, see first pic below and the YouTube link as well as the links at
https://airandspace.si.edu/whats-on/exhibitions/one-world-connected - there's nothing like standing underneath it to feel what a thirty foot diameter means, though of course we already had pics (second grab). [Edit: It also illuminates (pun v much intended) the size of RHYOLITE, which from an early, and now declassified estimate, would have had to have been at least double this diameter-possibly too big to fit the gallery !]]

ii) it turns out that the ATS 6 dish's technology was indeed originally from a classified project, and was declassified for its use by NASA. See attached, from a document compiled by Canada's SPAR aerospace in the 70s when they were looking at advanced antennae for a new comsat. Full original doc follows it [Edit: abstract is at https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.884823/publication.html and link to online pdf on  Canadian Govt site  is at  https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2020/isde-ised/Co24/Co24-411-1975-eng.pdf]

ATS 6 antenna folded into a 5 foot inner radius torus, so might have _almost_ been narrow enough to fit under the CANYON shroud- this seems to have been slightly hammerhead in shape (last grab).

One could envision CANYON as looking like ATS-6 but with a smaller box. But the ATS-6 satellite was built by Fairchild, not Lockheed, and therefore we would not expect the two satellites to look the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS-6

[LittleBird]

Moved from an apparently dormant thread on recent SIGINT: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=43637.msg1714726#msg1714726

Anik's old post below has at least one dangling question that I'd like to ask about.

I am trying to summarize info about numbering systems:

4000/4100/4300/4400/5100 - P-11
7050 - Bit
7100 - Poppy
7150 - Ferret
7200 - Aftrack
7500 - Mercury
7600 - Orion
7700 - Jumpseat
8200 - Trumpet(?)
8300 - Orion (since 2003)

All of the above numbers as far as I know seem to be  code numbers for activities, as opposed to spacecraft names, and so some lasted for very long periods, e.g. 7500 or 7600, first used in the sixties, which were still used in documents from about 2010 leaked to the Intercept  by Snowden. But 7700 is the odd one out in that I've not seen it either in a declassified document or  a leaked one.  Is there a source for this ? It seems highly likely to be right, as the sequence 75 76 77 follows that of first launch date of the type, but it'd be nice to know.

And was there ever conclusive evidence that 8200 was a HEO activity ?

[Blackstar]

Somewhat relevant to this thread.

Earlier in the thread I posted a link to my article about the NSA's STONEHOUSE listening post in Ethiopia. That site intercepted communications from deep spacecraft to a Soviet ground station in Crimea. A former ground station in Crimea was just attacked. I have not dug into this to see if they are the same ground stations. The STONEHOUSE listening post was uniquely located to gather signals being sent to the Crimea ground station.

This is from Anatoly Zak:

"An alleged missile strike at the historical NIP-16 ground station in Crimea, which served as the nerve center of the pioneering Soviet space missions, but apparently converted into a pure military base after the occupation of the peninsula by Russia: https://russianspaceweb.com/kik_nip16.html

Image attached.

[LittleBird]

Last (white USAF) orders for the Agena, and its SIGINT customer(s) - see Blackstar's correction in next posting

Great find! Based on the document titles that looks like the same "Document History of Agena" as mentioned above.

Around 1967/68 the USAF, probably at NRO initiative, put together several document histories. Off the top of my head they were:

-WS-117L
-Samos
-Discoverer
-Agena

I don't remember if they did a separate Midas collection as well. Anyway, they were all hundreds of documents, mostly memos, running from around 1956/57 to 1967. I found them at the Air Force Historical Research Agency in the 1990s and was really thrilled about that. Later, I think NRO had them all scanned and put them up on their website. They provide a good backbone for any history of those programs. However, they were a little lightweight from a historical perspective. I seem to remember that they were a lot of "what" and very little "why" or "how." So there were memos saying "We ordered the purchase of two more Agenda flight units for the fourth quarter of 1963" but no explanation of why they did that or what the impacts were. I think that they were all originally at secret or confidential level or not classified at all, and that prevented you from understanding what was going on--like that additional Agena was necessary to launch another classified payload X. The documents could help with building up a chronology, but you would really have to fill in a lot of the blanks with further research.

For me the other real limitation was that Agena continued far beyond 1967, so that collection didn't tell you as much as you wanted to know.

One interesting thing, which I've moved here as it seems more relevant, is that above collection shows the "last orders" for Agena, if I've understood correctly (turns out I hadn't, they are the last white USAF orders). See grabs below from two memos which appear late on in Volume 6  https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/declass/agena/SC-2017-00002f.PDF .

First memo from 8th September 1967, first two grabs, would appear to include the proposed order of production for the final set for "four projects": 110 (GAMBIT), 846 (CORONA), 770 (Large LEO SIGINT), and one more redacted mission. It's also stated that  there is a "fifth project for which all the required Agenas have already been delivered". I'm curious because I'd have thought that there would be six NRO projects using Agena by then (last 3 being CANYON, RHYOLITE and JUMPSEAT), but maybe the last of these was still sufficiently new that its requirement wasn't yet clear. SDS was still quite some way in the future and I don't think its launcher would be chosen for several years yet-its management may also have been different as not a fully NRO mission.

And maybe that's why a memo shortly after (20th Sep) adds another redacted requirement, perhaps this is indeed JUMPSEAT ?

[Blackstar]

One interesting thing, which I've moved here as it seems more relevant, is that above collection shows the "last orders" for Agena, if

Just to be clear, Agena kept flying for another 20 years, so I doubt these were the last orders.

[LittleBird]

One interesting thing, which I've moved here as it seems more relevant, is that above collection shows the "last orders" for Agena, if

Just to be clear, Agena kept flying for another 20 years, so I doubt these were the last orders.

Indeed, thanks, Jim has also helpfully explained that in the Agena D thread-you might say they had a "bar extension" ;-) I think they are still an interesting pair of memos because you can see that in second one SAFSP seems to need a 6th programme to be considered which fits well with what we know about  JUMPSEAT’s appearance

[Blackstar]

Part 2 of my Thors article just appeared. I was going to end it there, but I've decided to do a part 3 that will mostly be photographs, not text. Yesterday I went looking through Peter Hunter's collection for cool VAFB Thor photos and there are a lot of great ones. And the collection makes the point that there were a lot of Thor launches.

Anyway, there are some good photos of the SIGINT satellites of the 1960s. I've used all of them before in articles, and several them provided important clues about payload changes before the program was declassified. Here's a nice one.

[LittleBird]

A little bird pointed me at Wikipedia (always a reliable source) and the entry on the ATS-6, and it says this about the antenna:

“It weighed 182 lbs at launch and stowed into a toroidal volume (doughnut shaped) approximately 6 feet in diameter and 10 inches thick”


So it's not impossible to believe that there was also a 30-foot diameter dish that was perhaps only 4 feet in diameter and 20 inches thick that fit inside the smaller payload shroud for CANYON. (the ATS-6 payload shroud was about twice the diameter of the CANYON payload shroud.)

Also, it turns out that the ATS-6 antenna was built by Lockheed, and Lockheed built CANYON. So there's a possibility that Lockheed developed the dish technology for the earlier program and then used it for ATS-6.

Bumping this old post because

i) a full size ATS 6 antenna is now on display at NASM, see first pic below and the YouTube link as well as the links at
https://airandspace.si.edu/whats-on/exhibitions/one-world-connected - there's nothing like standing underneath it to feel what a thirty foot diameter means, though of course we already had pics (second grab). [Edit: It also illuminates (pun v much intended) the size of RHYOLITE, which from an early, and now declassified estimate, would have had to have been at least double this diameter-possibly too big to fit the gallery !]]

ii) it turns out that the ATS 6 dish's technology was indeed originally from a classified project, and was declassified for its use by NASA. See attached, from a document compiled by Canada's SPAR aerospace in the 70s when they were looking at advanced antennae for a new comsat. Full original doc follows it [Edit: abstract is at https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.884823/publication.html and link to online pdf on  Canadian Govt site  is at  https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2020/isde-ised/Co24/Co24-411-1975-eng.pdf]

ATS 6 antenna folded into a 5 foot inner radius torus, so might have _almost_ been narrow enough to fit under the CANYON shroud- this seems to have been slightly hammerhead in shape (last grab).

Bit more on the 30 foot Lockheed antenna for ATS-6: There's a nice article about the conservation task here at Air and Space magazine https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/treating-30-foot-diameter-umbrella-antenna

The ATS-6 was in storage at the Museum’s Paul E. Garber Facility for almost 30 years because the entire artifact, spanning over 28 feet high, 52 feet wide along the solar array, and 30 feet in diameter across the antenna, was simply too big to display. Until now! Renovation of the Museum on the National Mall has allowed for the umbrella-shaped parabolic antenna reflector to be integrated into the new One World Connected gallery, where it is suspended from the ceiling.

[LittleBird]

Bumping this older post because the episode Lew Allen was talking about in his 1970 memo (first grab) may be illuminated somewhat by Bill Perry's autobiography (second and subsequent grabs).

[Edit: And see also the 1970 Lew Allen memo https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/NROStaffRecords/442.PDF   in a previous post of mine, reposted below, that refers to Perry and what appears to be a failed bid to do what sounds like the COMINT mission, how all this joins up remains unclear for the moment.]

Sounds as if it was indeed a failed bid, for the "receiving subsystem" of what might have been RHYOLITE (perhaps including the COMINT aspects that seem to have later been descoped though not completely eliminated, see my posts passim.) Timing is not very clear but must surely be mid 60s [Edit: Intel was not, however, founded until mid-1968.] Not clear if receiving system is an onboard or ground-based thing.

[LittleBird]

NRO has released a new podcast associated with their 60th anniversary:

https://soundcloud.com/user-553105389/sitting-down-with-the-center-for-the-study-of-national-reconnaissance

At the 19-minute mark they say that the NRO is publishing a book with 60 key innovations and 60 key innovators.

Lightweight optics, CCDs, space firsts (like first manmade object recovered from space), management techniques.

Innovators and contractors.

Has this book appeared yet ?

Didn't find it on their web site. There is a page on "Pioneers" and "Leaders". I would guess at least some overlap with their list of 60 "key innovators":
https://www.nro.gov/History-and-Studies/Center-for-the-Study-of-National-Reconnaissance/Leaders-Pioneers-and-Artifacts/

Thanks @hoku for mentioning in the DSP thread that the book boldfaced in Blackstar's post above has now appeared. See "NRO Innovations & Innovators:  1961-2021" at
https://www.nro.gov/About-NRO/history/more-historical-programs/
and attached (large) pdf.

A handy document, and tidies some loose ends, including some stuff on KH-11's use of CMGs which I will put in appropriate thread. Has at least one oddity though, seems to give impression that relay satellite was in GEO, which I think may just have resulted from confusion among the dozen people credited as editors. Though of course there was at least one SDS launch into GEO eventually.

[Blackstar]

Thanks @hoku for mentioning in the DSP thread that the book boldfaced in Blackstar's post above has now appeared. See "NRO Innovations & Innovators:  1961-2021" at
https://www.nro.gov/About-NRO/history/more-historical-programs/
and attached (large) pdf.

A handy document, and tidies some loose ends, including some stuff on KH-11's use of CMGs which I will put in appropriate thread. Has at least one oddity though, seems to give impression that relay satellite was in GEO, which I think may just have resulted from confusion among the 8 or so names credited as editors. Though of course there was at least one SDS launch into GEO eventually.

Thanks for posting this. I was not aware.

I'm really glad they did this, and from a brief glance at the contents it looks like an excellent overview of the entire agency and its history. Glad to see things in there like the contractors and the different ground facilities.

I've only done a quick look, but I have some quibbles (and maybe I will amend my quibbles after I look more closely). However, it looks like they sorta blur over the line between 3-axis stabilization and CMGs. I'll have to fully read the Agena section, but Agena represented several important innovations. I think the two most important were using the rocket upper stage to support the spacecraft (Agena was both a second stage and a spacecraft), and 3-axis stabilization.

[Blackstar]

A few more random comments:

The Samos and Gambit photos are new to me. I don't remember seeing those before. We have so few Samos hardware images that every new find is major.

That Hexagon Mapping Camera model is new to me. I suspect that is at the NRO headquarters, where they have a little museum. Last time I was there was around 2000, so I have no idea what they have on display.

The ABM hunt--this is great to see, although I have not yet read it. For about 7-8 years now I have found all kinds of information that the hunt for Soviet ABM capabilities was a major push for the US intelligence community. And yet you will find almost nothing about it in history books. So to have the NRO finally highlight that issue is really important.



Update: I have now read the ABM section of the NRO history and although it is a good summary of the overall ABM history, it says nothing about NRO intelligence collection on ABM systems other than they monitored the ABM treaty. That's disappointing, because NRO did a lot more than that. It was NRO collection on Soviet ABM radars and missile systems that confirmed that the Soviet Union was not making breakout progress at intercepting missiles. Some of that has been public for years after NRO declassified it. I sense that this is intended to be a general guide to NRO history, but leaving out details dilutes what the NRO accomplished and why it was so important.

[Blackstar]

NRO has declassified a large number of POPPY documents from the 1960s:

https://www.nro.gov/foia-home/foia-declassified-major-nro-programs-and-projects/

They appear to have been declassified in 2024, although I don't know when they went on the website. NRO document declassification seemed oddly silent during 2024, and now it's clear that they were working on these. I suspect they were also working on PARCAE documents to be declassified soon.

I have not looked at these in any way other than noting the dates. If anybody spots anything interesting, please post.

[LittleBird]

NRO has declassified a large number of POPPY documents from the 1960s:

https://www.nro.gov/foia-home/foia-declassified-major-nro-programs-and-projects/

They appear to have been declassified in 2024, although I don't know when they went on the website. NRO document declassification seemed oddly silent during 2024, and now it's clear that they were working on these. I suspect they were also working on PARCAE documents to be declassified soon.

I have not looked at these in any way other than noting the dates. If anybody spots anything interesting, please post.

Fascinating, thanks. One immediate hit was to a 1970 memo from Geiger to DNRO McLucas on the internal politics, and aspirations, of Navy space surveillance. See below:

 

[Blackstar]

Fascinating, thanks. One immediate hit was to a 1970 memo from Geiger to DNRO McLucas on the internal politics, and aspirations, of Navy space surveillance. See below:
 

And that is an interesting one. It brings up a few different issues:

-the Navy was getting wary of the radar satellite idea. Identified here as Program 749, that was known as Clipper Bow. They thought it was going to be expensive and thought there might be a better way to find Soviet ships. So they were redirecting money from that to the classified systems (at this point it was POPPY).

-there was a question of where to run this new stuff from. NRL had developed GRAB and POPPY and it was a component of the NRO. But it was a technology lab, not an operational command where admirals told ships where to go and what to blow up. Should an operational command control this new ocean surveillance system, or should it reside in the NRL (NRO's Program C)?


Now those things are not surprising. If we had thought about them before, we would have assumed that these were issues. We knew, for instance, that Clipper Bow was canceled and PARCAE was pursued. But it's nice to have an indication that money came out of one program and went to another.

The issue about operational command vs. a tech lab also is not surprising, but nice to see confirmed. I have written a bit about Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities (TENCAP) and I'm sure they had to answer those kinds of questions as more tactical systems were developed.

[Blackstar]

One of the early documents has a list of programs from around 1962. It separates them into acknowledged and covert programs. The overt ones are Samos, etc. The covert ones are CORONA, GAMBIT. But it also mentions a film processing project called XENON. I wonder if XENON was the original name for Kodak's film processing, which was later known as "Bridgehead"?

[Blackstar]

This is a MULTIGROUP satellite. I need to figure out which one was Vehicle 2732, which I think was the Agena number. However, I'm a big confused/skeptical about the different MULTIGROUP configurations. I'd like to match antennas with what payloads were on the individual satellites.

By the way, MULTIGROUP was conceived as a flexible satellite. The idea was that they would have a standard bus and would be able to add whatever payload was need for newly emerging targets and do so quickly (hence the name "Multigroup"). But it did not work out that way. The long lead time necessary to design and test the payload, and then integrate it into the vehicle which also had to be tested, meant that they really could not rapidly respond to new targets. I wrote about that a bit in my "Wizard War" articles.



http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/Strange/Strange1.htm