KH-9 HEXAGON Reconnaissance Satellite

[Blackstar]

A spacecraft with readout and film return with 4 buckets might have accounted for its large size in Klass's mind, and not a larger film format.  A HEXAGON with readout and the same film load would have been a much larger spacecraft. 

We think (me and LB) that Klass learned about the large flight-qualified deployable dish antenna and assumed that it was for the HEXAGON. He therefore assumed it was both film-return and film-readout (or scanning). It's not a bad assumption, it was just wrong.

Surprisingly, Perkin-Elmer did pitch a near-real-time version of the HEXAGON. I'll have to write that in the future. I don't think it was serious. However, they put the S3 system on it, which did have some near-real-time capability for the late missions. I think if that had been available earlier, they would have used it more.

For those who don't know, HEXAGON could scan a huge amount of territory very fast in pretty good resolution. Each film frame contained a tremendous amount of information, many gigabytes. There was no way to send down that much information quickly at that time. Even today it would probably stress the capabilities of current technology if you attempted to do the maximum that a HEXAGON could do.

[Jim]

We think (me and LB) that Klass learned about the large flight-qualified deployable dish antenna and assumed that it was for the HEXAGON. He therefore assumed it was both film-return and film-readout (or scanning). It's not a bad assumption, it was just wrong.

I should have added "in addition to the antenna" in my statement.

Surprisingly, Perkin-Elmer did pitch a near-real-time version of the HEXAGON. I'll have to write that in the future. I don't think it was serious. However, they put the S3 system on it, which did have some near-real-time capability for the late missions. I think if that had been available earlier, they would have used it more.

For those who don't know, HEXAGON could scan a huge amount of territory very fast in pretty good resolution. Each film frame contained a tremendous amount of information, many gigabytes. There was no way to send down that much information quickly at that time. Even today it would probably stress the capabilities of current technology if you attempted to do the maximum that a HEXAGON could do.

the size of the Bimat reels would be as large as the ones for the film and would require more loopers.

[Blackstar]

I don't know how much Klass was thinking that all out. CORONA was flying with two buckets. If you simply assume a four-bucket version of CORONA, then that inherently requires a bigger booster, so it goes up to an Atlas or Titan. And if you assume a longer lifetime, I could see that pushing towards a bigger booster, even without a larger film format.

[Targeteer]

Shhhhhh!!! Pay no attention to the Big Bird…
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, September 22, 2025

In the first half of 1971, it was becoming clear that something big was about to happen at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Workers had prepared a launch pad for a new, larger rocket, the Titan IIID. This was to be the biggest, most powerful rocket ever launched from the West Coast, equipped with two solid rocket motors on its side. Previously, the Air Force had planned to launch the Titan IIIM with the Manned Orbiting Laboratory from Vandenberg. It would have been more powerful than the IIID, but it was canceled in 1969. There was no way to keep the large rocket secret—when it rose up over the low mountains, people in nearby Lompoc would see it, people to the south in Santa Barbara would see it, and people in much more populated Los Angeles would also probably see it.

In mid-June 1971, the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, John McLucas, wrote to the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, to inform him of what was about to happen:

“Previous experience with new space launchings indicates that we may expect some media coverage of the initial HEXAGON launch. This will be the first time that a booster as large as the Titan IIID has been launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and will indicate a major new program. In this period of limited space activity any new program commands national interest.”

McLucas stated that the only official comment regarding the launch would be a post-launch announcement that a satellite employing the Titan IIID was launched from Vandenberg. No other questions would be answered and all the press would get was, “The payload is classified and no additional information can be provided.”

Here is the link to the story for those who want to read the whole excellent story, as usual https://thespacereview.com/article/5064/1

[LittleBird]

As Blackstar notes

We think (me and LB) that Klass learned about the large flight-qualified deployable dish antenna and assumed that it was for the HEXAGON. He therefore assumed it was both film-return and film-readout (or scanning). It's not a bad assumption, it was just wrong.

One reason he thought this is probably that he thought that there were already film scanning “search and find” satellites in operation (in fact a bucket dropper, CORONA) complementing the “close look” satellites (in fact GAMBIT).

The thing I find intriguing is that he didn’t just have a rumour about the dish, he had seen documents that Lockheed had produced in the face of skepticism from Fairchild’s competitors on ATS -F, saying that a space qualified 20 ft dish was available. This aspect is more relevant to my Fairchild and ATS -6 thread so I’ll move it there (though travelling so may not be today). I am of course intrigued by why he didn’t think it was for SIGINT-perhaps because GEO SIGINT wasn’t thought to be a thing…

[hoku]

As Blackstar notes

We think (me and LB) that Klass learned about the large flight-qualified deployable dish antenna and assumed that it was for the HEXAGON. He therefore assumed it was both film-return and film-readout (or scanning). It's not a bad assumption, it was just wrong.

One reason he thought this is probably that he thought that there were already film scanning “search and find” satellites in operation (in fact a bucket dropper, CORONA) complementing the “close look” satellites (in fact GAMBIT).

The thing I find intriguing is that he didn’t just have a rumour about the dish, he had seen documents that Lockheed had produced in the face of skepticism from Fairchild’s competitors on ATS -F, saying that a space qualified 20 ft dish was available. This aspect is more relevant to my Fairchild and ATS -6 thread so I’ll move it there (though travelling so may not be today). I am of course intrigued by why he didn’t think it was for SIGINT-perhaps because GEO SIGINT wasn’t thought to be a thing…

Klaas' line of thought seems to have included both the Space-Ground Link System (SGLS) and Compass Link. Attached are a few pages of his 1971 (written in 1970?) book "Secret Sentries in Space".

[Jim]

Klaas' line of thought seems to have included both the Space-Ground Link System (SGLS) and Compass Link. Attached are a few pages of his 1971 (written in 1970?) book "Secret Sentries in Space".

That is funny since SGLS is only for commanding and telemetry

[LittleBird]

As Blackstar notes

We think (me and LB) that Klass learned about the large flight-qualified deployable dish antenna and assumed that it was for the HEXAGON. He therefore assumed it was both film-return and film-readout (or scanning). It's not a bad assumption, it was just wrong.

One reason he thought this is probably that he thought that there were already film scanning “search and find” satellites in operation (in fact a bucket dropper, CORONA) complementing the “close look” satellites (in fact GAMBIT).

The thing I find intriguing is that he didn’t just have a rumour about the dish, he had seen documents that Lockheed had produced in the face of skepticism from Fairchild’s competitors on ATS -F, saying that a space qualified 20 ft dish was available. This aspect is more relevant to my Fairchild and ATS -6 thread so I’ll move it there (though travelling so may not be today). I am of course intrigued by why he didn’t think it was for SIGINT-perhaps because GEO SIGINT wasn’t thought to be a thing…

Klaas' line of thought seems to have included both the Space-Ground Link System (SGLS) and Compass Link. Attached are a few pages of his 1971 (written in 1970?) book "Secret Sentries in Space".

Thanks. Anyone curious to see the book can still find it on archive.org  https://archive.org/details/secretsentriesin0000klas

For all the faults one can now see, it was a landmark at the time. I am curious as to how his deductive processes worked though, and why for example he and Aviation Week so confidently decided that what we now know to be CANYON 1 in 1968 was an "advanced MIDAS" (see pp 179-182), having linked the upcoming secret synchronous Atlas Agena launches to Vela-type treaty monitoring when they first heard about them the year before. They stuck to this interpretation as late as 1975, long after DSP had made its debut. One can't help wondering if a little bit of  misdirection was being applied by some of his sources. If so it was certainly effective, because the possible SIGINT significance of a 20 ft space qualified dish seems to have eluded him completely. One has also to wonder what, if anything, the Russians made of it.

[WallE]

[hoku]

<snip>
I am curious as to how his deductive processes worked though, and why for example he and Aviation Week so confidently decided that what we now know to be CANYON 1 in 1968 was an "advanced MIDAS" (see pp 179-182), having linked the upcoming secret synchronous Atlas Agena launches to Vela-type treaty monitoring when they first heard about them the year before. They stuck to this interpretation as late as 1975, long after DSP had made its debut. One can't help wondering if a little bit of  misdirection was being applied by some of his sources. If so it was certainly effective, because the possible SIGINT significance of a 20 ft space qualified dish seems to have eluded him completely. One has also to wonder what, if anything, the Russians made of it.

The chapter on "Nuclear Detection and Ferret Satellites" in "Secret Sentries" includes the statements "The optimum altitude for a ferret-type satellite is slightly higher than for a photo-reconnaissance spacecraft. (...) A ferret satellite ought not to be placed too high an orbit because this unnecessarily decreases its sensitivity. (...) The higher the satellite orbit, the less payload can be orbited."

Thus he had two plausible arguments supporting his deduction.

Attached is the transcript of a Today Show interview with Klaas from Sep 1971, where he iterates his thoughts on the "Big Bird".

[WallE]

Those are Cape Canaveral press release cards or something to that effect I posted. I'd posted another one in the Titan variants thread for a KH-8 launch. That one was quite open to the point of even stating what the mission was photographing, they weren't trying to hide anything there. I'd seen a Jumpseat one somewhere too that was quite open about its mission of monitoring Soviet ABM radars.

The CANYON cards referred to it as a MIDAS-type mission as LittleBird said. Whether that was intentional misinformation I don't know. However, there was doubtless more secrecy around that program and HEXAGON in the early 70s than the older reconnaissance programs as they were brand new, bleeding-edge tech and you never want the enemy to know what your most advanced hardware is, indeed the very idea of even doing geosync ELINT was so new that it never occurred to Mr. Klaas that that was a possibility. It was something of a moot point since the Soviets found out about it as early as 1975 and began switching to landline phones to avoid having their phone communications tapped, but taken in an early '70s context it would have made sense.

[Jim]

Those are Cape Canaveral press release cards or something to that effect I posted.

No, those are not press releases or any official. They are postal covers or cachets produced by philatelists.

[Blackstar]

Those are Cape Canaveral press release cards or something to that effect I posted.

No, those are not press releases or any official. They are postal covers or cachets produced by philatelists.

Yeah, a lot of these were produced using artwork taken from Aviation Week or somewhere else.

[Jim]

Those are Cape Canaveral press release cards or something to that effect I posted.

No, those are not press releases or any official. They are postal covers or cachets produced by philatelists.

Yeah, a lot of these were produced using artwork taken from Aviation Week or somewhere else.

And every launch to them was a SAMOS or MIDAS.

[LittleBird]

Those are Cape Canaveral press release cards or something to that effect I posted.

No, those are not press releases or any official. They are postal covers or cachets produced by philatelists.

Yeah, a lot of these were produced using artwork taken from Aviation Week or somewhere else.

I think the interesting things there are the 2 refs to Space Business Daily in 1972. If one of those articles had (erroneously) linked the 1972 Atlas Agena launch to SDS it would be the first contemporary suggestion I've seen that it _wasn't_ an infra red warning satellite.

[Blackstar]

Those are Cape Canaveral press release cards or something to that effect I posted.

No, those are not press releases or any official. They are postal covers or cachets produced by philatelists.

Yeah, a lot of these were produced using artwork taken from Aviation Week or somewhere else.

And every launch to them was a SAMOS or MIDAS.

I think I have shared this story before. In the 1990s the NASA HQ History Archive had an archivist named Lee Sagaesser (you will find him acknowledged in many space history books for his help to the author). He told me the story about how one day he was visited by some government security guys. I cannot remember if they were NASA or FBI. The reason was that the JSC gift shop was selling postal covers that had a line drawing of the "White Cloud" satellite on them. Somebody noticed that this was a classified satellite and so there was an investigation. They contacted the guy who created the postal covers and asked where he got the image, and he said he got it from Lee at the NASA history archive. So these guys showed up at NASA HQ and asked Lee where he got the image, and he took them over to the file drawer and pulled out the photocopy from an article that appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/5066/1

Last of the dinosaurs: Admiral Nakhimov sails again under satellite eyes
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, September 29, 2025

Recently, a commercial imagery satellite photographed the Russian nuclear-powered battlecruiser Admiral Nakhimov at pierside after undertaking new sea trials. The satellite imagery provides new details about the ship’s modernization after a very long and expensive refit period. It reveals the large number of missiles that the ship is now equipped to fire, making it, by some measures, the most powerful surface warship in the world. The ship first came to the attention of Western intelligence agencies in satellite photos taken more than 40 years ago, but then it posed a greater threat than it does today.
warships

Spotting the monster
In early 1974, American reconnaissance satellites spotted the first signs of a new major surface warship under construction at a Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) shipyard. Over the next several years they photographed the ship as it took shape, indicating that it would be the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-powered surface warship. The ship launched in late 1977, sliding down the ramp into the Neva River. It was the largest surface combatant in the world at that time, bigger than any American cruiser. High-resolution reconnaissance images showed that it had twenty large hatches on its bow covering what were obviously big missiles, and intelligence analysts determined that it was intended to attack American aircraft carriers. Other hatches concealed anti-aircraft missiles. The ship’s pagoda-like superstructure was covered with numerous radar and communications antennas. Eventually, the US intelligence community determined that the ship was named Kirov. (See “HEXAGON vs. Kirov: American satellite reconnaissance and the Soviet Union’s most powerful warship,” The Space Review, September 23, 2024.)

[Blackstar]

Working on a new article (one of many) on developing a near-real-time capability for HEXAGON. This was proposed by Perkin-Elmer in 1970. Their concept was to use a regular HEXAGON satellite and strip out "secondary" payloads to allow for incorporation of equipment to scan film after the main film-return mission was over. They did not do a detailed study, but they wanted permission and money to do a study. I have no evidence that they received that.

The timing is interesting but not surprising, because this was at the height of discussion about developing NRT. This was when FROG was being compared to electro-optical (eventually the KH-11 KENNEN), and around the time when NRO was looking at various "crisis response" satellite options. So Perkin-Elmer probably learned about this interest and wanted to propose a way to add this capability to the HEXAGON.

I don't know how such a system would have worked. They wanted to run film through one of the two cameras. But how would they splice that film onto the outgoing film that was being returned to Earth? Seems dicey to me.

Later, P-E developed the S-Cubed system which did add this capability to the HEXAGON. However, it does not appear to have been used, or at least not for long.

[WallE]

The fourth NOSS satellite fell victim to a spectacular launch disaster in 1980 when its refurbed Atlas E ride (Missile 68E) lost turbopump lubricant, causing the B-1 engine to shut down shortly before BECO and pinwheeling the Atlas back towards earth like a runaway torpedo. The booster exploded some time later from (I assume) aerodynamic heating. The other first gen NOSS flights were all successful.

As for the rest, Aviation Week always spammed SAMOS/MIDAS on everything because the official names of DoD satellite programs weren't publicly known after October 1961 and those were the last ones they knew about. It may well be that their sources were letting them think CANYON was an early warning satellite so as to obfuscate its actual mission since it was a satellite/mission type that was new and nobody knew about yet while early warning was already a known thing.

DoD programs until late '61 occupied a weird nether region where they were secret but not really. SAMOS and CORONA were publicly acknowledged, but the Air Force didn't really say what they did nor did they release any photos or diagrams of them and tended to describe them as test or scientific satellites. That happened because Eisenhower had some peculiar ideas about military secrecy and didn't think a free country should keep secrets as that was what communist countries did. The Kennedy Administration disliked that idea and moved to make DoD programs top secret as they among other things thought it was increasingly difficult to explain to the public what these alleged scientific/test payloads did and why they didn't seem to be returning any data.

Clearly some leaker had to give them that drawing of a NOSS satellite, but whoever he was, he wasn't talking. But then again Sam "KH-11" Morison was the only leaker to ever get busted.

[Blackstar]

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5075/1

Carriers—and battleships—from space (part 3): The Mighty O and the Mighty Mo
by Dwayne A. Day and Harry Stranger
Monday, October 6, 2025

In summer 1980, an American reconnaissance satellite flew over the Soviet Union’s Severodvinsk shipyard and for the first time photographed a new, large nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine, eventually designated the Oscar I, and a massive nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine designated the Typhoon. That same year, American satellites flew over the Northern 61 Kommuna 445 shipyard at Nikolayev on the Black Sea and photographed the first of the 445-F cruise missile cruisers, and evidence that two more were under construction. Not very far away, at another Nikolayev shipyard, a Kiev-class heavy cruiser/aircraft carrier was fitting out, with another under construction and probably launching in 1981. Meanwhile, near Leningrad, the first nuclear-powered guided missile battlecruiser Kirov was undergoing sea trials, and a second vessel of the type was under construction and would probably launch in 1981. The Oscar I, 445-F (later re-designated Slava) and Kirov were all intended to attack American aircraft carriers. The Typhoon was designed to destroy American cities. The satellites made clear that the Soviet Union was building many new vessels with much greater capabilities, apparently intending to finally face the United States Navy in the open ocean.

While this was happening, the US Navy was shrinking rapidly in size due to the retirement of hundreds of World War II-era ships that had reached the end of their lifetimes and were incapable of modernization. In the previous decade, the fleet had declined from just under 1,000 to 450 ships, and combat aircraft had reduced from 2,700 to 1,700. In 1979–1980, the General Accounting Office evaluated the possibility of modernizing and extending the lifetime of nineteen World War II-era Gearing-class destroyers, but determined this would be expensive. By 1980, some in the US Navy and Congress began discussing refurbishing several larger mothballed ships, including the aircraft carrier Oriskany, and the four battleships of the Iowa class (something that is in the news again).