KH-9 HEXAGON Reconnaissance Satellite

[Blackstar]

Just turned in my near-real-time HEXAGON article to The Space Review. It will appear on Monday.

Still having a hard time understanding where they might have fit the NRT system inside the spacecraft. Above the cameras and maybe forward is the only thing that makes sense, and that doesn't really make sense. I don't think it would have been workable.

[Blackhorse]

Fun fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

In the novel  the plot is set into motion by Ye Wenjie getting a job at the Red Coast (SETI) facility. Its official, cover mission is to spy KH-9s when they transmit electronic pictures. Author Liu Cixin made a small mistake there, as it wasn't KH-9 but KH-11 that beamed down electronic pictures.
So it is interesting to see that KH-9 almost got FRO / NRT, and thus Cixin was kinda not entirely wrong... 

More seriously: with KH-9 joining the FRO party next monday, we now know that laser scanning of film was proposed for
-KH-8 (FROG)
-KH-9 (RED SHIRT ?)
-KH-10 (DORIAN)
-Crisis reconnaissance (SPIN SCAN, FASTBACK-B)

It really tried to piggyback on every major spysat program of the era : only to be rejected each time and ultimately, losing to the KH-11 CCDs.

[Blackstar]

Fun fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

In the novel  the plot is set into motion by Ye Wenjie getting a job at the Red Coast (SETI) facility. Its official, cover mission is to spy KH-9s when they transmit electronic pictures. Author Liu Cixin made a small mistake there, as it wasn't KH-9 but KH-11 that beamed down electronic pictures.
So it is interesting to see that KH-9 almost got FRO / NRT, and thus Cixin was kinda not entirely wrong... 

More seriously: with KH-9 joining the FRO party next monday, we now know that laser scanning of film was proposed for
-KH-8 (FROG)
-KH-9 (RED SHIRT ?)
-KH-10 (DORIAN)
-Crisis reconnaissance (SPIN SCAN, FASTBACK-B)

It really tried to piggyback on every major spysat program of the era : only to be rejected each time and ultimately, losing to the KH-11 CCDs.

Well, it worked on Samos and Lunar Orbiter, so it was proven. Just had a lot of limitations. By the way, the image I posted above of the Lunar Orbiter scanner is one I took last year visiting the back storage room at the George Eastman Museum. That's from a LO, may be an engineering test model or a spare. I believe it was built by Westinghouse. I have some other photos of it. They have a fair amount of LO equipment on display and I could do an article about it sometime.

I would like to know more about RED SHIRT. I suspect that it was just a low-level study project kept alive by SAFSP which was managing HEXAGON while the KH-11 was being managed by the CIA. SAFSP wanted to keep their hand in the game somehow.

[edzieba]

From a technology development / risk reduction point of view, RED SHIRT also makes sense: if you need to hedge your bets over direct electrooptical sensing hitting some late stage showstopper, you need a backup system. Film readout was that backup, but that's only any good if you can actually deploy it. If film readout development stopped in the 60s with the last Lunar Orbiter, then by the late 70s everyone who worked on it would have moved on in the intervening decade and all the institutional knowledge would be a decade out of date. Keeping development alive with programmes that everyone hoped would ultimately be cancelled (because if they were not, it meant EO failed) would make RED SHIRT a fitting name for those in the know.

[Blackhorse]

The KH-11 decision was made by Nixon on September 23, 1971. It was FROG last chance, so a case could be make film readout development (second generation, laser scanning) stopped at this moment.

[Blackstar]

That's a reasonable explanation--they named the program RED SHIRT because they knew it was doomed.

[hoku]

That's a reasonable explanation--they named the program RED SHIRT because they knew it was doomed.

My initial guess was also that NRO assigned the codeword implying "dead on arrival" for the project. It might, though, also been borrowed from the college sports "Redshirt", implying that the project participates in meetings and planning, w/o actively competing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_(college_sports)

As indicated by Ed above, the "HEXAGON Program Plan" states that RED SHIRT's main purpose was to serve as a fall-back in case KENNEN or advanced KENNEN might have encountered issues:

"A film readout option may have a place in the post 1980 NRP imaging system mix, but such a determination should be made only after the community has gained considerable experience with baseline KENNEN, and the shortcomings of the mix at that time are understood, especially with respect to crisis monitoring. RED SHIRT or a comparable near real-time film readout device, because of its cost, will surely be a competitor with proposals for KENNEN improvements.
https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/HEXAGON%20Records/SC-2022-00001_C05137256.pdf

[Blackstar]

I'd note that this was two words, and BYEMAN designations at that time were only a single word. Maybe they were allowed to use two words if it was in a different security system (i.e. outside BYEMAN). Or maybe this was just SAFSP typically playing a bit fast and loose with the code names they came up with. Note that during the 1960s they often named payloads as jokes, like BIG JOHN and OPPOKNOCKITY, and they later had FARRAH and RAQUEL.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/5093/1

Live, it’s the Big Bird! The HEXAGON satellite and near-real-time reconnaissance
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, November 3, 2025

In late 1970, the Perkin-Elmer Corporation made a rather bold proposal to modify the HEXAGON film reconnaissance satellite to enable it to conduct near-real-time reconnaissance. It was unusual because HEXAGON had not yet launched and was behind schedule after suffering a series of delays and cost overruns in the previous several years. But the company was responding to an ongoing discussion within the intelligence community about the need for more timely satellite imagery. Perkin-Elmer’s proposal was not accepted at the time, but a decade later, the company included such a capability in its satellites.

HEXAGON
The HEXAGON satellite was the size of a schoolbus. Twenty were launched between 1971 and 1986, with the last one destroyed when its rocket exploded above the pad. If a near-real-time reconnaissance system was incorporated into the satellite, it probably would have installed above the main cameras in the area indicated by the green arrow. The last vehicle was equipped with an infrared camera known as the S-Cubed, which was located in the in a spot indicated by the yellow arrow. The vehicle never reached orbit. (credit: NRO)
Background of HEXAGON

The HEXAGON program began in the mid-1960s as a replacement for the CORONA area search satellite. The goal of HEXAGON was to photograph large areas of the Soviet Union at resolution sufficient to identify Soviet weapons systems and differentiate them: for instance, identifying a tank versus an armored personnel carrier. HEXAGON was designed and built by the Perkin-Elmer Corporation of Danbury, Connecticut. It was originally planned to launch in 1970, but due to technical problems, it was delayed by a year.

HEXAGON had two powerful cameras that spun in opposite directions, exposing long lengths of film. The film ran from large supply reels at the rear of the spacecraft, through the cameras, and forward into the four reentry vehicles. When a reentry vehicle was full, the film was cut, and the vehicle was sealed and ejected. It reentered Earth’s atmosphere and was recovered. The film was transported to Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, where it was developed and copied and sent to Washington, DC for analysis. It could be a few days to several weeks from when a photo was taken to when it was seen. It was not timely, but each HEXAGON mission would cover so much area at such good resolution that it would return a huge amount of intelligence data in a relatively short period of time.

The CORONA, GAMBIT and HEXAGON film-return systems provided “strategic reconnaissance,” meaning assessments of the numbers and types of Soviet weapons systems. They were not intended to provide indications and warning of potential attack. But throughout the 1960s the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which managed the satellite intelligence programs, evaluated other potential systems for providing photographic intelligence faster. They were spurred on at least in part by the experience during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, when Soviet invasion forces were photographed by an American reconnaissance satellite, but the film was not seen until after the invasion had occurred.

By early 1970, there were two concepts being considered for “near-real-time” reconnaissance, which was generally understood to mean that photos would be available for viewing within an hour. These two concepts were the electro-optical imaging (EOI) approach, and the Film Read Out GAMBIT, or FROG.

[Blackstar]

The satellite photo of Prague, Czechoslovakia, was taken by a CORONA satellite and provided by Harry Stranger. Harry obtained several CORONA photos from that time and the files are massive--800 megabytes or so. My computer chokes a bit just opening them. We have both looked at the images trying to find evidence of the Soviet invasion, but haven't discovered anything obvious. It's not something we're pushing on. I don't know how much destruction was caused during the invasion. Burning buildings would be more obvious on the satellite photos.

[Blackstar]

I mentioned (somewhere) that I have a piece of the Titan that exploded in April 1986. I found it.

[Blackstar]

Probably by this evening I'll have an article up on The Space Review about the 1970s dispute between the CIA and USAF intelligence on the range of the Backfire bomber. Early data on the bomber was obtained by US reconnaissance satellites, and possibly also signals detected from their test flights.

Here is an image that I'm not using in the article. It is Vozdvizhenka Air Base in Ussuriysk, Russia. It used to be a Backfire base, and several abandoned aircraft (stripped of their electronics) remain there. You can see them here:

https://englishrussia.com/2011/06/10/abandoned-air-base/

The satellite photo was taken by a KH-4B CORONA in 1972. This is before the Backfire entered operational service. There were probably only around 4-6 Backfires flying at that time. This base was apparently a medium bomber base (I have not checked) and the planes seen in this 1972 photo were eventually replaced by Backfires.

I posted this in the HEXAGON thread because most of the images of Backfires in service were taken by HEXAGONs, although the early detection was done by CORONA.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/5126/1

    
The Backfire bomber controversy
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, December 22, 2025

On June 1, 2025, Ukrainian drones launched as part of Operation Spider’s Web destroyed at least four Tu-22M Backfire bombers and damaged at least one more during an attack at Belaya Air Base near Irkutsk. Drone video footage released later showed the swing-wing aircraft out in the open, burning, and within a day, satellite imagery revealed the wreckage of the medium-range bombers.

The Backfire has been in service for many years, and more than 50 years ago, satellite photos of the bombers helped kick off a dispute within the US intelligence community. The controversy raged for years and had international implications, one of many times that CIA and military intelligence analysts clashed over the interpretation of intelligence data. The dispute was how much fuel the bomber could carry, which determined how far it could fly, and therefore whether it was a tactical or strategic bomber and subject to an international arms limitation treaty. American satellites played a major role in gathering data on the Backfire throughout the 1970s as this controversy raged. Like the earlier bomber and missile gaps of the late 1950s, as well as the 1960s disputes over the Soviet SA-5 surface-to-air missile, CIA analysts argued one set of data, whereas military officials took a far more alarmist position.