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Apollo 8 - part 5 (NRO)
NRO and Apollo
December 26, 1968
We are flying a manned lunar spysat. How about that, Jim Lovell thought.
The Lunar Mapping and Survey System – LMSS - Apollo 8 carried on its “nose” had been a backup system in the case Lunar Orbiter didn't worked. In the end Lunar Orbiter worked well, so the LMSS had been cancelled in July 1967... only to be revived a year later for Apollo 8.
Amazingly, Lunar Orbiter by itself had been a spy satellite - a failed one the National Reconnaissance Office handled over to NASA. Although a failure as a spy satellite, the Samos E-1 had done exessively well around the Moon.
Because there was no astronauts to retrieve the film, Lunar Orbiter processed the argentic pictures into a scanner, turning them into into digital pictures beamed to Earth at the speed of light. That was called film readout, and somewhat ironically didn't worked at all in Earth orbit for the simple reason the sheer number of pictures just overwhelmed the system; there was no way of storing, scanning and beaming ten thousand high resolution pictures down to the ground based receiving system.
The Moon however was a different matter, and there Samos E-1 worked well. Lunar Orbiter had been a highly successful program.
After the crew doned their AL7 spacesuits Lovell had the Apollo Command Module depressurized. He opened the hatch and reached into the modified Gambit Orbiting Control Vehicle,an unpressurized, squat cylinder with a docking adapter on the front.
In an ordinary, unmanned spy satellite there would be a Recovery Vehicle there, a large reentry capsule. At the front of the KH-7 was a 1 meter diameter mirror akin to a powerful space telescope. But that telescope didn't stared at the stars; instead it peered at the ground, essentially the Soviet Union or China. The system snapped very high resolution argentic pictures. Kilometers of film would then be stuffed into a reentry capsule; at the end of the mission the capsule would reenter the atmosphere above the Pacific and sprout a parachute.
As it hanged below the parachute, a C-130 cargo aircraft would snap it, retrieve it and head toward Hawaii, where a Boeing 707 liner would carry the capsule to Rochester, New Jersey, home of the Kodak company. Once there, thousand of high resolution pictures of the Soviet Union would be handled over to the highly secretive National Reconnaissance Office – an agency which very existence was one of the most guarded secrets in the United States.
Yet that deep black military space agency was collaborating with its exact opposite – NASA, a highly public agency. The NRO top brass must suffer severe stomach ulcers just thinking about it, Lovell smiled.
The KH-7 Gambit was one hell of a system, straight out of a James Bond movie.
With George Low a fan of James Bond, it is no surprise he reminded that system when planning Apollo 8 historical mission last August.
It was rather amazing that the military ever allowed NASA use of such an advanced, highly classified system. But after all, hadn't Kennedy committed the country into a war effort so that a man landed on the Moon before the decade was out ? NASA had been given a blank check that included any resource useful for the lunar landing goal – and that went as far as borrowing the military most advanced imaging systems.
When flying around the Moon a KH-7 obviously couldn't stuff the film into a recovery capsule to be send back to Earth. Instead Jim Lovell crawled into the spy satellite forward section and detached the film takeup reel—sealed to prevent accidental exposure. He pulled it back into the Command Module.
The film takeup reel Lovell handled was a treasure trove. These pictures of the Moon had a resolution never seen before.
According to a pre-flight briefing of the Apollo 8 crew, the KH-7 managed to image details of the USSR as small as 20 feet - looking through the thick Earth atmosphere from a height of 100 miles.
Around the Moon was no atmosphere, so the Apollo with the spy satellite on its "nose" flew quite low, around 30 miles. Needless to say, resolution was even better than on Earth.
Future Apollo landing sites had been imaged at an extremely high resolution, with boulder fields clearly visible on the frames.
And it was only a beginning.
Some more spy satellites had been "hijacked" by NASA; in fact four more systems were in storage, enough to image the whole Moon, although Lunar Orbiter had already done the job pretty well.
An issue however was that the KH-7 Gambit was so heavy, a good 4500 pounds, that a Saturn V couldn't carry it together with a Lunar Module. The thing was too heavy; there was not enough room above the S-IVB to carry both vehicles on the same flight. It was either a lunar module or a lunar spy satellite.
Apollo 8 had no such issue since it didn't carried a lunar module in the first place.
The capabilities of the lunar spy satellite were just too good to be true.
For example, a crash during an early Apollo landing mission could be investigated by an emergency manned lunar spysat mission. Apollo would fly as close as eight kilometers - five miles ! - above the Moon in such a forensic mission. Resolution at that altitude could be as sharp as 15 centimeters - 6 inches !
The Apollo / Spysat combination could also be used for lunar remote sensing, or to scout for landing sites for Advanced Apollo missions.
A global survey of the Moon from polar orbit was also possible.
Although Apollo 8 had left its spy satellite crash into the lunar surface, future missions bore more exciting prospects.
Simple modifications would allow the lunar spy satellite to hibernate in lunar orbit between missions. A more complex approach would have included a lunar spysat capable of continuing a lunar mapping mission after the Apollo crew had reloaded its film.
Kodak had described how the spy satellite could be equipped with the Bimat film readout system that it had developed for Lunar Orbiter. Such an onboard processing and readout capacity would have allowed the astronauts to gauge the status of the KH-7 camera. After the crew reloaded the film reel and departed the lunar spy satellite would have carried an unmanned survey mission.
After they resealed the hatch and repressurized the Command Module Borman, Lovell and Anders undocked from the spy satellite and fired Apollo big SPS to return home.
The abandonned spysat would soon crash onto the lunar surface.
(picture from The Space Review article that inspired this entry, here
- Picture by Giuseppe de Chiara)
December 26, 1968
We are flying a manned lunar spysat. How about that, Jim Lovell thought.
The Lunar Mapping and Survey System – LMSS - Apollo 8 carried on its “nose” had been a backup system in the case Lunar Orbiter didn't worked. In the end Lunar Orbiter worked well, so the LMSS had been cancelled in July 1967... only to be revived a year later for Apollo 8.
Amazingly, Lunar Orbiter by itself had been a spy satellite - a failed one the National Reconnaissance Office handled over to NASA. Although a failure as a spy satellite, the Samos E-1 had done exessively well around the Moon.
Because there was no astronauts to retrieve the film, Lunar Orbiter processed the argentic pictures into a scanner, turning them into into digital pictures beamed to Earth at the speed of light. That was called film readout, and somewhat ironically didn't worked at all in Earth orbit for the simple reason the sheer number of pictures just overwhelmed the system; there was no way of storing, scanning and beaming ten thousand high resolution pictures down to the ground based receiving system.
The Moon however was a different matter, and there Samos E-1 worked well. Lunar Orbiter had been a highly successful program.
After the crew doned their AL7 spacesuits Lovell had the Apollo Command Module depressurized. He opened the hatch and reached into the modified Gambit Orbiting Control Vehicle,an unpressurized, squat cylinder with a docking adapter on the front.
In an ordinary, unmanned spy satellite there would be a Recovery Vehicle there, a large reentry capsule. At the front of the KH-7 was a 1 meter diameter mirror akin to a powerful space telescope. But that telescope didn't stared at the stars; instead it peered at the ground, essentially the Soviet Union or China. The system snapped very high resolution argentic pictures. Kilometers of film would then be stuffed into a reentry capsule; at the end of the mission the capsule would reenter the atmosphere above the Pacific and sprout a parachute.
As it hanged below the parachute, a C-130 cargo aircraft would snap it, retrieve it and head toward Hawaii, where a Boeing 707 liner would carry the capsule to Rochester, New Jersey, home of the Kodak company. Once there, thousand of high resolution pictures of the Soviet Union would be handled over to the highly secretive National Reconnaissance Office – an agency which very existence was one of the most guarded secrets in the United States.
Yet that deep black military space agency was collaborating with its exact opposite – NASA, a highly public agency. The NRO top brass must suffer severe stomach ulcers just thinking about it, Lovell smiled.
The KH-7 Gambit was one hell of a system, straight out of a James Bond movie.
With George Low a fan of James Bond, it is no surprise he reminded that system when planning Apollo 8 historical mission last August.
It was rather amazing that the military ever allowed NASA use of such an advanced, highly classified system. But after all, hadn't Kennedy committed the country into a war effort so that a man landed on the Moon before the decade was out ? NASA had been given a blank check that included any resource useful for the lunar landing goal – and that went as far as borrowing the military most advanced imaging systems.
When flying around the Moon a KH-7 obviously couldn't stuff the film into a recovery capsule to be send back to Earth. Instead Jim Lovell crawled into the spy satellite forward section and detached the film takeup reel—sealed to prevent accidental exposure. He pulled it back into the Command Module.
The film takeup reel Lovell handled was a treasure trove. These pictures of the Moon had a resolution never seen before.
According to a pre-flight briefing of the Apollo 8 crew, the KH-7 managed to image details of the USSR as small as 20 feet - looking through the thick Earth atmosphere from a height of 100 miles.
Around the Moon was no atmosphere, so the Apollo with the spy satellite on its "nose" flew quite low, around 30 miles. Needless to say, resolution was even better than on Earth.
Future Apollo landing sites had been imaged at an extremely high resolution, with boulder fields clearly visible on the frames.
And it was only a beginning.
Some more spy satellites had been "hijacked" by NASA; in fact four more systems were in storage, enough to image the whole Moon, although Lunar Orbiter had already done the job pretty well.
An issue however was that the KH-7 Gambit was so heavy, a good 4500 pounds, that a Saturn V couldn't carry it together with a Lunar Module. The thing was too heavy; there was not enough room above the S-IVB to carry both vehicles on the same flight. It was either a lunar module or a lunar spy satellite.
Apollo 8 had no such issue since it didn't carried a lunar module in the first place.
The capabilities of the lunar spy satellite were just too good to be true.
For example, a crash during an early Apollo landing mission could be investigated by an emergency manned lunar spysat mission. Apollo would fly as close as eight kilometers - five miles ! - above the Moon in such a forensic mission. Resolution at that altitude could be as sharp as 15 centimeters - 6 inches !
The Apollo / Spysat combination could also be used for lunar remote sensing, or to scout for landing sites for Advanced Apollo missions.
A global survey of the Moon from polar orbit was also possible.
Although Apollo 8 had left its spy satellite crash into the lunar surface, future missions bore more exciting prospects.
Simple modifications would allow the lunar spy satellite to hibernate in lunar orbit between missions. A more complex approach would have included a lunar spysat capable of continuing a lunar mapping mission after the Apollo crew had reloaded its film.
Kodak had described how the spy satellite could be equipped with the Bimat film readout system that it had developed for Lunar Orbiter. Such an onboard processing and readout capacity would have allowed the astronauts to gauge the status of the KH-7 camera. After the crew reloaded the film reel and departed the lunar spy satellite would have carried an unmanned survey mission.
After they resealed the hatch and repressurized the Command Module Borman, Lovell and Anders undocked from the spy satellite and fired Apollo big SPS to return home.
The abandonned spysat would soon crash onto the lunar surface.
(picture from The Space Review article that inspired this entry, here
- Picture by Giuseppe de Chiara)
- Archibald
- Word Count: 1.1k