In the vast cold star-studded stillness of space a 100 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, a futuristic spaceplane, looking like a black twin-tailed delta-shaped fighter aircraft, fired its retro-rockets and began its final maneuvers for reentry. Within minutes a terrific boom signaled the boost-glider's return into Earth's atmosphere. A military air traffic controller at Andrews AFB, Maryland, radioed a priority clearance to the Dyna-Soar's pilot, 44-year-old Colonel "Al" Crews. While Dyna-Soar may seem like an unusual name for a spaceplane, Air Force engineers gave it the name based on its mode of flight; it "dynamically soars" through the atmosphere using the energy generated from its reentry and the maneuverability offered by its aerodynamic design.
Looking up from his desk, the controller glanced at a wall calendar. It was 6 October 1973, a Jewish holiday--Yom Kippur. Half a world away, a war had just started. In a coordinated assault, the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched a surprise attack on the Israelis at 2:00 p.m. The equivalent of the total forces of NATO in Europe would be flung against Israel's borders. As the attack began, 240 Egyptian aircraft crossed the Suez Canal, striking three airfields in the Sinai, surface-to-air missile batteries, and bombing Israeli command and control centers, artillery positions, and fortified strongpoints. Simultaneously, 2,000 field artillery pieces and mortars opened up along the entire front. In the first minute of the attack, 10,500 shells fell on Israeli positions at a rate of 175 shells per second. Tanks moved up ramps prepared on sand ramparts, depressed their guns and fired point-blank at preselected Israeli fortifications. Surface-to-surface missiles joined the 3,000 tons of concentrated destruction launched against a handful of fortifications that turned the entire east bank of the Suez Canal into an inferno for 53 minutes. The Syrians performed a similarly devastating attack against Israeli defenses along the Golan Heights. It lasted 50 minutes.
For the air traffic controller, it was hard to believe that the pilot with whom he had just spoken had, minutes ago, flown over this tremendous battlefield and was already back with high resolution photographs showing the precise deployments of the warring armies. Rocketing into space on top of an Air Force Titan IIIC missile, Col. Crews, one of only six Dyna-Soar pilots, had responded shortly after the battle began by overflying the Middle East on a path that took him over Jerusalem. With his mission for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) completed, he then maneuvered his hypersonic boost-glider down through the atmosphere to a pinpoint landing at Andrews AFB, Maryland. Officially, of course, he had performed no such mission; rather he had flown his Dyna-Soar on a routine weather reconnaissance flight.
Like the U-2 and SR-71 pilots before the development of Dyna-Soar, Colonel Crews now "publicly" flew for the CIA and the Air Force. However, because Dyna-Soar operated in space--like NRO's unmanned reconnaissance satellites--it flew at the request of the president and his National Security Council (NSC). In this particular case, Col. Crews gained valuable information about the Egyptians' and the Syrians' intentions in their new struggle with the Israelis.
After landing "T-Rex," the code-name for Crews' Dyna-Soar, he immediately took the stored photographic information (other "real-time" information had already been dispatched by downlinks and examined by the NRO), that had been processed as the glider maneuvered for reentry and landing, to debriefing. Shortly afterwards, it would be in the hands of the president. The information showed, respectively, the two forces operating from the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights rapidly pushing the surprised Israelis back. The photographic, radar, and electronic intelligence information Col. Crews gathered with Dyna-Soar's multisensor reconnaissance suite would prove invaluable to the United States and its ally, Israel.
Additionally, he had been able to redirect his boost-glider's sensors on an area not originally included in his mission briefing, the Soviet Mediterranean fleet. Had this been an unmanned mission, the fleet would have gone unreconnoitered for several days because no other intelligence information provided a reason for studying the Soviet's actions in this area. Nor would the NRO's surveillance satellite routinely covering this area have seen the fleet's actions because the Soviets planned them with full knowledge of the satellites timing and coverage. The information Col. Crews and his squadron of Dyna-Soar pilots provided in their twenty-four-hour coverage of the crisis turned the tide of war and averted a superpower confrontation. By 15 October, all the warring nations accepted a United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolution.
