We built the flight-ready items in the laboratory, and then put them through the shake and shock fall test and temperature cycling…”Īgena and Ferret Subsatellite credit: USAF Everything we built at Stanford was essentially built with stockroom parts. I was the team leader, but the payloads were usually built as a one-man project with one technician and perhaps a second support engineer. “My function was to develop the system concept and to establish the system parameters. We created a model to determine the probability of intercept on the desired and the interference environment from the other radar signals that might be in the field of view, de Broekert explained. Another challenge was ensuring that the design was adapted to handle the large number of signals that would be intercepted by the satellite. The challenges were establishing geolocation and intercepting the desired signals from such a great distance. “Instead of flying at 10,000 or 30,000 feet, we could be up at 100 to 300 miles and have a larger field of view and cover much greater geographical area more rapidly. “This was an exciting opportunity for us,” de Broekert remembered. This was the Lab founded by Fred Terman from his WWII work in Electronic Warfare. Just across the freeway from Lockheed’s secret CORONA assembly plant in Palo Alto, James de Broekert was at Stanford Applied Electronics Laboratory. Build the instruments and have them piggyback on the Agena/CORONA photo reconnaissance satellites.īut who could quickly build these satellites to test this idea? How could you pick up a signal so faint while the satellite was moving so rapidly? Could you sort out one radar signal from all the other noise? There was one way to find out. Air Force could locate radars which would threaten our manned bombers as well as those that might be part of an anti-ballistic missile system. For the first time, the National Security Agency (working through the National Reconnaissance Office) and the U.S. While the CORONA reconnaissance satellites were designed to take photographs from space, putting a radar receiver on a satellite would be enable it to receive, record and locate Soviet radars deep The P-11 subsatellite weighed up to 350lbs, had its own solid rockets to boost it into different orbits, solar arrays for power and was stabilized by either deploying long booms or by spinning 60-80 times a second.Īnd they had a customer who couldn’t wait to use the space. This subsatellite was called Program 11, or P-11 for short. Three different models were built and for over a decade nearly four hundred of them (at the rate of three a month) would be produced on an assembly line in Sunnyvale, and tested in Lockheed’s missile test base in the Santa Cruz mountains.Īs Lockheed engineers gained experience with the Agena and the CORONA photo reconnaissance satellite, they realized that they had room on a rack in the back of the Agena to carry another payload (as well as the extra thrust to lift it into space.) By the summer of 1962, Lockheed proposed a smaller satellite that could be deployed from the rear of the Agena. intelligence satellites for the next decade. The Agena would be the companion to almost all U.S. Unlike other second stage rockets, once in orbit, the CORONA reconnaissance satellite would stay attached to the Agena which stabilized the satellite, pointed it in the right location, and oriented it in the right direction to send its recovery capsule on its way back to earth. The engine (made by Bell Aerosystems) used storable hypergolic propellants so it could be restarted in space to change the satellite’s orbit. The Agena sat on top of a booster rocket (first the Thor, then the Altas and finally the Titan) and had its own rocket engine that would help haul the secret satellites into space. In addition to the CORONA CIA reconnaissance satellites, Lockheed was building another assembly line, this one for the Agena – a space truck. Startups that Have Employees In Offices Grow 3½ Times Faster.Reorganizing the DoD to Deter China and Win in the Ukraine – A Road Map for Congress.Before there was Oppenheimer there was Vannevar Bush.Leaving Government for the Private Sector – Part 1.
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