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03-09-2013, 22:50
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חבר מתאריך: 13.11.04
הודעות: 16,823
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ואוניקס ומיסטי?
Secret Space Shuttles
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-ex...e-Shuttles.html
The mission of STS-27 had been to deploy the first in a series of new spy satellites that used radar to observe ground targets, in any kind of weather, day or night. But shortly after the astronauts released the spacecraft, called ONYX, from the shuttle’s cargo bay, on December 2, 1988, one of its antenna dishes had failed to open. Without intervention by the crew, the billion-dollar satellite would become a hunk of space junk. As it turned out, they succeeded in grabbing, fixing, and re-releasing ONYX, for which they later received a medal from the U.S. intelligence community.
At least that’s one possible scenario for what happened. The astronauts may just as well have fixed the satellite without a spacewalk by Ross and Shepherd. We don’t know because not a word of the ONYX rescue was reported in newspapers or on television. Why not?
Because STS-27 was—and remains—a secret mission.
Between 1982 and 1992, NASA launched 11 shuttle flights with classified payloads, honoring a deal that dated to 1969, when the National Reconnaissance Office—an organization so secret its name could not be published at the time—requested certain changes to the design of NASA’s new space transportation system. The NRO built and operated large, expensive reconnaissance satellites, and it wanted a bigger shuttle cargo bay than NASA had planned. The spysat agency also wanted the option to fly “once around” polar missions, which demanded more flexibility to maneuver for a landing that could be on either side of the vehicle’s ground track.
“NRO requirements drove the shuttle design,” says Parker Temple, a historian who served on the policy staff of the secretary of the Air Force and later with the NRO’s office within the Central Intelligence Agency. The Air Force signed on to use the shuttle too, and in 1979 started building a launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in northern California for reaching polar orbits. Neither the Air Force nor the NRO was ever comfortable relying exclusively on NASA’s vehicle, however. Delays in shuttle launches only increased their worry; even before the 1986 Challenger accident, they were looking for a way off the shuttle and back onto conventional rockets like the Titan.
According to most accounts, STS-51C’s payload was ORION, an eavesdropping satellite for signals intelligence. Parked in geosynchronous orbit, it unfurled a dish almost as wide as a football field is long (hence the need for the shuttle’s large payload bay) to listen in on ground communications and telemetry. No one involved with the mission will comment beyond this recent statement from Payton: “It’s still up there, and still operating.”
On the other hand, the STS-4 payload, identified only as “P82-1,” didn’t impress Mattingly. “It was a rinky-dink collection of minor stuff they wanted to fly,” he recalls. P82-1 turned out to be the Cryonic InfraRed Radiance Instrumentation for Shuttle (CIRRIS) and the Ultraviolet Horizon Scanner (UHS), two sensors designed to test missile detection from space. A cover failed to open, so neither worked.
The next classified mission was STS-33, in November 1989. Discovery’s crew was commanded by Fred Gregory, with John Blaha as pilot and three mission specialists: veteran astronaut Story Musgrave, Sonny Carter, and Kathy Thornton. Musgrave and Thornton (who had once worked as a scientist for the Army) were the only civilians ever assigned to secret missions. In orbit over Thanksgiving, the crew of STS-33 was able to conduct its mission with limited public scrutiny. The Air Force admitted only that the astronauts deployed a spacecraft using the Inertial Upper Stage; the payload is believed to have been the second ORION eavesdropping satellite
The cargo for the next classified flight, STS-36 in February 1990, was harder for ground-based sleuths to figure out. The mission was unusual for its highly inclined orbit—62 degrees, still a shuttle record—which took the crew well above the Arctic Circle and far enough south that they could glimpse the coast of Antarctica. The industry magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology reported the payload’s name as “AFP-731” and its weight as 37,000 pounds. For years it was thought to have been an advanced KH-11 imaging satellite; not long after Atlantis’ return, the Soviet news agency Novosti reported that the satellite had “malfunctioned,” and that large pieces of debris were being tracked prior to reentry.
Wrong, says author Jeffrey Richelson, whose credits include books on the Defense Support Program (DSP) early warning satellites and The Wizards of Langley, a 2001 history of technical innovation at the CIA. In the latter book he claims that STS-36 deployed a stealthy reconnaissance satellite named MISTY. The “debris” had likely been jettisoned shrouds or instrument covers. Stealthy or not, the satellite was eventually spotted by amateur trackers in a roughly 500-mile-altitude orbit at a 65-degree inclination.
The November 1990 flight of STS-38 presented another puzzle for spysat detectives. Its trajectory east of Cape Canaveral initially pointed toward a third ORION eavesdropping satellite, but NRO information released eight years later indicates that it might have been a data relay satellite. Richelson has suggested that in addition, STS-38 carried a small “inspector” satellite designed to get close to other spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. That scenario is still being debated.
With the launch of STS-39 in April 1991, the Department of Defense began to lift the veil on its shuttle operations. The mission was declassified before launch, and NASA was allowed to reveal that it carried a military-sponsored pallet called AFP-675, a reflight of the payload flown years earlier on Mattingly’s STS-4 mission.
The last dedicated military mission, STS-53, flew in December 1992, carrying a satellite identified as DOD-1, which Richelson and other analysts surmise was another data relay vehicle.
נערך לאחרונה ע"י strong1 בתאריך 03-09-2013 בשעה 22:55.
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