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- FIRE FROM THE SKY: Battle of Harvest Moon & True Story of Space Shuttles
-
- by "One Who Knows"
-
- PART 4:
-
- Remember *Sputnik?* I first saw it one day as I was out in the field
- choppin' cotten (it pains me to realize that some of my readers will not
- even know what choppin' cotten is). *Sputnik I* was a 184 pound ball
- launched by an SS-6 ICBM by Russia at 9:36 P.M. on October 4, 1957. It was
- highly polished to make it easier to see, and carried a radio transmitting
- at a frequency that made it easy for ham radio operators to track. Our
- government made fun of the rocket, contemptuously calling by the code name
- Sapwood. The MIT humor magazine *Voodoo* had a cartoon of a cutaway
- *Sputnik* with a bearded Russian inside saying, "Beep...beep...beep."
-
- A month later Russia launched the Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,119 pounds
- which was in the warhead range. Although we still made fun of Russia (the
- Senate majority leader said we were going to launch a better satellite,
- with chrome trim and windshield wipers), President Eisenhower took special
- note of the missile. Russia had leap-frogged our expensive bomber system
- and was becoming able to deliver warheads with their ICBMs. Between 1956
- and 1960 Ike sent over 20 U-2 flights over Russia to try to learn Russia's
- missile capabilities. Every U-2 flight was monitored by radar by Russia.
- Our Air Force reported that Russia would have a thousand ICBMs by 1961.
-
- Two years after *Sputnik* we launched our *Discoverer* satellite, which had
- a camera and did a lot more than beep. We had a program called Pied Piper
- which did become SAMOS (Satellite and Missile Observation System). The
- first SAMOS launch was October 11, 1960, which failed, and SAMOS 2 was
- launched into orbit on January 31, 1961. The final SAMOS 30 was November
- 27, 1963, although officially the final *Discoverer* was 38 launched on
- February 27, 1962. At this point the program was changed and some of the
- satellites were back-named. The new program was KeyHole, and the satellites
- were called KH-1s (*Discoverers* were renamed KH-4s).
-
- One of the most secret branches of the government was/is the National
- Reconnaissance Office, established officially on August 25, 1960. I believe
- that one reason for its establishment had to do with flying saucers, but
- that is another story. NRO developed the KH-11 (By a man named Kennan) spy
- (photo [and other]-reconnaissance) satellite in 1972. One of the projects I
- worked on at Control Data involved the KH-11. The KH-11 was used for such
- things as finding where the hostages were held in the Iranian Embassy and
- supposedly for observing the heat shield tiles on the Shuttle. It is
- obvious to me that they were also used to observe flying saucers, but then
- we all know flying saucers "*do not* exist* so I must be wrong, right?
-
- America knew that Russia's orbital fleet of manned Cosmos Interceptors
- would destroy the Shuttle, but planners hoped that before this happened the
- satellite would be able to radio back enough targeting information for a
- nuclear missile first strike. The first mission was a frantic rush job, and
- had to be manned because of the secret cargo.
-
- If the Shuttle reached orbit, the astronauts were to be required to deploy
- the military satellite inside the cargo bay. The satellite was basically a
- spy satellite, but it was also much more. In order to do its job, it was
- designed to fend off Russian space weapons for as long as possible. As a
- result, it would be nothing less than a robot battle station in space. It
- was a "hardened satellite" able to withstand an attack without being easily
- destroyed, or so they hoped. It was equipped with active defenses, it could
- "shoot back."
-
- All the components of the satellite were crammed into the cargo bay of the
- Shuttle *Columbia.* They were already there when the *Columbia* was rolled
- out the prior November. Once in orbit, the job of the astronauts, John
- Young and Robert Crippen, would be to assemble it and to get it operating,
- and rapidly.
-
- TUNGSTEN SATELLITE POSES THREAT TO COSMOSPHERES
-
- Once it would be assembled and floating in space, the satellite would look
- like a giant rotating tin can perhaps 30 feet long and 20 feet in diameter,
- but on closer inspection it would seem to be made more like a wooden barrel
- except that the barrel staves are all made of tungsten.
-
- Inside the outermost tungsten barrel was another smaller barrel and inside
- that was a still smaller barrel. At the very center was the heart of the
- satellite itself. The tungsten barrels were separated from one another by a
- foot or more of space. There was also considerable space between the
- innermost barrel and the core satellite. The tungsten barrels constitute
- the passive defense of the satellite. If a Charged Particle Beam blast
- would strike the outermost barrel, it would vaporize a spot on the barrel
- but in the process it would absorb energy and diffuse the beam. In theory,
- that would greatly reduce the damage done to the second barrel and do no
- damage whatsoever to the innermost barrel. Tungsten has the highest melting
- point of any workable metal in service at the time, so this system of
- particle beam shields was expected to last through a number of battles.
-
- The three-layer tungsten shield system was also instrumented. When a blast
- would strike it, the blast pattern would be sensed as an initial indication
- of from which direction came the attack. A computer within the core
- satellite would then activate a secret new target acquisition system called
- LADAR (Laser Direction And Ranging). The removable barrel stave sections of
- the rotating tungsten shields would be opened. LADAR would peek out through
- the openings as they rotated past in ultra-fast scanning.
-
- In the black void of space, LADAR was expected to be much more efficient
- than radar, picking up the Russian attacker very quickly, and the moment it
- would do so, the American robot battle station would open fire. When it did
- so, it would pose a major threat even to a Russian Cosmos Interceptor
- because the American satellite would be armed with a giant carbon dioxide
- gas dynamic blaser (CDDB).
-
- END OF PART 4.
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