Foreword
My reason for writing this book is to pay homage to all of the people who, like I, spent many hours working shift at the Satellite Test Center (STC) in Sunnyvale, California, supporting one of our early national satellite assets. The STC was later renamed to Onizuka Air Force Station (OAFS), to honor Colonel Ellison Onizuka, who perished in the Shuttle Challnger launch mishap. Many or my coworkers, military, civilian and contractors, are no longer with us, and it is my hope that their family and friends (even a generation or two from now) might gain some insight into what they experienced, which they could not relate for security reasons until the program was declassified in September 2011.
As I look back to September 2011, I think it was after the declassification at that time that caused me to think about writing a book about the Gambit program. At that time I started assembling some data which I called “memory joggers” which were very helpful in trying to assemble some history.
Along the way, many lessons were learned, sometimes in a less than positive manner, and it is my hope that some of these lessons learned may be applied to current satellite operations, and, also to many other aspects of life. I will also provide more detail on certain events which occurred on the program, as I experienced them while providing on orbit support on the first satellite program that I supported on shift. Most notably are discussions of some anomalies experienced on the program, as I remember them.
I will mention many other organizations, (and miss many others whom I either forgot about or was not aware of their contribution to program success) both in the control center and at many other sites, who contributed greatly to make the program successful. For instance, the GE factory in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where the satellite was designed, built and tested, along with similar activities at various subcontractors from which parts of the satellite were purchased for integration into the satellite vehicle, often referred to as the Orbital Control Vehicle (OCV), by the prime vehicle contractor (GE) for whom I worked. The same applies to contractors who provided the vehicle payload sensor (EKC), the Atlas (General Dynamics) and Agena (Lockheed) boosters which launched the satellite into polar orbit from the Satellite Launch Complex 4 (SLC 4) launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) in California.
Let us not forget the vehicle test and launch organizations at VAFB, and all of the organizations in the STC in Sunnnyvale who contributed to successful launch and on orbit support of the satellite vehicles.
One cannot forget the Satellite Control Facility (SCF) Remote Tracking Stations (RTS’s) around the world, and the people, software and hardware manning them, along with all of the communication nodes and paths which conveyed data related to the satellite to the STC in Sunnyvale. Each of those organizations and/or personnel should feel free to document their contribution and functions performed to make the program successful.
THAT IS MY CHALLENGE TO ALL SUPPORTING ORGANIZATIONS, i. e., to document the history of the program as you lived and contributed to the program.
Of course, I have overlooked a large bunch of people and organizations which were the reason for existence of the of the program, namely the intelligence community organizations who contracted to have the vehicles built, watched over them through test and launch, and, then after launch, tasked the vehicle to acquire intelligence data of interest.