Memory 02
Effect of Another Program
During late 1962 and for most of 1963, personnel from the same company that I worked for were in another office next door to us were working another program (SAMOS E6/201), and some of the hardware on our program was utilized on that program. The payload sensor was made by the same contractor as on our program, and, the command programmer was also used on the other program being supported by the personnel in the next door office.
Also common to both programs were some commanding hardware that was placed at all of the Remote Tracking Stations and used to command the vehicles, including loading commands in the vehicle command subsystem’s programmer to be read out from the memory for execution as needed. These consoles were originally called 701 and 702, and later, 125 and 126; they were designed to send commands to our vehicles ONLY, and were not usable by any other programming, to my knowledge. More on the consoles in a later section.
One other important piece of hardware our program inherited from the other program, which was cancelled in late 1963, was an instrumentation ground station van, containing all the necessary hardware to process telemetry data from instrumentation tapes containing telemetry data recorded from satellite downlink telemetry data. More about its value and use later.
The other program had launched several satellites, but none were successful; I was told that none of the reentry vehicles were recovered, and I did note that some of the people in the group were stressed over the lack of success on the program, similar to what had occurred in the early part of the later successful Corona program.
Needless to say, these were experienced on orbit support personnel, and management on our program would have liked to hire some of them to work on our program when their program was cancelled. After their program was cancelled in 1963, the head of the group found a job for his entire group in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and they virtually transferred as a group. I recall that one or two transferred to our program, and two went to Florida but came back later and worked our program. With three shifts to cover, around the clock, when a satellite was launched, we could certainly have used the help.
Another interesting apparent linkage between the program 201 and our newer program that I feel was in place was in the area of reentry vehicle configuration on the two programs, and the recovery of them. Some of the older systems documentation on our program talked about land recovery of our reentry vehicle in the Wendover, Utah, area, and that older documentation also showed a vehicle outboard profile of the OCV and reentry vehicle with the reentry vehicle attached to the front of the OCV having a rounded cone-shape, with the larger end of the reentry vehicle attached directly to the OCV. Later documentation and the outboard profile showed a small cone shaped adapter between the OCV and reentry vehicle, where the cone resembled a cone that one sees on dogs when the dog has some problem in the area of its head or neck and the cone prevents the dog from licking or scratching some affected area. This cone allowed a smaller reentry vehicle to be attached to the OCV than that shown in the older outboard profile.
I have read several discussions relating to why the reentry vehicle configuration change was made on our program. The main reason given in some of the discussions was that many people felt that it would not be good to have a reentry vehicle de-boost/recovery go awry for some reason and the reentry vehicle hit an undesirable spot on the earth, such as landing in Canada, South America, or some other area out of control and recovery by US government forces. Such an event could have serious international consequences, and might lead the US government to have to negotiate with some other country for return of the reentry vehicle, which could prove embarrassing if someone chose to open the reentry vehicle and see what was inside and learn how the reentry vehicle functioned. Then, too, consider the dire ramifications should a reentry vehicle damage property in some area, be it in the Continental United States (CONUS) or some other country. Other nations could think that the US was trying to attack their country, and, perhaps think about retaliating. Recently, I encountered a discussion in a recently declassified document that said a high level US General having great input on the program did not like land recovery, and fought to have our program employ aerial recovery over water.
One other piece possible piece of information that may have contributed to the land/air recovery change decision that I am aware of, but have not seen in any recently released documentation, is some information related to the older 201 program. It experienced loss of reentry vehicles during de-boost/recovery operations on all, (or, perhaps most of their recoveries), and so, on some of the later 201 reentry vehicles (RVs), temperature sensors were bonded to the inside of the bottom side of the reentry vehicle, just under the ablative heat shield which burned off on reentry. These sensors started at the bottom of the RV, and fanned out from the center, toward the top of the RV, along lines resembling bicycle spokes, and placed on the “spoke type” lines every few inches, toward the top of the RV, were the temperature sensors, which were then all routed to a telemetry multiplexer such that all were sampled and sent to the downlink telemetry transmitter.
Apparently, after this added instrumentation, when the RV was de-boosted, telemetry was sent downlink for these sensors which showed temperature rising rapidly inside the RV under the heat shield, and then all contact with the RV was lost, as the extreme heat on the heat-shield probably burned through the heat-shield, and the RV or parts of it were burned up and did not survive the reentry. The RV being used on the 201 program was a larger and different shaped RV than the Discoverer RV being used successfully on the Corona program, and it is likely that the extreme temperatures and inability to make the larger 201 program RV work may have contributed to the decision to use the working RV from the Corona program on our newer program, thus the adapter between the OCV and Corona program Discoverer type RV was necessary.
I believe that the 201 RV would have been used on our program if it had not experienced problems during reentry. It was larger, could have held more recorded data, and that would have been a big plus for our program and later programs; as stated earlier, the more expendables the SV had, the longer missions could be!!
One interesting sidelight that someone who was involved in early RV design and testing passed on to me was that one of the considerations in land recovery was to how to locate an RV which had came down to earth in bad terrain. Someone suggested that after the vehicle stopped moving when it hit the earth, using some type of aerosol release from within the RV, similar to the orange dye released, it should be sprayed with the scent of a female dog in heat, and then utilize male dogs in searching for the downed vehicle. This apparently was tried, and when searchers heard dogs howling, they found the dogs, which were circling below a dummy reentry vehicle, which was hanging at the bottom of a parachute snagged on a high tree, with the reentry vehicle some distance above the ground. One can imagine what the dogs were conveying to the RV, perhaps something like “we don’t know what you are, but if you come down here, you will be in big trouble”. I challenge/urge personnel who were involved in early RV design and testing to enlighten the reading public with their knowledge.