Memory 04

Hardware and Software Support by Other Entities

Readers of this treatise could likely include personnel (or family members thereof) that supported software or hardware on KH7 but worked for other contractors from other firms, perhaps trying to see what was said about KH7 related to their product. They will not find information as detailed as what I presented here for my company’s portion of the KH7 which I was trained on.

Several samples below illustrate that type of hardware, one being launch boosters which was a needed commodity; the program missions needed the boosters to do their job well; I feel they obviously did, but I do not know much detail about the boosters used in this early phase of the mission.

Launch day activity employed 2 boosters (an Atlas built by General Dynamics and an Agena built by Lockheed) to inject the Orbit Control Vehicle in to orbit. Generally, the perigee of the vehicle near circular polar orbit was in the range of 70 to 100 miles.

Worth mentioning at this time that I was not involved with were various “piggyback” satellites ejected off of some of our boosters, usually very early in the mission. Some were likely testing hardware for future programs and others probably gathering classified data for a current program of that era.

Another set of hardware employed during the launch phase that I was not involved with were the ARIA (Advanced Range Instrumentation Aircraft) “chase planes”, which were in position to monitor events occurring along the launch and injection path and probably most useful should an anomaly occur during that phase.

Rawinsonde and radiosonde environmental data gathered by other program assets was another activity that took place before launch that I was not involved with. It provided pressure, temperature and other similar type data on the value of upper atmosphere cross winds that, if strong enough, might jeopardize the launch.

Go to Memory 05: Launch Trajectory.