For its first 50 years, the National Reconnaissance Office’s willingness to embrace risk in solving the complex technical tasks of spying from the safety of orbit earned the agency respect by a string of U.S. presidents faced with managing the Cold War.
“The value of the photography alone was worth more than the cost of the whole U.S. space program,” said then-President Lyndon B. Johnson about images that are credited with helping to monitor the former Soviet military machine.
Today, the price of intelligence is no longer limitless. With lawmakers in Washington hammering out a series of budget cuts designed to shrink the national debt, the intelligence community is under pressure to reduce spending despite an expanding mission.
“We still have to do all that counting [of tanks, bombers and missiles], but we also have to give data to warfighters and that’s a much faster-paced battle,” says the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) director, USAF Gen. (ret.) Bruce Carlson.
As the NRO embarks on another 50 years, Carlson expects the next big breakthrough to come from the power of digital processors and how they can aid analysts in combing through volumes of data. But 50 years ago, the NRO faced a much different challenge: The U.S. leadership lacked knowledge of the might of the Soviet military. A look at how the NRO and the aerospace industry responded to that problem—including two newly declassified satellite systems—sheds light on the art of the possible for the agency today.
The Hexagon satellite’s unprecedented resolution and wide-area imaging capabilities were key to shaping U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.
The initial problem was for the NRO to develop, with the KH-7 Gambit, a satellite capable of collecting images 70-90 mi. over Earth with 2 ft. of ground resolution of targets such as nuclear sites or submarine ports in the Soviet Union and China. At the time, the Corona system provided wide-area imaging but lacked spot capability.
With a 77-in. focal length and 9-in.-wide film, Gambit’s Eastman Kodak camera was “better than anything previously planned or undertaken,” said USAF Maj. Gen. David Bradburn, then-special projects director. To design Gambit, engineers had to solve several technical challenges, including crafting lightweight mirror materials to keep the mass of the camera under 1,500 lb.
First deployed in July 1963, Gambit 1 missions, averaging 6.6 days, continued for four years. Gambit initially carried about 3,000 ft. of film. Images were retrieved via capsule, which was ejected from the vehicle, reentered the atmosphere and parachuted over the Pacific Ocean. C-130 aircraft were typically used to snatch the capsules from midair.
The NRO launched 38 Gambit missions, 28 of which were successes. Developing mechanisms to reel film from the spool through the camera and to the capsule proved to be the “biggest challenge” early in the program, says James Outzen, an NRO historian.
An upgraded version, the Gambit 3, first deployed a year earlier, in July 1966. The NRO incorporated such improvements as a stellar camera for locating targets and a roll joint for improved camera slewing. The focal length was also increased to 175 in., an improvement referred to as the KH-8. Also, the NRO added the first of two upgrades using thinner film, allowing for more images to be captured per mission. By the end of the 1960s, Gambit was able to collect 9,000 images per mission, up 1,000.
In addition, thermal improvements were made to the satellite, allowing operators to at one point conduct a mission below 65-mi. altitude. During this period, analysts also worked on the technique of using the cameras to help construct three-dimensional images of targets such as submarines, providing the U.S. the first such pictures of Soviet military hardware.
It became evident in the late 1960s that a new system was needed to combine the wide-area views of Corona with the high resolution of Gambit. Thus, the KH-9 Hexagon was born. First launched in 1971, Hexagon conducted 19 successful missions of 20 attempts until April 1986 and provided the U.S. with coverage that, at the time, was the closest the intelligence community had gotten to continuous operations.
The satellite, dubbed “Big Bird” by the press owing to the massive Titan III booster needed to loft it, carried two panoramic cameras made by Perkin-Elmer capable of resolutions as low as 2 ft. using 60-in. focal lengths as well as an Itek camera used for mapping and targeting of nuclear weapons (which operated for 12 missions). Hexagon is credited with confirming that the Soviet Union was maintaining its Arctic bomber bases.
Owing to lessons from Gambit, film was able to travel roughly 100 ft. through the Hexagon satellite to be exposed and stored prior to dispatch in one of four recovery buckets. NRO officials say that Hexagon was able to image at least 98% of the Eurasian landmass; program coverage totaled 877 million square mi.
Hexagon’s requirements drove developers to craft the longest-to-date solar arrays to accommodate the satellite’s power requirements.
