Секретные спутники США на ГСО и ВЭО

[Liss]

Какой все-таки душка этот бывший военно-космический инженер ВВС США Ларри Джеймс, участник весенних визитов В.А.Поповкина в США и Дж.Э.Картрайта в Россию :-)
И должность у душки бригадного генерала чудная: Brig. Gen. Larry D. James is Director, Signals Intelligence Systems Acquisition and Operations Directorate, National Reconnaissance Office, Washington, D.C.

[Liss]

На такой подвиг, как перечитать всю эту тему, меня явно не хватит, но такая вот деталь хоть и мелькала, но вроде явно не формулировалась.
Идентификация Canyon'ов и Rhyolite'ов в итоге была проведена, конечно, не по размеру обтекателя и не по рабочей орбите, хотя в сумме опубликованные данные по орбитам и наводят на определенные мысли.
Идентификация Canyon'ов и Rhyolite'ов в итоге была проведена по заводским номерам ракет Agena D. Именно по ним, а не по номерам "Атласов". То есть вот так:

Дата  Аджена  ПН

1968.08.06  2801  Canyon 7501
1969.04.13  2802  Canyon 7502
1970.06.19  1551  Rhyolite 1
1970.09.01  2803  Canyon 7503
1971.12.05  2804  Canyon 7504
1972.12.20  2805  Canyon 7505
1973.03.06  1552  Rhyolite 2
1975.06.18  2806  Canyon 7506
1977.05.23  2807  Canyon 7507
1977.12.11  1553  Aquacade 3
1978.04.07  1554  Aquacade 4
 
Следующий вопрос -- откуда взялись заводские номера. Их приводит Марк Уэйд (но не на всех его страницах есть они все), и с разным набором ошибок их копируют другие товарищи. Правда, я не убежден, что Уэйд действительно первоисточник.

В первом обзоре сабжей 1998 года Джонатан МакДауэлл расписывает их именно так, но номеров "Аджен" не приводит: http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.369

Во втором -- тоже не приводит, но проводит детальный разбор ООНовских параметров на сабжи. Кажется, это уже цитировалось: http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.501

[Старый]

Идентификация Canyon'ов и Rhyolite'ов в итоге была проведена по заводским номерам ракет Agena D.

 Следующий вопрос -- откуда взялись заводские номера. Их приводит Марк Уэйд (но не на всех его страницах есть они все), и с разным набором ошибок их копируют другие товарищи. Правда, я не убежден, что Уэйд действительно первоисточник.

Классификация по номерам Аджен выглядит вполне логичной. Действительно Аджены имели серийные номера соответствующие типам КА. Но однако классификация была произведена задолго до того как стали известны номера.
 Ну и если источником номеров является Вэйд то это очень сомнительно. Трудно поверить чтоб Вэйд мог знать чтото что не знает Макди. Нет ли здесь подгонки под заданый результат?

[Liss]

У меня сейчас записано 290 вроде бы надежных номеров разных "Аджен". Почти все они есть у Уэйда, за исключением серии номеров 48XX от KH-7. Слишком много нужно было бы подгонять под результат, не так ли?

[Старый]

У меня сейчас записано 290 вроде бы надежных номеров разных "Аджен". Почти все они есть у Уэйда, за исключением серии номеров 48XX от KH-7. Слишком много нужно было бы подгонять под результат, не так ли?

Почему слишком много? Вот какраз эти и подогнать. Ато несправедливо получается: для всех спутников номера Аджен известны, а для этих - нет.

 Как объяснить каким образом классификация была сделана задолго до того как стали известны номера Аджен - вот вопрос.

[Старый]

Джентльмены, а как вы однако прокомментируете следующий тезис Макдауэлла:

--- First generation, Agena attached ---

1       CANYON    1968 Aug  6  Atlas Agena D
2       CANYON    1969 Apr 13  Atlas Agena D
3       CANYON    1970 Sep  1  Atlas Agena D
4       CANYON    1971 Dec  4  Atlas Agena D (failed to orbit)

--- Improved version, Agena separated ---

5       CANYON    1972 Dec 20  Atlas Agena D
6       CANYON    1975 Jun 18  Atlas Agena D
7       CANYON    1977 May 23  Atlas Agena D

?

http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.369

[Старый]

И както осталась без ответа картинка на конверте.

[carlos]

Как объяснить каким образом классификация была сделана задолго до того как стали известны номера Аджен - вот вопрос.

Дык а разве не по орбитам? (ООНовский реестр)

[Liss]

Джентльмены, а как вы однако прокомментируете следующий тезис Макдауэлла

Читайте по последней ссылке, там сам же МакДауэлл рассматривает три возможных варианта интерпретации.

[Старый]

http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.501

However, in Nov 1984 an extra object was cataloged with this launch, 1977-38C:
 1977-38C         1440.0 34325 x 34500 x  0.3

This is a bit worrying, since the orbit is much more circular and
equatorial than the CANYON payloads - it makes me a bit concerned that
1977-38 might not be a CANYON, but only a bit since my confidence in the
UN data's reliability is low. My guess is that the cataloging of 38C may
reflect an end-of-life event rather than improved sensors tracking an
existing object, and so it may have been ejected around the time it was
cataloged

Интересно, почему он не обратил внимания что период не соответствует высоте?

[Старый]

Джентльмены, а как вы однако прокомментируете следующий тезис Макдауэлла

Читайте по последней ссылке, там сам же МакДауэлл рассматривает три возможных варианта интерпретации.

Читал я это. И даже уже здесь спрашивал почему это он забыл про ATS-2. Там хоть и не на геостационар а всёж на высокую орбиту Аджена должна была вывести спутник апогейным импульсом.
 А спрашиваю я по данному вопросу мнение джентльменов а не самого Макдауэлла.

[carlos]

Джентльмены, а как вы однако прокомментируете следующий тезис Макдауэлла:

Фиг его знает... Сомнительное что-то. Скорее во всех случаях Аджена была "сепаратед". Просто с каталогизацией первых Аджен подзадержались, отсюда такая гипотеза возникла.

[Старый]

Фиг его знает... Сомнительное что-то. Скорее во всех случаях Аджена была "сепаратед". Просто с каталогизацией первых Аджен подзадержались, отсюда такая гипотеза возникла.

Да, и мне так кажется. Но почему Макдауэлл сразу не догадался?

[Liss]

Плохо, конечно, что в одну тему слились геостационарные и высокоэллиптические зверушки, но разделить это нет никакой возможности.

Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (Hardcover)
By William E. Burrows
NY: Random House; 1st ed edition (January 12, 1987)  401 pages

Запишем для памяти, что на стр. 174-175 этой книги Берроуз проводит разделение между системами SDS и Jumpseat и высказывает суждения по поводу назначения каждой из них:

[color=yellow:bff13754e1]Vetan, a tiny, suitably remote peninsula in the far northern Skjerstad fjord not far from the air base at Bod

[Liss]

Далее читаем стр. 182-185 и убеждаемся, что слова Rhyolite, Aquacade, Chalet и Magnum к январю 1987 года были уже хорошо известны:
U.S. space reconnaissance and surveillance operations in Australia are focused at two locations, each of which possesses several capabilities, though each also has a distinct primary mission. The installations, both of which are as black as such things get, are at Pine Gap, a valley near Alice Springs (and therefore smack in the center of the country's barren outback), and Nurrungar, which is hard by the old rocket-firing range at Woomera, about two hundred fifty miles north of Adelaide. Pine Gap's primary mission is to serve as the downlink--the intelligence receptacle--for a series of multipurpose geosynchronous SIGINT satellites whose first version was named Rhyolite. Similarly, Nurrungar is the terminus for data coming from a platform known as DSP-647 (for Defense Support Program), which images the heat coming from ballistic missile tests and is supposed to sound an alarm in case of a ballistic missile attack.

Rhyolite and its several modified namesakes, all synchronous orbiters, are in many ways the most remarkable reconnaissance satellites ever developed. They were also intended to be among the most secret. But that was before the espionage trial of Andrew Daulton Lee and Christopher John Boyce, which took place in Los Angeles in 1977.

Having abandoned three colleges short of graduation and meanwhile holding jobs as a janitor, pizza cook, waiter, and liquor-store delivery boy, Christopher Boyce finally decided to use family connections to land a clerk's job at TRW's Redondo Beach headquarters, just south of Los Angeles, in July 1974. After making it through successive CIA security checks with apparent ease, Boyce, who was twenty-one, was put to work in the company's supersecret Black Vault. He soon learned of the existence of a spy satellite that was referred to as RH, for Rhyolite, which sent great quantities of intelligence data to Australia. The information in turn was transmitted from there to the Black Vault, which relayed it in code to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Boyce was therefore in a position to monitor whatever kind of intelligence Rhyolite collected.

During a subsequent twenty-one-month period Boyce and Lee, his childhood pal, sold thousands of documents relating to Rhyolite operations to KGB agents in Mexico City and Vienna. They did this, according to testimony at their subsequent espionage trial, to finance drug purchases, improve their lifestyles and, in Boyce's case, almost as a "whim" because of vague feelings of enmity he had for the CIA and for his country in general. It was the time of Vietnam. Boyce was given forty years in prison and Lee got life.

The spacecraft whose secrets Lee and Boyce sold to the Russians was described to Boyce at an early TRW briefing as "a multipurpose covert electronic surveillance system," according to Robert Lindsey, whose book The Falcon and the Snowman chronicles the spies' exploits. "Project Rhyolite . . . had been developed by TRW to eavesdrop electronically on foreign countries, especially the eastern Soviet Union, China and Soviet test ranges in the Pacific. It was a 'bug'--much like the listening devices detectives plant on telephones to eavesdrop on private conversations--except that it was a listening device on the missile-launching tests of the two countries and on their telecommunications system--and on several other nations whose communications traffic the United States might want to monitor," Lindsey wrote. "Chris was to learn that each satellite carried a brace of antennas capable of sucking up foreign microwave signals from out of space like a vacuum cleaner picking up specks of dust from a carpet. American intelligence agents could monitor Communist microwave radio and long-distance telephone traffic over much of the European landmass, eavesdropping on a Soviet commissar in Moscow talking to his mistress in Yalta or on a general talking to his lieutenants across the great continent. . . . "

But Langley and the National Security Agency, which shared the intelligence that came down in a steady stream from tar above the equator, had bigger fish to fry than commissars exchanging endearments with their paramours or generals giving orders to junior officers. As good as Rhyolite's intercept capability was against Soviet and Chinese radio and telephone communication links in the VHF, UHF, and microwave broadcast bands, COMINT was not the satellite's primary target, and neither was RADINT--radar intelligence--although it did a little of that, too. Rhyolite's main task was to collect TELINT, or the telemetry from Soviet and Chinese ballistic missile tests, and to relay what it heard in coded form to the CIA and the NSA through Pine Gap and Redondo Beach. And it did that very well indeed.

The first fully operational Rhyolite went up on top of an Atlas Agena-D on March 6, 1973, though at least one experimental operational version was orbited as early as 1970 (the year the
U.S.-Australian "Joint Defence Space Research Facility" at Pine Gap began functioning). The spacecraft, a squat cylinder about five feet long and weighing three quarters of a ton, was positioned 22,175 miles over Borneo. Once on station, its main dish antenna, measuring more than seventy feet across, was unfolded and extended forward as though on the end of an accordion. Other, smaller antennas received instructions from Pine Gap (whose code name was Merino), and answered with a bonanza of telemetry intercepted from the ballistic missiles that roared off the pads at Tyuratam and Plesetsk and separated from their warheads, which then arced far over Siberia and impacted on Kamchatka or the north Pacific.

Subsequent Rhyolites were launched on May 23 and December 11, 1977, and on April 7, 1978. Of the initial batch of four operationally capable satellites, two are understood to have been put to work on telemetry collection, communication intercepts and some radar mapping, while the other two were kept in reserve for the day when point failure or attack crippled one or both of their sisters. So sensitive were the satellites' listening equipment that they could pick up walkie-talkie chatter during Red Army field exercises from more than twenty-two thousand miles over the equator. They also collected signals from the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

The NRO reacted to Lee's and Boyce's having compromised Rhyolite, as well as to the subsequent public trial, in traditional fashion: its name was changed. Though still essentially the same satellite, Rhyolite was rechristened Aquacade in an effort to get the Soviet Union to believe that its TELINT and other intercept activities were mostly, or even totally, being taken over by a newer system. Meanwhile, the Rhyolites continued tapping the approximately fifty channels, most of them UHF and microwave, that the Russians use for telemetry transmission.

Nor is Rhyolite the only heavy SIGINT spacecraft to have been put in geosynchronous orbit by the United States. Even as Lee's and Boyce's trial was taking place, finishing touches were being put on a second major signals intelligence platform, this one code-named Chalet. The first Chalet launch apparently took place on June 10, 1978, followed by others on October 1, 1979, and October 31, 1981. After an article in The New York Times mentioned Chalet by name, it too was assigned a new designator: Vortex.

Yet another large signals collector, this one code-named Magnum, was launched amid glaring (and unwanted) publicity when the space shuttle Discovery went into orbit on January 24, 1985. A month before, Brigadier General Richard Abel warned reporters at a crowded press conference that coverage of the mission--51-C--was to be severely restricted because of the nature of the heavily classified cargo. Abel, who was the Air Force's director of public affairs, added that subsequent similar launches would also come under the new rules, which were intended to "deny our adversaries" as much information as possible. And, Abel went on, any press "speculation" about the nature of Discovery's mission and the cargo it was to carry to orbit would set off a federal investigation for breach of national security.

Although some news organizations withheld details of Mission 51-C, Abel's threat, combined with a fear that the shroud of secrecy covering the NASA launch would become a precedent, proved too much for The Washington Post. Two days after Abel issued his warning, the Post ran a page-one story saying that the shuttle would be carrying a "new military intelligence satellite that is to collect electronic signals and retransmit them to a U.S. receiving station on Earth." The article went on to report that the collected data would include missile telemetry that could be used to verify arms control treaty compliance and that the SIGINT satellite's cost was $300 million. Caspar Weinberger promptly denounced the newspaper, saying that the article might have given ''aid and comfort to the enemy." General Abel was reassigned.

But there was at least one more attempt to deceive the press and, therefore, it was hoped, the Soviet Union regarding Magnum's mission. By international agreement, the initial orbits of all satellites are filed with the United Nations. In the case of U.S. military launches, procedure calls for the Air Force to supply the State Department with a satellite's initial orbital characteristics within several weeks after it has gone up. The State Department then passes the information to the UN. In the case of Magnum, someone seems to have tipped The New York Times that the satellite had gone into a most unusual orbit for a reconnaissance platform. A Times reporter than requested details. He was told that the secret spacecraft had been put into a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of 21,543 miles, a perigee of only 212 miles, and an inclination of 28.4 degrees. The reporter noted in his lead paragraph that it was a "radically different orbit from many spy satellites" and quoted an expert at MIT as saying, "It's a very funny trajectory." It was a funny trajectory for a reconnaissance satellite, but it did not remain so for long. Magnum's initial orbit was just that: a temporary so-called parking orbit where it was stabilized before being rerouted to geosynchronous. Although the Air Force had been absolutely truthful in describing Magnum's initial orbit, it had neglected to add that the orbit was subsequently changed, thereby attempting to undo what it saw as the damage that had been done by the earlier disclosures. This was a neat bit of what was later to be officially called a deliberate policy of disinformation by the Defense Department.

[carlos]

Творчество тов. Берроуза мы начинали обсуждать еще на 16-й странице данного романа, ровно год назад...  

[Liss]

Там хоть и не на геостационар а всёж на высокую орбиту Аджена должна была вывести спутник апогейным импульсом.

Можно подумать, что два Midas RTS из трех были выведены на круговую 3700 км божьим духом, а не "Адженой" ;-)

[Liss]

Как объяснить каким образом классификация была сделана задолго до того как стали известны номера Аджен - вот вопрос.

Ну это, собственно, к товарищу Берроузу. Он назвал пять штук Rhyolite/Aquacade поименно:

1970 экспериментальный
1973.03.06
1977.05.23
1977.12.11
1978.04.07

Средний из них сейчас считается Canyon'ом, хотя даже МакДауэлл выражал некоторое сомнение на сей счет. В остальном версия Берроуза была принята. На его же счету три даты запусков Chalet, также оставшиеся общепринятыми:

1978.06.10
1979.10.01
1981.10.31

А слова Canyon товарищ Берроуз действительно не говорил.

[Liss]

[А слова Canyon товарищ Берроуз действительно не говорил.

Ха-ха. Слона-то я... :-)
Старый, радуйтесь: на стр. 189 труда Берроуза 1987 года фигурируют advanced versions of the CIA's Corona and the Air Force's SAMOS photo intelligence satellites – "Корона" за восемь лет до рассекречивания.

[carlos]

Хм. А разве наименование "Корона" было чем-то неизвестным? Емнип, Корона фигурировала даже в "Авиац. и Косм." в 70-х.