SPARTAN reconnaissance satellite

[Flyaway]

A phoenix dying in Samos ashes: The SPARTAN reconnaissance satellite program
by Dwayne Day
Monday, January 24, 2022

One of the first American efforts to develop a reconnaissance satellite was known as Samos. Several of the Samos projects involved taking photographs using film and returning it to Earth in a reentry vehicle. One of these projects, designated E-6, was a search satellite equipped with two Eastman-Kodak cameras designed to photograph large amounts of territory at medium resolution. The satellite held promise but failed because of reentry vehicle problems. In 1963 the E-6 project was briefly revived as part of a program designated SPARTAN, the proverbial effort to make a silk’s purse out of a sow’s ear.

The early years
The United States’ first effort to develop a reconnaissance satellite was named Weapons System 117L. It began in 1956 and, around the time of Sputnik, split into several projects, including the Sentry reconnaissance program. Sentry was soon renamed Samos—which, contrary to some claims, was not an acronym for “satellite and missile observation system”—and Samos itself soon evolved into multiple programs. The Samos program was run by the Secretary of the Air Force Special Projects office, usually referred to either as SAFSP or, more commonly, “special projects.” Located in Los Angeles, SAFSP was part of the relatively new National Reconnaissance Office, a loose conglomeration of government agencies cooperating—more or less—on developing satellite reconnaissance systems. SAFSP cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency on an offshoot program known as CORONA that returned its film to Earth in kettle-shaped reentry vehicles, achieving first success in August 1960.

One of the persistent misconceptions about Samos is that it was a film-readout system intended to develop film in orbit, scan it, and beam the images back to a ground station. The early Samos projects, known as E-1 and E-2, involved this technology. But Samos soon evolved to include the E-4 mapping system, the E-5 higher-resolution system, and the E-6 search system, all of which were designed to return their film to Earth inside reentry vehicles. Although E-4 was canceled before it ever took flight (E-3 never left the study phase), the Air Force launched both Samos E-5 and E-6 satellites starting in the early 1960s. But their reentry vehicles suffered problems and in early 1962 the E-5 program was canceled.

The Samos E-6 incorporated two 36-inch (0.91-meter) focal length Eastman-Kodak manufactured cameras that could scan large areas of the ground below at an estimated resolution of about six and a half feet (1.98 meters), good enough to spot and identify aircraft, ships, submarines, and possibly even military ground vehicles, and better than the early CORONA versions. (CORONA had a 24-inch/0.60-meter focal length.) After the film was exposed in the cameras it was wound up on spools inside the reentry vehicle.

The Space Review: A phoenix dying in Samos ashes: The SPARTAN reconnaissance satellite program

 

[Nik]

Thank you.
Clarified stuff I'd half-remembered... Okay, eighth-remembered !!

 

[Archibald]

Be ready for major headaches and brain bleeding, the one who goes down the Samos rabbit hole...
Samos E-1
Samos E-2
Samos E-3
Samos E-4
Samos E-5
Samos E-6
KH-6 LANYARD
SPARTAN
Eight variants.

And very little, if none, success.

 

[Nik]

Slightly off-topic, but do we know which spawned 'Ice Station Zebra', the book, not the film ??

 

[blackstar]

Slightly off-topic, but do we know which spawned 'Ice Station Zebra', the book, not the film ??

The story was clearly inspired by the Discoverer 2 (not Samos) loss in the arctic. It was believed that the capsule could have come down on Spitsbergen Island, which is owned by Norway but at the time had a Soviet mining operation on it. The USAF sent a plane to search for the capsule, and there were rumors that the Soviets recovered it. However, there is no evidence that the Soviet Union retrieved the capsule, and I talked to the guy who was responsible for Discoverer launch operations and his attitude was that there was a big ocean to hit and a tiny island, and he didn't think it could have hit the island. The story was reported in the press and clearly inspired author Alistair MacLean.

Discoverer was the cover story for the CORONA reconnaissance satellite program, although Discoverer 2 did not have any reconnaissance equipment on it, and even if the Soviets had recovered the capsule they would have learned nothing of interest.

At one point, the late Jeff Richelson was working on an article about real-life intelligence operations that made it into books and movies. I think his focus was on leaks, and he found a reference in some book to the CORONA satellite, at the time that the program was still highly classified. So somebody leaked. I cannot remember if that was in an Alistair MacLean book, however, and I don't think Richelson ever published the article.

The movie "Ice Station Zebra" was on TCM yesterday and I watched a bit of the ending. It's a clunker. I think they refer to American film in a British-made camera in a Soviet spacecraft. All made up.

 

[blackstar]

Be ready for major headaches and brain bleeding, the one who goes down the Samos rabbit hole...
Samos E-1
Samos E-2
Samos E-3
Samos E-4
Samos E-5
Samos E-6
KH-6 LANYARD
SPARTAN
Eight variants.

And very little, if none, success.

It's not that confusing, although certainly more complicated than CORONA. E-1 and E-2 were the film-readout cameras. They exposed film and developed it onboard, then scanned it and transmitted the imagery to the ground. E-2 was a better camera than E-1. Only a few launched.

E-3 was just a study, canceled before they built any hardware.

E-4 was a mapping camera and a bit of a mystery. No photographs of the actual hardware or even diagrams, so we don't know how it worked. Never launched. Effectively replaced by the KH-5 ARGON.

E-5 was a more powerful camera in a pressurized capsule. The real objective was for USAF to build its own space capsule like Mercury. E-5 was a compromised design. None successful. But the E-5 camera was later modified to become the KH-6 LANYARD as an insurance policy in case the planned GAMBIT-1 system did not work. LANYARD had one success but was canceled as no longer necessary when the KH-7 GAMBIT-1 was successful.

E-6 was a search system designed to cover a broader amount of territory. It was really created to replace the CORONA system. But they made a bad choice with the reentry vehicle and had five failures. SPARTAN was an effort to resurrect the E-6 camera.

You could also add the Lunar Orbiter to that list, because the technology was directly adapted from the E-1 and E-2, and it was successful.

The overall Samos program is not very well-described in popular sources. There is a ton of information available on the overall program, but nobody has really written a good article or book on it (not counting the official histories). Samos was competing with CORONA at the time, and part of the problem is that CORONA was not working consistently, but it was working. The Samos variants were all failing.

CORONA had a bunch of variants in the early years too--the KH-1, 2, 3, and 4 in the first few years. They had their own designations for the camera systems. So there was the C camera, the C' ("C Prime") camera, and the C''' ("C Triple Prime") camera. But at least they were consistent, whereas each Samos camera was significantly different than the previous one.

As noted in the article, I'd really like to figure out how the E-6/SPARTAN camera actually worked. It was panoramic, so it swept back and forth (east-west) during operation. That appears to have been accomplished with a mirror at the front end. But we don't have any good diagrams about how exactly that worked.

 

[Nik]

Thank you.

I was careful to specify book rather than movie, as latter sacrificed a lot of plausibility ...

 

[blackstar]

Thank you.

I was careful to specify book rather than movie, as latter sacrificed a lot of plausibility ...

I've got the book somewhere and I sorta want to read it. But I find Alistair MacLean to be a bit overbearing. It is entirely possible that he had good sources besides the newspapers. Sometimes successful thriller writers develop sources. People told Tom Clancy stuff. That doesn't mean that he had great secrets or insights, but he might have had access to information that other people did not.

I should add that there's some interesting information about the Discoverer 2 event. There was really a push to go search for it, and suspicions that the Soviets somehow got it. But if they really had gotten it, you'd think they would have said something after the end of the Cold War.

 

[blackstar]

Here is an account of Discoverer 2:

The Space Review: Has anybody seen our satellite?

 

[blackstar]

Since I mentioned the race to find/retrieve Discoverer 2, I will attach this. The key figure in the USAF effort to locate Discoverer 2 was Colonel Charles "Moose" Mathison. He probably got that nickname for a reason. He was involved in the Discoverer 13 recovery as well, and was a bit bull-headed during that one too. This is an excerpt from a 1965 book about flying that includes an account of Mathison's involvement in Discoverer 13.

Keep in mind that Discoverer 2 was launched in April 1959 and Discoverer 13 in August 1960. They were shooting them off fast, sometimes two launches in a month, followed by a pause to figure out what was failing and fix it and try again. They had a lot of failures before success. But President Eisenhower insisted that it was too important to quit.