Graugrun
ACCESS: Top Secret
- Joined
- 17 May 2011
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Part and parcel of our then nuclear weapons program, many items of which were dual use and dependent on each other. Starting with GreenSat (a spy satellite now thinly veiled as an earth observation satellite), there is no point in having nuclear tipped MRBM/ICBM's without the necessary surveillance and early warning to know when to use them.
So GreenSat was built (a couple of them actually) as part of a constellation of spy satellites for South Africa. Naturally with the change of power looming in the early 90's, the Americans in particular where rather uneasy about this sort of technology and very particularly of their launch vehicles, landing up in the hands of a new government that had close ties with countries like Cuba/Russia/China/North Korea etc.
So massive pressure was put on us to shut it all down , with the only viable chance of survival being to commercialise it - something that apparently held promise but ultimately proved unsuccessful (we also denounced our nuclear weapons program and destroyed the 6 +1/2 bombs we declared - with some observers stating that these were just the tip of our nuclear weapons iceberg).
The article from Engineering News (South Africa) gives some interesting insight, although it's deduction is incorrect in that we wanted foreign partners to pay for the full development of GreenSat (we had already built at least 3 of them), I think that the rest is fairly close to what happened: http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/why-greensat-stayed-grounded-2000-07-07
I thought nothing much of our space capabilities, however in recent years details of some of the countries we have assisted, and supplied our own built items to - for their own space programs is a bit of an eye opener - more on that later though.
So GreenSat was built (a couple of them actually) as part of a constellation of spy satellites for South Africa. Naturally with the change of power looming in the early 90's, the Americans in particular where rather uneasy about this sort of technology and very particularly of their launch vehicles, landing up in the hands of a new government that had close ties with countries like Cuba/Russia/China/North Korea etc.
So massive pressure was put on us to shut it all down , with the only viable chance of survival being to commercialise it - something that apparently held promise but ultimately proved unsuccessful (we also denounced our nuclear weapons program and destroyed the 6 +1/2 bombs we declared - with some observers stating that these were just the tip of our nuclear weapons iceberg).
The article from Engineering News (South Africa) gives some interesting insight, although it's deduction is incorrect in that we wanted foreign partners to pay for the full development of GreenSat (we had already built at least 3 of them), I think that the rest is fairly close to what happened: http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/why-greensat-stayed-grounded-2000-07-07
I thought nothing much of our space capabilities, however in recent years details of some of the countries we have assisted, and supplied our own built items to - for their own space programs is a bit of an eye opener - more on that later though.
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