Secret Space Shuttles
When you’re 200 miles up, it’s easy to hide what you’re up to.
• By Michael Cassutt
• Air & Space Magazine, August 01, 2009
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Secret-Space-Shuttles.html?c=y&page=1
The giant gold and silver satellite glittered against the black sky as
space shuttle Atlantis closed in on it from below. Commander Hoot
Gibson and pilot Guy Gardner flew the approach, while mission
specialist Mike Mullane, at the other end of the flight deck, readied
the shuttle’s robot arm for a capture. Downstairs in the airlock,
mission specialists Jerry Ross and Bill Shepherd waited in their
spacesuits for Gibson’s order to go outside and attempt a rescue.
The mission of STS-27 had been to deploy the first in a series of new
spy satellites that used radar to observe ground targets, in any kind
of weather, day or night. But shortly after the astronauts released
the spacecraft, called ONYX, from the shuttle’s cargo bay, on December
2, 1988, one of its antenna dishes had failed to open. Without
intervention by the crew, the billion-dollar satellite would become a
hunk of space junk. As it turned out, they succeeded in grabbing,
fixing, and re-releasing ONYX, for which they later received a medal
from the U.S. intelligence community.
At least that’s one possible scenario for what happened. The
astronauts may just as well have fixed the satellite without a
spacewalk by Ross and Shepherd. We don’t know because not a word of
the ONYX rescue was reported in newspapers or on television. Why not?
Because STS-27 was—and remains—a secret mission.
Between 1982 and 1992, NASA launched 11 shuttle flights with
classified payloads, honoring a deal that dated to 1969, when the
National Reconnaissance Office—an organization so secret its name
could not be published at the time—requested certain changes to the
design of NASA’s new space transportation system. The NRO built and
operated large, expensive reconnaissance satellites, and it wanted a
bigger shuttle cargo bay than NASA had planned. The spysat agency also
wanted the option to fly “once around” polar missions, which demanded
more flexibility to maneuver for a landing that could be on either
side of the vehicle’s ground track.
“NRO requirements drove the shuttle design,” says Parker Temple, a
historian who served on the policy staff of the secretary of the Air
Force and later with the NRO’s office within the Central Intelligence
Agency. The Air Force signed on to use the shuttle too, and in 1979
started building a launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in northern
California for reaching polar orbits. Neither the Air Force nor the
NRO was ever comfortable relying exclusively on NASA’s vehicle,
however. Delays in shuttle launches only increased their worry; even
before the 1986 Challenger accident, they were looking for a way off
the shuttle and back onto conventional rockets like the Titan.
The uneasy relationship between the Air Force, NRO, and NASA assumed a
human face in 1979, when the military chose its first group of shuttle
astronauts. Two years before the shuttle’s first launch, the NRO
selected 13 Manned Spaceflight Engineers as potential payload
specialists, all but one from the Air Force. The new military
astronauts ranged in age from 24 to 36. Most had advanced degrees in
engineering; one was a Ph.D. They were experienced in satellite flying
and acquisition. And they believed they were the vanguard of the Air
Force in space.
Only one of that first group ever made it to orbit.
Paul Sefchek, one of those who didn’t (he retired from the Air Force
in 1989 and died in 1997 at the age of 51), told me in an interview
years ago that his colleagues were like “old Army scouts who were sort
of aimed at NASA by the Air Force and told to find out whatever they
could find out. They returned to the fort bleeding and full of wounds.”
One fundamental problem was how the two agencies perceived “payload
specialists.” NASA thought of them as outsiders, almost guests—
engineers or scientists who tended one particular satellite or
experiment, and typically flew just once. The MSEs thought their job
was to help bridge the gulf between the military and civilian space
agencies.
It didn’t work. Gary Payton, now deputy undersecretary of the Air
Force for space, is the only one of the first group of military
astronauts to fly; he recalls, “I was naive enough to believe that the
payload side would be treated by NASA the same way the Air Force
launch people treated us. In the world I came from, payload
requirements would drive the time of day you launched, the time of
year, everything. In 1980, NASA was still worried about getting the
shuttle to fly. So we were not paid much attention to. It was a rude
awakening.”
In addition to cultural differences, there were plain old turf
battles. According to Dave Vidrine, director of the military astronaut
program in the early 1980s, one eager MSE, whom he didn’t want to name
for publication, was “coming up with a lot of new projects and carving
out his own turf.” On one occasion, NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka was
training underwater at the Johnson Space Center for a spacewalk when
the MSE, a qualified scuba diver, decided he needed to measure a piece
of equipment. He and another member of the Air Force team in Houston
jumped into the training pool and went to work. The NASA test
conductor spotted the two unauthorized divers and ordered them out of
the pool. A shouting match ensued, and the offending MSE was banned
temporarily from the center.
T.K. (Ken) Mattingly, an Apollo-era astronaut who also reached the
rank of rear admiral before retiring from the Navy in 1989, commanded
the shuttle’s fourth mission, in June 1982, which carried the
program’s first classified payload. He describes the relationship
between the NASA astronauts and the MSEs in those early days as “sour.”
Nor did the MSEs have much support within the Pentagon. Jeff DeTroye,
one of the first 13 military astronauts, was assigned to escort
General Lew Allen, Air Force chief of staff, during a visit to Los
Angeles for the 20th anniversary of the NRO in 1981. Upon learning of
DeTroye’s involvement in the shuttle, Allen was blunt. He had played
“a primary role in canceling the Manned Orbiting Laboratory [a
proposed military space station of the 1960s], and had he had his way,
would have canceled the shuttle,” DeTroye says. Allen made it clear he
thought there was no role for man in space, period, according to
DeTroye.
Mattingly says, “I sometimes thought the only people in the Air Force
really interested in the shuttle were the MSEs.”
Still, the classified payloads had to be launched—not just on the
secret flights, but as secondary payloads on NASA-sponsored shuttle
flights too. Once the two sides started working together on actual
missions, things improved, according to Payton, who was part of the
support team for Mattingly’s STS-4 flight. “We found that once the
shuttle had flown, there were people inside NASA who were eager to
satisfy military requirements,” he remembers. “We saw that the [NASA]
folks were pretty damn good!”
On the other hand, the STS-4 payload, identified only as “P82-1,”
didn’t impress Mattingly. “It was a rinky-dink collection of minor
stuff they wanted to fly,” he recalls. P82-1 turned out to be the
Cryonic InfraRed Radiance Instrumentation for Shuttle (CIRRIS) and the
Ultraviolet Horizon Scanner (UHS), two sensors designed to test
missile detection from space. A cover failed to open, so neither worked.
The Air Force-NRO control center for shuttle missions was located in
Sunnyvale, California. While Houston and Columbia conversed
frequently, no one had come up with a way to refer to the classified
control center over the open channel. Payload communicator DeTroye
recalled a last-minute panic about the mere mention of “Sunnyvale.”
“What were we supposed to say? ‘Columbia, this is&hellipSaratoga’? I
can’t imagine what [Mattingly] would have done if he’d heard that.”
The use of code words occasionally got comical. On the seventh day of
the mission, Mattingly and pilot Hank Hartsfield were getting ready to
return to Earth and had just stored the classified checklists in
Columbia’s safe. Sunnyvale then asked them to perform “Tab Echo.” The
astronauts looked at each other; neither could remember what Tab Echo
was. They opened the safe, removed the checklist, and began paging
through it. Sure enough, there was Tab Echo: “Store checklist.”
A few years later, when NASA astronaut Kathy Thornton was preparing
for her classified mission, STS-33, “training schedules were coded,”
she recalls. “They would say things like ‘Event 7012.’ You had to open
up the safe every morning to find out that Event 7012 was food tasting
in another building, and you were already five minutes late.”
After STS-4, an ambitious schedule of military missions loomed, and in
1982 the Air Force recruited 14 more MSEs. But the first fully
classified flight, STS-10, got delayed due to problems with the new
Air Force-built Inertial Upper Stage, used to boost satellites to
their designated orbit. Other military experiments flew on NASA
missions in the meantime. On flight STS-41G, launched in October 1984,
the crew conducted a satellite refueling test “hatched by some Air
Force general,” according to journalist Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. in his
1986 book Before Liftoff. Oceanographer Paul Scully-Power was also on
board, observing ship wakes on the surface of the sea for the U.S. Navy.
Meanwhile, the crew of STS-10 (renamed STS-51C and commanded by
Mattingly) continued to train, all the while pioneering the security
procedures that classified missions mandated. A ready room was set up
in the astronaut office, complete with a secure telephone that had a
secret number. “If certain people need to get hold of you,” Mattingly
was told, “they’ll call.” The phone rang just once: The caller asked
if Mattingly was interested in subscribing to MCI long distance service.
Another time, Mattingly and three STS-51C crewmates—Onizuka, Loren
Shriver, and Jim Buchli—had to take a trip to Sunnyvale. The
astronauts were ordered to disguise their destination by filing a
flight plan for Denver, then diverting to the San Francisco Bay area.
They landed their T-38s at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain
View, rented a “junky old car that could hardly run,” according to
Mattingly, and drove to an out-of-the-way motel arranged by their
secretary. As they pulled up, Buchli, in the back seat, called a halt.
“We made extra stops to make sure we wouldn’t come here directly,” he
said. “We didn’t tell our families, we didn’t tell anybody where we
are. Look at that motel.” On the marquee was written “Welcome STS-51C
Astronauts,” with all four names in big type.
Mattingly’s crew—including MSE payload specialist Payton—finally got
off the ground in January 1985. For the first time in NASA history,
there was no pre-launch public affairs commentary until nine minutes
before liftoff. During the flight, the Air Force lifted the veil of
secrecy only to admit that the payload was successfully deployed, and
that an Inertial Upper Stage was used.
According to most accounts, STS-51C’s payload was ORION, an
eavesdropping satellite for signals intelligence. Parked in
geosynchronous orbit, it unfurled a dish almost as wide as a football
field is long (hence the need for the shuttle’s large payload bay) to
listen in on ground communications and telemetry. No one involved with
the mission will comment beyond this recent statement from Payton:
“It’s still up there, and still operating.”
The second dedicated military flight was STS-51J, the following
October. Karol Bobko commanded the crew of five, and Bill Pailes, a
member of the second military astronaut group, was on board as a
payload specialist. Even before the launch, outside analysts deduced
that Atlantis would release a pair of Defense Satellite Communications
System spacecraft in orbit.
When STS-51J landed, the first launch from the new west coast shuttle
pad at Vandenberg was just a year away. The mission, STS-62A, was to
have been commanded by four-time shuttle astronaut Robert Crippen,
with Air Force undersecretary Edward “Pete” Aldridge and MSE Brett
Watterson along as payload specialists.
Then came the 1986 Challenger accident. As NASA struggled to return
the shuttle to flight, the Air Force and NRO sped up their plans to
move payloads back to unmanned rockets. The only satellites that would
still be launched on NASA’s shuttle were those that couldn’t be
shifted to the Titan IV.
When the military abandoned the shuttle, MSEs like Frank Casserino and
Watterson suddenly lost their flights. By 1988—the year NASA returned
the shuttle to service—the military astronaut corps had disbanded, its
members scattered to new assignments. (Of the 27 officers in the first
two MSE groups, five would later become generals.)
The remaining classified flights fell to NASA astronauts. The first
post-Challenger military mission was STS-27, whose crew rescued the
ONYX satellite. Then came STS-28 in August 1989, which analysts
assumed at the time—based on its 57-degree orbit that overflew a large
percentage of the Earth—carried another imaging satellite. Years
later, the sleuths determined that STS-28 had instead carried a
Satellite Data System spacecraft for relaying imagery from NRO spy
satellites. (That conclusion was confirmed for me by an Air Force
officer familiar with the mission, who upon seeing CBS news footage of
the NRO satellites in 1998 said, “It’s strange to work on a secret
project for 10 years, then see it on network television.”)
The next classified mission was STS-33, in November 1989. Discovery’s
crew was commanded by Fred Gregory, with John Blaha as pilot and three
mission specialists: veteran astronaut Story Musgrave, Sonny Carter,
and Kathy Thornton. Musgrave and Thornton (who had once worked as a
scientist for the Army) were the only civilians ever assigned to
secret missions. In orbit over Thanksgiving, the crew of STS-33 was
able to conduct its mission with limited public scrutiny. The Air
Force admitted only that the astronauts deployed a spacecraft using
the Inertial Upper Stage; the payload is believed to have been the
second ORION eavesdropping satellite.
The cargo for the next classified flight, STS-36 in February 1990, was
harder for ground-based sleuths to figure out. The mission was unusual
for its highly inclined orbit—62 degrees, still a shuttle record—which
took the crew well above the Arctic Circle and far enough south that
they could glimpse the coast of Antarctica. The industry magazine
Aviation Week & Space Technology reported the payload’s name as
“AFP-731” and its weight as 37,000 pounds. For years it was thought to
have been an advanced KH-11 imaging satellite; not long after
Atlantis’ return, the Soviet news agency Novosti reported that the
satellite had “malfunctioned,” and that large pieces of debris were
being tracked prior to reentry.
Wrong, says author Jeffrey Richelson, whose credits include books on
the Defense Support Program (DSP) early warning satellites and The
Wizards of Langley, a 2001 history of technical innovation at the CIA.
In the latter book he claims that STS-36 deployed a stealthy
reconnaissance satellite named MISTY. The “debris” had likely been
jettisoned shrouds or instrument covers. Stealthy or not, the
satellite was eventually spotted by amateur trackers in a roughly 500-
mile-altitude orbit at a 65-degree inclination.
The November 1990 flight of STS-38 presented another puzzle for spysat
detectives. Its trajectory east of Cape Canaveral initially pointed
toward a third ORION eavesdropping satellite, but NRO information
released eight years later indicates that it might have been a data
relay satellite. Richelson has suggested that in addition, STS-38
carried a small “inspector” satellite designed to get close to other
spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. That scenario is still being
debated.
With the launch of STS-39 in April 1991, the Department of Defense
began to lift the veil on its shuttle operations. The mission was
declassified before launch, and NASA was allowed to reveal that it
carried a military-sponsored pallet called AFP-675, a reflight of the
payload flown years earlier on Mattingly’s STS-4 mission.
Which is not to say that STS-39 didn’t have secrets. One day,
according to a member of the crew, another astronaut, Guy Bluford,
“went up on the aft flight deck by himself while the rest of us
pretended not to notice.” Bluford launched a small classified
satellite, purpose still undisclosed.
The trend toward declassification continued with STS-44 in November
1991. Months before the launch, the Air Force acknowledged that
Atlantis would carry the 16th DSP satellite for early warning of
missile launches. Also on board were some secondary experiments and
Army intelligence specialist Thomas Hennen, who flew in space to
observe military targets on the ground, under a program known as Terra
Scout.
The following year, the existence of the National Reconnaissance
Office was officially revealed, just as the queue of secret shuttle
payloads wound down to the end. The last dedicated military mission,
STS-53, flew in December 1992, carrying a satellite identified as
DOD-1, which Richelson and other analysts surmise was another data
relay vehicle.
NASA closed the secure control room at JSC in Houston and the equally
secure Firing Room 4 at the Kennedy Space Center. The cadre of Air
Force support personnel was dispersed. And that brought to an end the
sometimes testy, always mysterious relationship between NASA and the
Air Force/NRO, which had figured so prominently in the middle decade
of the shuttle’s nearly-30-year history.
In 1993, a person identified publicly only as a “high-ranking
intelligence official” traveled from Washington to the Johnson Space
Center to meet with all the astronauts who had flown secret shuttles
and present them with National Intelligence Achievement Medals. At
that time, each astronaut was officially cleared to wear the medal in
public and to acknowledge the facts written on the citation. Hoot
Gibson, for example, could now disclose that he had “returned to”
STS-27’s satellite payload, and that the mission specialist on that
flight, Mike Mullane, had used the shuttle’s robot arm. Sixteen years
later, those brief citations provide almost the only official details
of what happened.
Today, the astronauts remain bound to silence. Says Mattingly, “The
accomplishments were first-class. I would give anything if someone
would say, ‘Here’s what we did. You should be proud of it.’ ”
As for the Ross-Shepherd spacewalk on STS-27, we still can’t say for
certain that it happened. There is another clue, however. On February
14, 2001, astronauts Tom Jones and Robert Curbeam were in the middle
of their third spacewalk of space station assembly mission STS-98.
NASA public affairs had advertised it beforehand as the 100th American
spacewalk. But just as the astronauts were about to say something to
mark the event, pilot Mark Polansky radioed them on a private channel
to warn them off. According to Jones’ 2006 memoir, Skywalking,
“Somebody had done a recount, and discovered that the real 100th EVA
[extravehicular activity] had been two days ago on EVA-2.”
How could that happen? Had there been a secret spacewalk that never
made it into the official tally?
Maybe someday we’ll all be cleared to know.
Michael Cassutt is a novelist and television writer in Studio City,
California.
Find this article at:
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Secret-Space-Shuttles.html?c=y&page=1
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