Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Space Commerce: Face The Risk, Seize The Opportunities
lunar base
A new era of space commercialization opens up opportunitites on the Moon and elsewhere. (credit: ESA/P. Carril)
Space commerce: face the risk, seize the opportunities
by Norm Mitchell
Monday, April 14, 2025
Imagine it’s 1625 and you’re an ambitious young entrepreneur. The world’s most powerful nations have pushed wooden shipbuilding technology to unprecedented heights. The oceans are no longer the barrier to commerce that they once were. New continents have been discovered. Known continents are more accessible because traders can avoid rugged, dangerous overland routes.
We are now standing on the threshold of that doorway, with the universe inviting us to step through.
The possibilities exceed anything previously imagined. There is gold to be discovered, spices and silk to be bartered for, adventures to be had, and fortunes to be won. But of course, the venture is not without risk. Violent storms, shipwrecks, and mutinies are hazards of the occupation. Plus, you must contend with enemy navies while pirates, who find it more desirable to plunder merchant ships than to build fortunes through honest labor, abound. Privateers are augmenting military forces to provide maritime security. As if that weren’t enough to worry about, the logistical efforts required to sustain ocean voyages are staggering.
Now imagine that in 2025, you have the same sort of opportunities your predecessors did 400 years ago—because you do. Space launch technology has been pushed to unprecedented heights, and Earth’s atmosphere is no longer the barrier it once was. The potential to discover new worlds, build wealth, and develop technologies that can benefit humanity exceeds that of the age of sail by many orders of magnitude.
Humans have been venturing into space for 60 years, and the early pioneers who made up the first wave of space exploration have cracked open the door to a domain that holds infinite possibility. We are now standing on the threshold of that doorway, with the universe inviting us to step through.
Space traffic will almost certainly grow exponentially over the next five to ten years, as Earth’s spacefaring peoples explore new worlds and seek fortune and adventure. Space is becoming increasingly accessible, allowing new entrants to venture into the new frontier. It is not improbable to imagine recurring trips to the Moon by the end of this decade, nor is it farfetched to imagine trips to Mars and even the asteroid belt by the end of the next.
Currently, we use space primarily as a place to employ stand-off sensors and beyond-line-of-sight communications platforms, but we should expect that to change soon. People toss around ideas about space tourism, but really, that’s the tip of an iceberg of commercial possibilities whose depth we haven’t begun to fathom.
The initial focus of space commerce will likely be on resource acquisition, energy production, and advanced manufacturing. Asteroids may prove to be the source of rare earth minerals and valuable metals, and the Moon’s bountiful reserves of helium-3 could be a promising, low-radioactivity fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors.
For those of us on the crest of this second wave of space exploration, scientific and economic opportunities abound. These opportunities lie just beyond the threshold on which we stand.
As one might expect, the opportunities come with inherent risks. Aside from the obvious hazards inherent to the harsh space environment, other threats will surely materialize. Enemy space fleets (manned and unmanned) and space pirates will certainly be problems with which spacefaring companies must reckon. For every opportunity, there is a risk, yet even the risks present new opportunities for enterprising space companies. Ambitious countries may find it advantageous to specialize in one of the emerging space market niches. Here are a few of those opportunities.
Manufacturing
Long-range space transports and asteroid-mining systems will have to be manufactured on-orbit.
Lunar bases will need to be constructed to facilitate mining, research, and communications.
Logistics
We are going to need transfer stations where travelers or machinery can transfer from short-range shuttles to long-range transports.
Orbiting satellites or transport ships will need refueling stations that can be stockpiled with fuel or that possess an efficient energy generation capability.
Space mining companies will need a steerable recovery capability: a way to send materials back to Earth without threatening populated areas or air traffic, and they will have to reliably deliver it to a secure area that’s not so remote that it’s cost prohibitive to retrieve.
We will need reusable space launch platforms to get people, machines, and cargo into orbit. Naturally, these launch platforms will need efficient and capable spaceports, complete with the terrestrial infrastructure needed to sustain regular spacelift operations. Countries with optimum spaceport locations, particularly those near the Equator, may discover new economic development opportunities in the space transport business.
It is now commonly understood, but worth mentioning, that we will need to develop methods of cleaning up orbital debris to ensure a sustainable future for space operations.
Information management and communications
The amount of data that we will need to collect, store, process, and turn into useful information is going to be orders of magnitude above what we can currently envision.
Speaking of data, we’re going to need to transport that data from the middle of the solar system back to Earth.
We’ll need the ability to remotely operate and monitor mining equipment as far away as the asteroid belt (beyond Mars).
We’ll need to remotely monitor transfer stations and on-orbit refueling stations for security purposes.
We’ll need to monitor space traffic, which will probably entail a combination of sensors, transponders, tracking systems, and control stations.
Disciplined frequency management will be critical. We will need to devise new communication methods and new high-efficiency waveforms that optimize the capacity of existing frequency bands.
Navigation and security
We will need to leverage space traffic management systems to avoid collisions between spacecraft and debris and to efficiently route interplanetary traffic to and from Earth.
Naturally, orbital refueling stations and cargos of valuable minerals or precious metals will be tempting targets for thieves or for nation-state rivals. We will need to find ways to safeguard them.
Companies will need to be able to provide security for recovery operations that bring lunar, Martian, or asteroid resources back to Earth.
National economic interests will likely dictate that governments make space commerce protection a standard military mission set. Once criminal organizations or thuggish militaries make it to space, then we’ll need to stand up a regiment of space troopers. Private security companies will undoubtedly play a role as well.
For those of us on the crest of this second wave of space exploration, scientific and economic opportunities abound. These opportunities lie just beyond the threshold on which we stand. We must cross that threshold to begin benefitting from the new worlds we will discover, and the scientific advancements that result will dwarf those of the age of sail. The opportunities are virtually limitless. Let us be courageous and generous enough to seize them!
The human race stands to make tremendous advances in knowledge, manufacturing, energy production, and commerce. The resources are limitless, but human nature being what it is, we will almost certainly find ourselves in conflict over them. One thing is clear: the countries and companies that master the challenges of this new domain will have a massive economic advantage over the rest. We should start building the skills and capabilities required to master that domain today.
The opinions presented in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official opinions of any company, the US government, the Department of Defense, or any of its components.
Norm Mitchell is a retired United States Marine and combat veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He is currently a strategic planner for Torch Technologies, Inc.
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Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Space Policy: The Moon And Mars Simultaneously
Gaia
With fleets of reusable ships, large and growing international bases could be established on both the Moon and Mars. (credit: SpaceX)
Space policy: The Moon and Mars simultaneously
by Doug Plata, MD, MPH
Monday, April 7, 2025
In a nutshell, this article proposes that America’s human spaceflight (HSF) policy be directed to go both to the Moon and Mars simultaneously for exploration and the development of permanent bases. This is based upon accepting the likelihood of the emergence of multiple heavy-lift commercial transportation systems that will be far more cost-effective than NASA’s current plans. The idea that we cannot go to Mars without establishing a base on the Moon is not obviously true and something that SpaceX certainly does not believe.
The idea that we cannot go to Mars without establishing a base on the Moon is not obviously true and something that SpaceX certainly does not believe.
Even though comments by both Trump and Musk indicate a desire to ultimately send humans to Mars, recent testimony makes it clear that Congress will not accept the bypassing of the Moon. Yet, SpaceX has sufficient Starlink funding, the emerging capability, and resolve to go to Mars as soon as possible. Space policy decision makers will not have NASA stand by while SpaceX and other countries go to Mars. Likewise, Blue Origin has sufficient funding and is making steady progress to develop an Earth-Moon transport system. The solution therefore is a policy where countries, led by the US, return and explore the Moon and establish a growing base there while NASA also partners with SpaceX as they go to Mars.
However, for America to have such an ambitious policy, it will need to free up budgetary space. This article proposes that all legacy HSF programs be placed on the table and asked whether each item is the best use of taxpayer dollars considering what could be accomplished for America’s space leadership by guiding the world to expand beyond Earth. This essay proposes that budgetary space be opened by cancelling the following, starting with the least needed: Mobile Launch Platform-2, Exploration Upper Stage (EUS), the Gateway, the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion, and limiting spending to just one billion dollars per year on “Commercial” LEO Destinations (CLDs).
To the Moon and Mars simultaneously
To be very clear, the proposal to go to the Moon and Mars simultaneously is not any of the commonly proposed approaches. It is not choosing one instead of the other, such as the Moon instead of Mars, or the Moon being an unnecessary distraction from Mars. It is also not the idea of safely going to the Moon first, establishing a base, and demonstrating technologies as a steppingstone toward Mars some years later.
First, SpaceX clearly does not believe that establishing a base on the Moon is necessary before going to Mars. With their engine production rate, Starship factory, and the remaining Starship development hurdles, there is a decent likelihood that they will make multiple cargo landing attempts on Mars during the November 2026 launch window, 19 months from now, even if they reduce the number of LEO refuelings needed by reducing payload. And if they miss the 2026 window, they certainly will be ready by the 2029 window. Mechazilla has already caught three Super Heavy booster stages, so booster reuse appears to be a given. The upper stages have had pinpoint landings twice now. If they can be reused, then that saves even more money. If not, SpaceX still has the engine production rate sufficient to complete cargo and crew missions including refuelings of depots even if they have to expend tankers.
As for propellant transfer and storage in LEO depots, this will not be as difficult as many space advocates have presumed. I interviewed Bernard Kutter, who was perhaps the leading applied researcher on the topic. His view was that all aspects of propellant depot storage (including zero boiloff using cryocoolers) and transfer had been demonstrated in the lab or on orbit and that it was more likely than not that docking, storage, and transfer would work on the first attempt. Also, the wildly divergent estimates of the number of refuelings necessary for Moon or Mars landings are not largely based upon firm rocket equation calculations. It’s as though people are picking the estimates that best match what they want to argue. And the number of refuelings can be adjusted by how much payload one chooses to send. Finally, once propellant transfer is mastered once, doing it again and again shouldn’t be particularly difficult as evidenced by the Falcon 9 flight frequency. And one missed refilling just means a short delay until the next tanker arrives.
SpaceX is not only fully committed as a company to send cargo and crew there as soon as possible, but their level of Starship revenue will likely pass NASA’s HSF budget later this year.
Another point is that, although not optimized for the Moon like Blue Origin’s lander is, Starships can be used for both the Moon and Mars. So, the Moon and Mars shouldn’t be considered as two separate programs requiring a lot more funding for vehicle development. Likewise, most of the surface systems between the Moon and Mars are the same—not all, but most. This would include habitats, much of the life support, sanitation, potentially food, any centrifuge, surface transport, local satellite constellation, and some in situ resource utilization. Any fission power system could also be the same.
Mars
The first thing to understand about space policy for Mars is that SpaceX is not only fully committed as a company to send cargo and crew there as soon as possible but their level of Starship revenue will likely pass NASA’s HSF budget later this year. Given how much more efficiently SpaceX spends its money compared to NASA, the question of Mars policy is no longer driven by the space policy decision makers in DC but by SpaceX itself. If Congress decides to delay Mars and go to the Moon first, it will be irrelevant because that won’t change SpaceX’s mind, and it is unlikely that government space policy will prevent SpaceX from getting a launch license. In other words, the decisionmakers in DC will be faced with an interesting decision. Will America stand to the side while SpaceX (in partnership with other countries) goes to Mars, or should NASA partner with SpaceX and hence play a role among the nations in this very historic moment? There are few things that the two sides of the aisle agree upon in Washington. But one thing that they agree upon is that our space program is to demonstrate American leadership on the world stage. So, I cannot imagine NASA failing to partner with SpaceX for Mars.
I am estimating that, between the 2026 and 2029 Earth-Mars windows, SpaceX will have made multiple cargo landing attempts with telemetry from any crash being used to adjust the landing software for the next attempt a few days later. With time, SpaceX will have delivered large quantities of cargo before and during crew arrival. Perhaps either in 2029 or 2033—and only after multiple successful cargo landings had been achieved—crew will be landed on Mars.
Perhaps it will be limited to something like 24 crew split between two ships so that not too many lives are risked early on. Given the very large quantities of cargo already landed, safety will be assured by having plenty of supplies and numerous, redundant equipment and spares. For NASA’s part, they can help lead international exploration and work with SpaceX to establish an International Mars Base. Note that, in terms of the hardware needed, there’s not a lot of difference between a base and a settlement.
The Moon
However, there are multiple reasons why the Moon won’t be bypassed. In fact, establishing a permanent base on the Moon will be considered important. First, from recent congressional testimony, Congress clearly wants America to return to the Moon. As happened with SLS, Congress has everything to say about space policy when it comes down to the funding. Trump likes space because it is where America can shine. But it seems unlikely that he would be willing to burn political capital opposing lunar return when many people point out that China is making real progress to establish their own permanent base on the Moon. And for what it’s worth, it was during Trump’s first administration that a return to the Moon became his very first space policy (i.e. SPD-1).
In addition, practically all the other countries of the world would like to watch their astronaut heroes explore the Moon on behalf of their own citizens and in their own languages. The US may have “been there and done that” but that’s not yet the case for the other countries. So, there is the “huge” foreign policy opportunity to lead other countries beyond Earth. Significantly lower per-seat costs means that America can go beyond the very successful Artemis Accords and lead an international coordinating group to plan an International Lunar Exploration Phase (ILEP). As international astronauts go to the Moon, a large and growing International Lunar Base could be established.
Surface hardware
So, what role does NASA play? Will it be limited to just purchasing flights from Blue Origin and SpaceX? No. America should encourage its Artemis partners to fund their own companies to develop different surface systems including the development of large specialty habs dedicated to a single function given mutually agreed upon standards. I believe that very large, inflatable habs could form the basis for large and growing international bases on the Moon and Mars for the first decade or so. The result would be multiple companies that would compete on price and quality. This competition would bring costs down. Along with increased flight rate, these lowering costs could make expansion of the international bases to include private settlement as a natural outcome.
Funding both the Moon and Mars
Even though we can reasonably hope that transportation and surface hardware companies will make exploration and development much more cost effective, this article proposes two simultaneous programs (Moon and Mars) which means two sets of flight programs and two bases. To the extent that NASA would pay for a portion of these programs, sufficient funding will need to be made available. I am not proposing an increase in NASA’s budget but rather a significant reworking of its current budget.
Practically all the other countries of the world would like to watch their astronaut heroes explore the Moon on behalf of their own citizens and in their own languages. The US may have “been there and done that” but that’s not yet the case for the other countries.
To free up the needed funds, this article proposes that all current and anticipated NASA programs be placed on the table to assess whether they really are the best use of NASA funds or not. According to some reports, there seems to be an open-mindedness to cancelling some programs. In my estimation, the lowest hanging fruit would be NASA’s Mobile Launch Platform-2 and the Exploration Upper Stage. This would probably mean doing what Scott Pace suggests by playing out Artemis 2 and 3 and then looking for a transition to commercial transportation architectures. For my part, I would rather cancel SLS immediately, including Artemis 2 and 3, as a way of saving a few billion dollars and making the point that companies will not be allowed to go severely over budget and schedule. The administration should also quickly investigate the question of whether any alternate transportation architectures can avoid the need for Gateway altogether. In a relay race, is a middleman really necessary?
And finally, whereas opinions are much more favorable regarding Orion than SLS, Orion is still expensive to produce and holds just a few astronauts. It would not be easy to transport many international astronauts in the relatively small Orion capsule. It seems that SpaceX believes that many people could be launched on Starship if engine-out capability enables the safe completion of mission in a manner analogous to how airline planes can still land even if one of the engines is lost.
But I would go further: perhaps the greatest risk to this policy of the Moon and Mars simultaneously would be if a decades-long policy were adopted of funding two so-called “Commercial” LEO Destination (CLD) stations. I say “so-called” because there is serious doubts about whether those stations will ever be able to sustain themselves purely from commercial customers. Attempts to commercialize the ISS was such a failure that Paul Martin, former NASA inspector general, said, “Candidly, the scant commercial interest shown in the station over its nearly 20 years of operation gives us pause about the agency’s current plans”.
The LEO station companies seem to be depending on NASA funding rather than seeking a pure commercial business case. So, it concerns me that, after spending money helping CLDs get up and running, the policy makers may fall for the sunk cost fallacy and feel as though they must utilize them indefinitely, for perhaps a billion dollars per year per station for decades.
Nobody is quite certain what will be the killer app for LEO research stations. Some used to think that it would be crystallizing proteins to determine their structures, but AlphaFold significantly damaged that usage case. ZBLAN fibers and 3D-printed organs likewise have factors that question their business cases. Rather than manufacturing or research intellectual property being the killer app, large-scale LEO tourism seems a more likely business case. But the CLDs are not designed to receive a hundred tourists at a time. Rather, a single launch of a Starship, with the propellant tanks vented and opened up, would provide 2.5 times the internal volume of the ISS. If the decisionmakers in Washington still feel compelled to fund CLDs, I would propose that the annual budget for them be limited to no more than $1 billion per year.
Conclusion
We are at a unique moment in human history. Humanity is on the verge of spreading into the solar system. It would do well for America’s space policy to recognize the historic opportunity to be seized by leading our fellow nations beyond Earth. We also have the option to take full advantage of the emerging, very cost-effective super heavy launch systems. A smart and bold policy of Moon and Mars simultaneously is an opportunity we really shouldn’t miss.
Doug Plata (dougspace007@gmail.com) is a physician in Redlands, California, and is the President and Founder of the Space Development Network, a free-to-join network of space advocates organized to work on projects of common interest. Their website, DevelopSpace.info, provides a realistic and extensive description for how humanity can begin moving beyond Earth.
Anything But Expendable-(Part One)
ESPA
Figure 1. The launch of Intelsat-708 aboard the Long March CZ-3B launch vehicle on February 15, 1996. In these stills taken from the CCTV video, the rocket can be seen veering off course seconds after liftoff. (credit: CCTV)
Anything but expendable (part 1)
A history of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA)
by Darren A. Raspa
Monday, April 7, 2025
Prologue: The grim ’90s
It was Valentine’s Day 1996: launch day at Space Systems Loral’s headquarters building overlooking San Francisco Bay. Members of the Intelsat-708 mission team had assembled to view its launch aboard a “Long March” CZ-3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan, China, from a series of monitors.
The troubles of the Challenger disaster still fresh in the nation’s memory, American satellite operators were forced to buy rides on European, Russian, and Chinese launch vehicles due to NASA’s ban on commercial payloads flying on the Space Shuttle. The Intelsat consortium contracted with the Chinese government to send its seventh-generation communications satellite, Intelsat-708, into orbit at half the rate of the European Ariane rocket.
ESPA
Figure 2. Xichang Satellite Launch Center (XSLC) in Sichuan Province is responsible for many civil, scientific, and military launches by the PRC since 1984.
On the other side of the globe from the Space Systems Loral building in California, in Xichang, China, a party atmosphere prevailed the night of the launch. “Everybody was dressed in his or her best clothes,” remembered Bruce Campbell, a safety specialist contracted to prep the sat for launch on site by Loral. The launch window opened at 2:51 AM, but a nine-minute hold was inserted by Xichang operators to secure a more “auspicious” hour of 3:00 AM. Campbell and other American test engineers not directly involved in the launch went up to the roof of the satellite processing building to watch the event. The pad was out of view from the roof, hidden behind a ridge, but the rocket would be visible after it cleared the gantry and began its ascent. The surrounding residential villages were quiet as farmers and their families slept before work began at dawn.
The Loral team in Palo Alto knew there was a problem before the engineers on the roof did.
Two seconds after liftoff, Loral engineers watched on screen as the rocket went into a marked pitch, a fatal angle that only grew suddenly and drastically horizontal. In Xichang, the realization came soon after. “[I]nstead of rising vertically for nine seconds and several thousand feet [before starting to arc toward the east],” Campbell remembers, “I saw it traveling horizontally, accelerating as it progressed down the valley, only a few hundred feet off the ground.” The 426-ton Long March rocket accelerated for 22 seconds towards a hotel and residential complex, loaded with rocket-grade RP-1 and liquid oxygen propellant.
The payload section—including Intelsat-708—broke off first, before the entire launch vehicle impacted a hillside. Night turned into day, and the resulting shockwave could be felt for miles. In nearby Mayelin village, every house was leveled. The wail of ambulances echoed in the valley where cheers for liftoff had been heard only minutes before.
The resulting investigation found that the rocket’s flight control system was to blame for the six deaths and 57 injuries officially counted by the Chinese investigators. The unofficial death toll likely ranks in the hundreds. Subsequent visits to the site by Campbell and others found the village neighboring the launch complex no longer exists.[1]
Rather than creating a cathartic moment of positive change, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster ushered in an era in which it had become more expensive and more dangerous than ever to launch vehicles into space. If the space industry was to survive, something had to change.
The Intelsat-708 incident was only one of several successive disasters that plagued the US space industry from the late 1990s to early 2000s.[2] Two years later, on May 19, 1998, a problem on a telecommunications satellite orbiting 36,000 kilometers above the Earth shut down gasoline pumps, television stations, and pagers across the US. Mechanical engineer and spacecraft vibration isolation expert Joe Maly and his boss, CSA Engineering President Conor Johnson, were in Washington, DC, for a meeting at the Pentagon when the BlackBerry device Johnson was using suddenly stopped working.[3] “I only went to the Pentagon twice in my career, so it was a memorable trip,” Maly recalls.
CSA Engineering had recently been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate in New Mexico to work on a novel payload adapter when the orbital failure struck.[4] Johnson’s BlackBerry was not the only device affected that day; indeed, 80% of US paging and mobile devices went offline for at least 24 hours, as did the entire Reuters news service, CBS, and National Public Radio. More than a mere annoyance, the incident highlighted the growing reliance on space in daily terrestrial affairs in the late 1990s, which has increased a thousand-fold in the three decades to follow.[5]
ESPA
Figure 3. CSA/Moog’s (L to R) Joseph R. Maly and Conor Johnson.
Only a few months after the Galaxy IV incident, in September of 1998, Loral was hit once again with a satellite loss. A Zenit-2 launch vehicle burned up in the atmosphere five minutes after launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, along with the 12 Globalstar telecommunications satellites on board, after a glitch in the rocket’s Ukrainian-manufactured control system shut down the engines.[6]
The commercial space industry was not alone in the failures of the 1990s. Six months after the Galaxy IV incident, on April 9, 1999, a Defense Support Program (DSP) spacecraft launched aboard a Titan IVB booster with an Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) bound for a geosynchronous (GEO) orbit from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-41 pad. The booster strap-on motors and the first and second stages went off without a hitch, as did the first stage of the IUS. The second stage of the IUS fired next, but rather than heading for the intended GEO orbit, the IUS had been launched into a useless orbit; the spacecraft was not recovered.
Less than a month later, on April 30, 1999, the Titan IV experienced another failure, this time carrying a US Air Force Milstar space vehicle. Everything checked out during the Titan’s flight, but problems soon developed during the Centaur second stage rocket’s first burn, followed by the vehicle going out of control during the second burn. Once again, a military satellite worth hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars was placed into a useless orbit.
Investigations of the two DoD launch incidents found quality control to blame. In the first Titan IV launch, the insulating tape intended to be wrapped around the wiring harness of the IUS for thermal protection purposes had been carelessly wrapped over an electrical connector that was supposed to separate when the first stage had completed its mission; on the second Titan failure, the Centaur roll damping constant was entered as -0.199 rather than the required –1.99, which led to unnecessary maneuvering during the first Centaur burn and the depletion of the attitude control propellant that the vehicle needed for the second burn.
ESPA
Figure 4. US launch industry failures, 1980 to 2000. Note the sharp increase in pre-and post-launch failures in the mid-to-late 1990s.
The above is only a sampling of the losses experience by the US space industry between 1998 and 2000. Rather than creating a cathartic moment of positive change, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster ushered in an era in which it had become more expensive and more dangerous than ever to launch vehicles into space. If the space industry was to survive, something had to change. And that change would come from a combined group of young officers, civilian, and industry scientists and engineers supporting a lab with a brand-new name, but a long history in historic aerospace research and development milestones.
Part 1: Getting to space: The origins of AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate, 1945–1993
The Cambridge Lab
On the westernmost outskirts of Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, scientists and engineers have been working to make the assured access to space its top priority for the past eight decades. The AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate and its predecessors have continuously made the cutting-edge breakthroughs that have pushed the envelope in space science and engineering R&D.
After World War II, the development and advancement of the jet engine allowed the Army Air Forces to go farther, faster, and higher than ever before. However, the problem remained that weather patterns and high-altitude atmospheric turbulence were still unpredictable, and, in some higher altitudes, entirely unknown. Ideological and political differences between the Soviet Union and United States and Allies emerged in July 1945, even before the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the Potsdam Conference. A nuclear world, it would seem, would not be one in which assured destruction via an atomic “superweapon” would usher in an era of peace. During this new “cold” war, the need for reliable forecasting of the weather would prove key for reconnaissance, air-to-air refueling, and the technological push to the upper atmosphere and beyond with ballistic missile technology. Seeing the need to maintain the edge in scientific development, the Army Air Forces began recruiting scientific personnel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Laboratory and Harvard University's Radio Research Laboratory for post-war employment at the Cambridge Field Station (CFS) in Massachusetts under the jurisdiction of the Watson Laboratories at Red Bank, New Jersey. On September 20, 1945, a young field-grade officer, Major John W. Marchetti, was appointed Commander (Acting) of the new Army Air Forces Cambridge Field Station.
Located on Albany Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the aging dormitories of MIT, personnel of the Cambridge Field Station would, like rocket pioneer Robert Goddard before them, first travel from Massachusetts to New Mexico for the unobstructed and wide-open test space it provided. Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, fresh from the German Peenemünde Army Research Center, had been absorbed into the American space R&D effort following Operation Paperclip at the end of World War II and were now actively engaged in upgrades and modifications to their Vergeltungswaffe (“Vengeance Weapon”) model two—or V-2—rocket.
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Figure 5. AFRL’s first payload adapter system was developed for the Project Blossom V-2 rocket tests in 1947. (From, “Film Report WF12-114, ‘Project Blossom 1,” Air Material Command Engineering Division, Motion Picture Section, Photographic Division, T-2 Intelligence, White Sands, New Mexico, March 1947, AFRL Phillips Research Site History Office and Archives Collection).
The United States began launching reconstructed V-2s from the Army’s White Sands Proving Grounds in May of 1946. Under the direction of CFS’s Navigation Lab Chief Dr. Marcus O’Day, the Lab’s photoelectric methods for measuring radiation were being tested. O’Day and his “Project Blossom” Cambridge Lab S&Es (scientists and engineers) managed to push their rockets above the Kennelly-Heavyside E Layer of the atmosphere to more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) above the Earth. At the appropriate altitude, a box—arguably the first “CubeSat” containing instruments and cameras— ejected from the warhead and slowly lowered to the ground by means of special Lab-designed parachutes. In this manner, previously unknown weather and technical data about the upper atmosphere were collected. “Blossom” improved on near-orbital photography, reconnaissance, parachute, and payload adapter technology and set the stage for the Air Force Research Lab’s pushing the boundaries of space science and engineering.[7]
ESPA
Figure 6. First photograph of the Earth from space, October 24, 1946. A 35-millimeter motion picture camera was launched aboard a V-2 rocket at an altitude of 65 miles on the edge of space. The V-2 testbed would provide the early Air Force Research Lab Space Vehicles Directorate with knowledge of the upper atmosphere and improve upon payload adapter design. (Source: White Sands Missile Range Museum).
The Cambridge Field Station was renamed the Air Force Cambridge Field Station Geophysics Research Directorate in 1947 with the birth of the independent Air Force, and the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories (AFCRL) in 1949 would continue to develop hardware and nascent computer chip technology to understand weather patterns and atmospheric turbulence at higher altitudes into the 1950s and ’60s. In a Cold War world—the US had detected the Soviet Union’s first test of a thermonuclear device in the late summer of 1949—military detection and targeting systems, and therefore access to space, became a Department of Defense imperative.[8]
Sputnik, SESP, and the early DoD Space Test Program
The launch of the Soviet Sputnik I satellite in 1957 instantly made space the fourth possible theater of war. If the Russians could get to space, they could theoretically drop a nuke on an American city. “Space is hard” is a truism that lasts to the present day and originates in the first failed attempts at developing and launching satellites for military use. Before space technology could be relied upon in an operational environment, it needed to be tested in a real-world orbital environment. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had been created in the summer of 1958 to develop the civilian space program, but growing American assets on orbit highlighted the need to protect and defend those assets with reliable military space systems. President John F. Kennedy had delivered his “We Choose the Moon” speech at Rice University and NASA astronaut Ed White had walked in space, but by the end of 1965 no organization or funding lines existed to test military spaceflight experiments and demonstrations.[9]
The astronauts, unfamiliar with the reference, opened the safe and removed the checklist to look up the term. A quick review found Tab Echo’s translation: “store checklist.”
John S. Foster, Under Secretary of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E), had the responsibility of formulating a plan for research, development, testing, and engineering for the entire Department of Defense. Foster had cut his teeth during World War II as a physicist attached to Harvard’s Radio Research Lab, which along with MIT’s Radiation Lab had combined to form the Air Force Cambridge Research Lab after the war. Prior to his appointment to the DoD, Foster had been recruited personally by Edward Teller to work as the division lead in experimental physics at Lawrence Livermore Lab. He quickly rose through the ranks to become associate director in 1958 and director in 1961, a post he held until his appointment as DDR&E in 1965 by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara under President Lyndon Johnson. In July of 1966, after reviewing the development status of weapons systems that the services presented to Secretary of the Air Force (SECAF) Harold Brown for production approval, Foster drafted the memo that would finally provide spaceflight for DoD experiments that did not have their own means of flight. The Space Test Program (STP) was born, thus pioneering a program that would give wings to the experimental ESPA program four decades later.[10]
ESPA
Figure 7. John S. Foster, Jr. would form what would become the STP program in 1966 during his tenure as Under Secretary for Defense Research and Engineering. (Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum).
Founded as the Space Experiment Support Program (SESP), the office was created to safely and economically advance developmental programs for the DoD services. SESP was organized into three initial categories of development: experiments related to systems or subsystems, experiments measuring and analyzing the space environment, and experiments exploring the benefits of a manned military space mission. The first SESP mission, P67-1, was launched on June 29, 1967, from Vandenberg Air Force Base (now Vandenberg Space Force Base) aboard a Thor-LV2F Burner-2 Star-13A rocket. P67-1 consisted of an Army program, the Sequential Collation of Range-9 (SECOR 9), and a Navy program, Aurora 1, whose missions were to improve global geodetic survey accuracy and collect data on background radiation in ultraviolet wavelengths, respectively. Both experiments were 100% successful. Data from SECOR 9 was used for military target location and mapping while data from Aurora 1 was used in the background radiation database for surveillance satellites.[11]
ESPA
Figure 8. Columbia lifts off for the first DoD STP Space Shuttle mission, June 27, 1982.
Even before men walked on the Moon, NASA and DoD had been analyzing the next platform for space experiments. Early designs for a space vehicle that would “shuttle” humans and experiments into orbit regularly intrigued SESP leadership. However, it was not until ten years later that Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering William J. Perry under the Jimmy Carter Administration ordered STP (SESP had been renamed STP in 1971) to analyze the nascent Space Shuttle as a DoD “laboratory in space.” First launching on STS-4 aboard the Columbia under the command of pioneering space program astronaut Ken Mattingly (who was famously replaced on the Apollo 13 mission by Jack Swigert after being exposed to German measles—which he never caught) in the summer of 1982, the first STP Space Shuttle mission would yield data on navigation, plasma contamination, and the space environment. STP would ultimately fly 242 DoD experiments on 109 of the 135 total Space Shuttle missions until its retirement from service in 2011. Although a useful platform for DoD experiments, the dream of the Shuttle’s routine access to space fell short when launch rate promises failed to meet pro¬jected targets. To protect their launch requirements, Air Force and DoD leaders sought an alternative to assured access to space on more conventional rockets like the Titan. Additionally, the human element to Shuttle operations complicated military space launch.[12]
Classified challenges, the Challenger, and the origins of the EELV program
Well before the Challenger incident and mounting costs and delays at NASA, it was clear to DoD leadership that an uncrewed rocket platform was needed for military programs. Due to the differing goals of NASA and DoD for space experiments, complications arose first in 1979 during the selection of the first group of astronauts for military space experiment missions. DoD had selected a baker’s dozen of Manned Spaceflight Engineers (MSEs) as potential payload specialists, all but one of whom hailed from the Air Force. The plan was that these MSEs would assist during military-related missions and that civilian astronauts would work non-military payload elements. However, as mere “payload specialists” for very specific programs among several launching aboard any one shuttle mission, NASA culture cast the DoD MSEs as outsiders, almost guests, on a primarily civilian space science platform. Reinforcing this perception was NASA’s decision to authorize only one of the 13 military MSEs proposed from DoD’s first roster of astronauts for spaceflight. Among the first and follow on groups of Shuttle astronauts, tensions existed between the military and civilian astronauts.
Ken Mattingly, who commanded the first STP mission on Columbia, later described the relationship between NASA and the DoD specialists as “sour.” Classified payloads compounded this challenge. For example, the control center for classified Air Force programs riding on the Shuttle platform was located in Sunnyvale, California. However, Houston and Columbia communicated over the open channel but did not have a code word selected for mentioning Sunnyvale programs. Code word challenges continued on STS-4 during the seventh day of the mission when Mattingly and pilot Hank Hartsfield were readying the ship for return to Earth. They had just stored the classified checklists in the safe when Sunnyvale radioed to have the crew perform “Tab Echo.” The astronauts, unfamiliar with the reference, opened the safe and removed the checklist to look up the term. A quick review found Tab Echo’s translation: “store checklist.”
During her preparation for STS-33, on which a classified DoD program was flying, NASA astronaut Kathy Thornton remembers, “Training schedules were coded. 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.” On another shuttle mission flying a classified DoD program, Mattingly, Ellison Onizuka, Loren Shriver, and Jim Buchli were required to travel to Sunnyvale to be briefed and ordered to disguise their destination. They filed a flight plan for their T-38s for Denver, then diverted to the San Francisco Bay area. They landed their aircraft at NASA Ames in Mountain View and were ordered to use cash to rent a barely working car and stay at an out-of-the-way low-end motel. Taking a circuitous route to the motel that included several stops and reverses to throw any potential tails, the astronauts eventually arrived at their motel, only to see “WELCOME STS-51C ASTRONAUTS!” with all four of their names emblazoned on the roadside motel sign.
By January 1986 it was already clear the Air Force and DoD needed to return to uncrewed rockets to launch military space experiments. The loss of Challenger and the deaths of Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Mike Smith, and Ellison Onizuka was only the sad, final affirmation. Although DoD would continue to fly programs aboard the Shuttle platform following a 31-month launch ban by NASA that followed Challenger, a faster, more expendable means of launch was needed for military space access.[13]
“Space War I” and the evolution of DoD space launch systems, 1980s–1993
The two and a half years without a Space Shuttle forced both NASA and DoD to rethink the entire American space program. As during the Apollo mission, NASA turned to the Air Force. Systems engineering genius General Samuel C. Phillips had helped bring the Apollo program back from possible cancellation in the 1960s. Two decades later they once again looked to General Phillips, then in retirement, and the Air Force for guidance. Phillips, who was in his 60s and who had retired from government service as a four-star general in 1975, and his Rogers Commission report released in June 1986 recommended the Air Force and DoD focus on dependable uncrewed boost-ers and expendable launch vehicles that could quickly begin launching and begin putting a dent in the more than 25 military space missions in the post-Challenger backlog.[14]
ESPA
Figure 9. General Sam Phillips, famous for his management of the B-36, B-52, Thor, and Minuteman programs, would bring the Apollo program success in the 1960s and refocus space access in the 1980s.
The Cold War was still on in the 1980s, and the nuclear mission’s no-fail requirement had driven the rise of big, expensive satellites with high mission assurance and system redundancy to last several years—if not decades—without maintenance on orbit. What was needed were large, rugged monstrosities like the MILSTARs. The MILSTAR 2 NC3 communications satellite, for example, had a 50-foot (15-meter) bus, a solar array twice that long, weighed 10,000 pounds (4,500 kilograms), cost $800 million, required a $433 million Titan IV rocket to launch, and took almost 11 years to launch from contract award in 1982 to delivery on orbit in 1993. Small satellites, or smallsats, were the realm of amateur space hobbyists.[15]
ESPA
Figure 10. Large, expensive satellites on the MILSTAR model was the order of the day for DoD space vehicles in the 1990s. (Image courtesy Air & Space Forces Magazine).
Programs that suffered the most during this period were those designed specifically for the shuttle platform, such as the operational GPS satellite constellation, the early warning Defense Support Program (DSP), and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellites. Shuttle-specific programs included satellites launched by the Air Force Geophysics Lab (AFGL), descendant of the Cambridge Research Lab. Across the services, the DoD had to quickly redesign their programs for expendable launch vehicle (ELV) compatibility.[16]
Before 1986, the Air Force fleet of ELVs consisted of Titan IIs, Titan 34Ds, and Atlas E/F/G and Hs; after the Challenger incident, Titan CELVs—re¬named Titan IVs—new Delta IIs, and Atlas II rockets would be added to the launch arsenal. Many of these were deactivated ICBMs and made for a rough ride for satellites, a challenge that would soon be addressed by the space folks at AFGL.
Each ELV booster and payload was unique, making integration of the two a months-long process. The Titan IV booster, for example, had to be custom fitted to each particular space vehicle. Payload fairing segments were often too large to install in an off-pad facility, requiring payload technicians to integrate the payload to the rocket on the pad, then install the fairing around it. In sum, integration complexity, cost, and limited flexibility to substitute missions created a call for a standardization booster modification kit. If any challenges arose in the integration process, delays would mount. In every space launch assessment following the Challenger flight moratorium, a key recommendation emerged: a standard payload adapter was desperately needed for rapid and sustained access to space.
In every space launch assessment following the Challenger flight moratorium, a key recommendation emerged: a standard payload adapter was desperately needed for rapid and sustained access to space.
In the spring before the return to flight for the Shuttle program, Air Force Chief of Staff General Larry Welch formed a Blue Ribbon Panel on Space Roles and Missions. The panel was comprised of high-ranking representatives from every Air Force major command. Their challenge: solve the Air Force space access problem. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was well underway when the Blue Ribbon Panel convened, but the role of space for the warfighter, space system responsiveness, and organizational and institutional relationship specifics were still unclear. The final report, produced in August, emphasized space policy that reflected realistic warfighting capabilities under four mission functions: space control, force application, force enhancement, and space support. In February 1989, Air Force headquarters issued an implementation plan that identified 27 specific actions necessary to accomplish the changes recommended by the panel. Among the most important: rapid and robust standardized space launch.
Air Force Space Command (AFSPC)—which was activated a year after the first Space Shuttle mission in September of 1982—was spearheading an initiative to develop a new fleet of launch vehicles that could provide low-cost access to space for a variety of payloads. With funding and untested technology always at stake, opposition was high to any new vehicles; the Pentagon opted for upgrades to existing launch systems rather than promising—but unproven—launch technology. As consolation, however, Air Force Space Policy was rewritten to transfer “space system requirements, advocacy, and operations, exclusive of developmental and, for the near term, launch systems” to Air Force Space Command. On October 1, 1990, all Systems Command launch-related centers, ranges, bases, and the Delta II and Atlas E missions would transfer to Space Command, with all remaining Atlas II, Titan II, and Titan IV missions to be transferred on a set schedule. A large step in operational space for the warfighter had just taken place, as it would turn out, two months into the world’s first “space war.”[17]
Less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in August 1990, Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein invaded and overran the country of Kuwait. Within five days, under the operational name “Desert Shield,” allied United Nations (UN) forces began a military buildup in the region. It was time for AFSPC to try out its new role. At bat was a new Air Force laboratory, one of four research and development “super labs,” that had recently been formed to support transition of technology to the warfighter.
In the early days of AFSPC, Air Force Systems Command had created the Air Force Space Technology Center (AFSTC) on Kirtland AFB in October of 1982. The Air Force Weapons Lab (AFWL), which supported directed energy and radiation remediation and related nuclear simulation R&D on Kirtland, the Geophysics Lab, which continued the work of the Cambridge Lab in Massachusetts, and the Rocket Propulsion Lab on Edwards AFB in California reported to AFSTC. AFGL had studied the atmosphere and space environment since 1945, while the Rocket Propulsion Lab had developed and tested rocket boosters since 1947. AFSTC reported to the space product center, the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) on Los Angeles Air Force Base in order to make it more responsive to its customers’ needs and to focus its resources on timely technology transition.
ESPA
Figure 11. AFRL predecessor, the Phillips Lab, would prove foundational in increasing access to and operability in space.
Four months after the invasion of Kuwait, in December of 1990 the Space Technology Center was redesignated the Air Force Phillips Laboratory (AFPL) and the three AFSTC subordinate labs were reassigned into six technology directorates for space and missile systems, geophysics, and advanced weapons R&D. It was no coincidence that the Air Force had named its new space lab in honor of the late General Phillips, who had passed away earlier in the year from a sudden and rapidly advancing cancer and who had made such an enormous impact in the Air Force and civilian space community. Indeed, at his retirement in 1975 as Commander of Systems Command, General Phillips predicted, “The importance of space to our defensive military effort can only increase in the future.”[18]
American military space power was under the microscope in January 1991 when Saddam Hussein’s deadline from the UN Security Council to withdraw from Kuwait went ignored: Operation Desert Shield was now “Desert Storm,” and the Persian Gulf War had begun. For the first time in American military history, space would play a central rather than corollary role in an international armed conflict. Taking point in this engagement was the work of US Space Command (USSPACECOM), which had stood up three years after AFPSC to command military operations in space, and AFSPC, supported by the space R&D effort at Phillips Lab. The force enhancement capabilities allowed by Phillips Lab space programs included knowledge of weather, strike planning, redirection, weapon loading, air refueling, and floodplain and other geographic information, as did the first military utilization of the Global Position System (GPS), which had launched aboard the DoD Navigation System with Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR) satellite in 1978. Indeed, General “Stormin” Norman Schwarzkopf would highlight Air Force space R&D work in space as integral to his “Hail Mary” tank movement victories. Space forces had proved their worth through the nearly 60 military and civilian satellites influencing—and, in the realm of commercial space, televising—the course of the war.[19]
However, when US Central Command requested an additional DSCS III satellite shortly after the Kuwait invasion in the fall of 1990, USSPACECOM and AFSPC could not act: the launch needed to await completion of the Atlas II’s new Centaur upper stage, which was not scheduled until July 1991, nearly a full year later. This was not good for rapid response. Although six military satellites would join the existing network on orbit during the war, all of these had been previously scheduled months in advance. In the event of an all-out space war, Desert Shield put the spotlight on the fact that the US could not respond on short notice.[20]
Two months after the end of Gulf War hostilities, in April of 1991, the National Launch System (NLS) was created to solve the rapid space access problem following several high-level meetings with NASA, DoD, and the National Space Council. The NLS would form the basis for President George H. W. Bush’s National Space Policy Directive (NSPD) 4. The mission of the NLS was to “significantly improve the operational responsiveness of the entire space lift process, while reducing all costs” by launching medium to heavy payloads using “elements of existing launch systems and new technology.” NSPD 4 indicated this was to be accomplished through an intra-government partnership between the DoD and NASA for development, funding, and management of the program. The foundation of NLS was to pave the way for a standardized system of three launch vehicles, modular adaptable components, a standard engine, standardized interfaces, off-pad processing and encapsulation, and as many standard components and adapters as possible.[21]
The NASA/DoD relationship—specifically the partnership between the Air Force and NASA—had been dysfunctional from the start. Several months after the NLS proposal, a memorandum of understanding between the DoD and NASA was still unsigned. Undefined roles and responsibilities meant no funding, no acquisition strategy, no list of priorities, and no concept of operations. It came as no surprise to either agency in fiscal year 1993 when Congress terminated the program.
Entering the White House in January of 1993, President Bill Clinton’s administration conducted a bottom-up review of the space and defense budgets and found that, rather than supporting starting a new launch system from the ground up outright, other options existed. The first option relied on maintaining existing launch vehicles until 2030; the second option focused on developing a new series of expendable launch vehicles to replace the current fleet beginning in 2004; and a third option was to develop a reusable vehicle. Defense Secretary Les Aspin presented a fourth option that was ultimately accepted: a combination of utilizing existing launch vehicles while building a new fleet and creating standardized systems for both. In November 1993, Congress directed Secretary Aspin to “develop a plan that establishes and clearly defines priorities, goals, and milestones regarding modernization of space launch capabilities for the Department of Defense or, if appropriate, for the Government as a whole.” The stage had been set for renewed—or evolved—expendable launch vehicles: the EELV program.[22]
References
Kurtis J. Zinger, “An Overreaction that Destroyed an Industry: The Past, Present, and Future of the U.S. Satellite Export Controls,” 2014; Chen Lan, “Mist Around the CZ-3B Disaster (Part 2),” SpaceNews, 8 Jul 2013; “Satellite Launches in the PRC: Loral,” US National Security and the People’s Republic of China; Anatoly Zak, “Disaster at Xichang,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2013.
Interview, Darren Raspa with Lisa Berenberg, Jeffrey Ganley, Gregory Sanford, and Peter Wegner, 30 January 2024, AFRL Phillips Research Site History Office and Archives Collection.
See J.P Den Hartog’s seminal Mechanical Vibrations (Dover: 1985). Hartog proposed an analytical procedure for designing and optimizing tuned mass dampers to be used to control the dynamic response of structures. Vibration isolation, according to Hartog, is the process of reducing the amount of vibration that is transmitted to an object. Vibration isolators work by lowering a system’s natural frequency below its excitation frequency, thus making a “smoother ride” for launch vehicles—an extremely necessary component for the fragile payloads contained within the rocket.
Email, Darren Raspa with Joe Maly, 26 August 2024, AFRL Phillips Research Site History Office and Archives Collection.
Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Great Pager Blackout of 1998,” The Atlantic, 25 March 2011.
Journal Record Staff, “Globalstar Satellites, Rocket Burn Up as Russian Launch Fails,” The Journal Record, 11 September 1998.
Edward E. Altshuler, The Rise and Fall of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, (CreateSpace, 2013), pp. 9, 18-19.
Air Force Research Laboratory History Office, “’Breakthrough’ Technologies Developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and Its Predecessor,” 21 Dec 2005.
Barbara Manganis Braun, Sims, Sam Myers, and James McLeroy, “Breaking (Space Barriers for 50 Years: The Past, Present, and Future of the DoD Space Test Program,” 31st Annual AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites, 1.
Office of the Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (SAF/AQ), “A Brief History of the DoD Space Test Program,” December 1993, III-2; J. Ronald Fox, Acquisition Reform, 1960-2009: An Elusive Goal (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, US Army, 2011), 44.
SAF/AQ, “A Brief History,” II-3; Braun et al., 2.
Braun et al., 1-2; Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office, “William J. Perry,”; David N. Spires, Assured Access: A History of the US Air Force Space Launch Enterprise, 1947-2020 (Maxwell, Ala.: Air University Press, 2022), 207.
Michael Cassutt, “The Secret Space Shuttles,” Air and Space Magazine, August 2009, 1-14: pp. 9-11.
Spires, 224.
Col. Charles S. Galbreath, USSF (Ret.) and Poling, Aidan, “SmallSats: Answering the Call for Space Superiority,” Air & Space Forces Magazine 107, No. 9&10 (September, October 2024), pp. 47-51: 224.
Galbreath, 225.
Spires, 244-45.
Robert W. Duffner, “The Origins and Heritage of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Phillips Research Site, Kirtland AFB,” n.d., AFRL Phillips Research Site History Office and Archives Collection.
(U) Book Chapter, (U), Gen. Donald J. Kutya, USAF (Ret.), “Indispensable: Space Systems in the Gulf War,” in The U.S. Air Force in Space, 1945 to the 21st Century, R. Cargill Hall and Jacob Neufeld, eds., (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998), pp. 103, 108.
Spires, 250.
George H.W. Bush, NSPD-4, "National Launch Strategy," NASA Historical Reference Collection (File 012605), 10 July 1991, pp 1-6.
Public Law 103-160 (November 30, 1993), Section 213, The Fiscal Year 1994. National Authorization Act.
Dr. Darren Raspa is the historian and space technology integration lead for the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s space and directed energy technology programs. He can be reached at darren.raspa@spaceforce.mil.
The Best Space Telescope You Never Heard Of Just Shut Down
Gaia
Artist’s impression of the Gaia spacecraft in front of the Milky Way. (credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier)
The best space telescope you never heard of just shut down
by Laura Nicole Driessen
Monday, April 7, 2025
The Conversation
On Thursday 27 March, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent its last messages to the Gaia spacecraft. They told Gaia to shut down its communication systems and central computer and said goodbye to this amazing space telescope.
Gaia has been the most successful ESA space mission ever, so why did they turn Gaia off? What did Gaia achieve? And perhaps most importantly, why was it my favorite space telescope?
Running on empty
Gaia was retired for a simple reason: after more than 11 years in space, it ran out of the cold gas propellant it needed to keep scanning the sky.
Gaia’s main mission was to produce a detailed, three-dimensional map of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
The telescope did its last observation on January 15, 2025. The ESA team then performed testing for a few weeks, before telling Gaia to leave its home at a point in space called L2 and start orbiting the Sun away from Earth.
L2 is one of five Lagrangian points around Earth and the Sun where gravitational conditions make for a nice, stable orbit. L2 is located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth on the “dark side”, opposite the Sun.
L2 is a highly prized location because it’s a stable spot to orbit, it’s close enough to Earth for easy communication, and spacecraft can use the Sun behind them for solar power while looking away from the Sun out into space.
It’s also too far away from Earth to send anyone on a repair mission, so once your spacecraft gets there it’s on its own.
Keeping L2 clear
L2 currently hosts the James Webb Space Telescope (operated by the USA, Europe, and Canada), the European Euclid mission, the Chinese Chang’e 6 orbiter and the joint Russian-German Spektr-RG observatory. Since L2 is such a key location for space missions, it’s essential to keep it clear of debris and retired spacecraft.
Gaia used its thrusters for the last time to push itself away from L2, and is now drifting around the Sun in a “retirement orbit” where it won’t get in anybody’s way.
As part of the retirement process, the Gaia team wrote farewell messages into the craft’s software and sent it the names of around 1,500 people who worked on Gaia over the years.
What is Gaia?
Gaia looks a bit like a spinning top hat in space. Its main mission was to produce a detailed, three-dimensional map of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
To do this, it measured the precise positions and motions of 1.46 billion objects in space. Gaia also measured brightnesses and variability and those data were used to provide temperatures, gravitational parameters, stellar types and more for millions of stars. One of the key pieces of information Gaia provided was the distance to millions of stars.
A cosmic measuring tape
I’m a radio astronomer, which means I use radio telescopes here on Earth to explore the Universe. Radio light is the longest wavelength of light, invisible to human eyes, and I use it to investigate magnetic stars.
But even though I’m a radio astronomer and Gaia was an optical telescope, looking at the same wavelengths of light our eyes can see, I use Gaia data almost every single day.
I used it today to find out how far away, how bright, and how fast a star was. Before Gaia, I would probably never have known how far away that star was.
This is essential for figuring out how bright the stars I study really are, which helps me understand the physics of what’s happening in and around them.
A huge success
Gaia has contributed to thousands of articles in astronomy journals. Papers released by the Gaia collaboration have been cited more than 20,000 times in total.
It’s difficult to express how revolutionary Gaia has been for astronomy, but we can let the numbers speak for themselves. Around five astronomy journal articles are published every day that use Gaia data.
Gaia has produced too many science results to share here. To take just one example, Gaia improved our understanding of the structure of our own galaxy by showing that it has multiple spiral arms that are less sharply defined than we previously thought.
Not really the end for Gaia
It’s difficult to express how revolutionary Gaia has been for astronomy, but we can let the numbers speak for themselves. Around five astronomy journal articles are published every day that use Gaia data, making Gaia the most successful ESA mission ever. And that won’t come to a complete stop when Gaia retires.
The Gaia collaboration has published three data releases so far. This is where the collaboration performs the processing and checks on the data, adds some important analysis and releases all of that in one big hit.
And luckily, there are two more big data releases with even more information to come. The fourth data release is expected in mid to late 2026. The fifth and final data release, containing all of the Gaia data from the whole mission, will come out sometime in the 2030s.
This article is my own small tribute to a telescope that changed astronomy as we know it. So I will end by saying a huge thank you to everyone who has ever worked on this amazing space mission, whether it was engineering and operations, turning the data into the amazing resource it is, or any of the other many jobs that make a mission successful. And thank you to those who continue to work on the data as we speak.
Finally, thank you to my favorite space telescope. Goodbye, Gaia, I’ll miss you.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Laura Nicole Driessen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Radio Astronomy at the University of Sydney. She works with the biggest telescopes in Australia to search for radio light from stars and things that change in the radio sky.
Book Review: Mars And Earthlings
book cover
Review: Mars and the Earthlings
by Jeff Foust
Monday, April 7, 2025
Mars and the Earthlings: A Realistic View on Mars Exploration and Settlement
by Cyprien Verseux, Muriel Gargaud, Kirsi Lehto, and Michel Viso (eds.)
Springer, 2025
hardcover, 452 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-3-031-66880-7
US$179.99
To say that opinions about exactly when humans will make to Mars widely vary is an understatement. At one end is Elon Musk, who has argued that Starship could be ready to send people to Mars as soon as the end of the decade, once the vehicle has proven its ability to perform robotic landings, quickly building up a large presence. At the other end are those skeptical that humans will ever be able to live in significant numbers there given its hostile conditions (as an essay in The Atlantic put it several years ago, “Mars Is a Hellhole.”) NASA has fallen somewhere in between, suggesting human missions might be feasible in 2040s as part of its Moon to Mars Architecture.
There are certainly major challenges, from transportation and life support to regulation and governance, that must be tackled before humans establish a sustained presence on Mars. Are those challenges, though, being overestimated or underestimated. That’s the focus of Mars and the Earthlings, a book that attempts to offer a “realistic” assessment of those difficulties, although it’s unclear if it will sway many people.
“We presume that, as this book draws to its end, the reader will concur: Mars is a harsh place,” the editors conclude.
The book is, at the very least, comprehensive. Its 11 chapters cover topics from the science of Mars to the how and why of crewed missions, including settlements. The book also covers legal and ethical issues, the influence of science fiction on plans for Mars exploration and even if Mars can be terraformed (spoiler: the authors are extremely skeptical.)
Skepticism is a theme of the book, but not an overriding one: the authors of many of the chapters acknowledge the plausibility of human missions to Mars and the benefits they offer. That said, they are wary of many of the promises that advocates like Musk have made of rapidly sending people to Mars.
The expertise the authors offer has its limits. One chapter suggests creating a broad public private partnership to pursue Mars missions that includes intergovernmental organizations like Eutelsat and Intelsat; both were privatized about a quarter-century ago. Another suggests that the “national exceptionalist driver” for Mars missions “may be faltering under the impact of globalisation processes.” National exceptionalist drivers seem alive and well, more so now than at any time in recent memory.
The biggest flaw of the book, though, is that list of authors. There is an impressive list of more than 50 contributors to the book, but they hail from European universities and organizations. What blind spots might the book have from lacking American, Chinese, Japanese or other perspectives, not to mention those from industry? (An exception is NASA scientist Chris McKay, who contributed the foreword with a brief overview of Mars exploration from the perspective of searching for evidence of life there.)
“We presume that, as this book draws to its end, the reader will concur: Mars is a harsh place,” the editors conclude in the book’s final chapter. They envision a future where Mars may be like Antarctica, “with heroic expeditions and, perhaps, permanent research stations,” but with humanity’s future tied to the Earth for centuries to come. It’s unlikely, though, to be the last word on the topic.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
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Could Mankind Survive The Meteor That Destroyed The Dinosaurs?
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HK Hagol
Mar 2
Could mankind survive the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs?
The species Homo sapiens? It could and almost certainly would.
Bad news for everyone; minor hiccup for humanity as a whole:
The K-Pg impactor would have killed in the following ways:
*The physical impact would have annihilated everything within a thousand miles.
*Ejecta would have rained down globally - ie, in all areas, but not in most specitif locations, of course - killing directly and starting fires all over the planet.
*The global earthquake at magnitudes 11 and 12 would have been apocalyptic.
*A massive temperature drop due to all the debris (an estimated 25 trillion tons) sent into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, worsened by smoke from the global fires.
*Years later, when most of the debris had settled back to the surface, the huge influx of carbon dioxide caused by the pulverization of trillions of tons of carbonate rocks, would have caused a global greenhouse effect and massive temperature spikes.
Genarally, a lot of bad news. But here’s the good news for Homo Sapiens. Remember, I am speaking of the species here, not individuals. There would be a whole lot of suck for everyone as a person but the species would endure, for several reasons.
First, there are more than eight billion of us. Kill off 99% and there are still ~80 million. Kill off 99% of them - ie, 99.99% of everyone in the first place - and there are still ~800,000 of us. Think that’s not so many? No, it’s a pretty good population for a random species of megafauna. For example, it’s about 7x the number of brown bears in the world, and they’re doing quite well as a species. Losing 9999 out of every 10000 people and still having a healty population gives one hell of a numerical buffer.
Second, we’d be aware of what’s happening and able to react accordingly. Isolated populations can go underground. There would be a technological collapse, but foods stores would allow survivors to get back on their feet. Insects, worms and snails thrived in the wake of the impact, as those species largely feed on dead matter. They would provide an enduring food supply. Freshwater ecosystems tended to be relatively unaffected by the extinction event, and would provide food as well. Wood-burning would persist as a power source, and surely primitive hydro would make a big comeback. Again, the massive depopulation would mean far fewer people needing supplies.
People endure. Yes, I know, people will posture with their “Well, *I* woudn’t want to live that way!”. But the fact is, when faced with life or death, people almost always choose the former. The legions of people who crawled out of concentration camps weighing 71 pounds and having seen their entire familes wiped out testifies to this. The Black Death killed a third of Europe, and over half of some regions. Survivors went on. The Toba supereruption? The Storegga slide megatsunamis? The Three Kingdoms wars? People endured.
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Ryan Smith
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Our Icy Moon
Icy Moon
There might be more ice on the Moon than previously thought.
A previous study had already proved the existence of water ice on the Moon. However, due to large variations in surface temperature, this was only the case close to the surface in the lunar polar regions.
Now, direct measurements taken by India’s Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lunar lander have likely confirmed the existence of ice a few centimeters beneath the satellite’s surface in regions away from the poles, Cosmos Magazine explained.
In a new study, researchers analyzed temperatures measured to a depth of about four inches beneath the surface using the ChaSte probe on board the Chandrayaan-3 Vikram.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully landed on the lunar surface at 69 degrees south, the latitude that crosses Antarctica on Earth – a perfect location to study if water ice can exist away from the poles, researchers said.
At the landing point – consisting of “a Sun-facing slope angled at six degrees” – the researchers found the highest temperatures to be about 180 degrees Fahrenheit and the lowest about -274 degrees Fahrenheit at night.
Barely a meter away from the touching-down point – at a flat surface – the highest temperature was 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
Data collected by the lander was used to develop a model of how slope angle can affect temperatures at polar latitudes on the Moon.
The team found that if a slope is facing away from the Sun toward the Moon’s nearest pole and at an angle greater than 14 degrees, it might be cold enough for ice to accumulate closer to the surface.
High-latitude regions are easier to explore compared to those closer to the poles, and they might be the place to look to find water ice in future long-term, crewed missions that will rely on local sources of water.
“Water in liquid form cannot exist on the lunar surface because of (an) ultra-high vacuum,” said lead study author Durga Prasad Karanam in an interview with India’s Economic Times. “Therefore, ice cannot transform into liquid, but would rather sublimate to vapor form.”
Karanam suggested that with the current information available, it is unlikely that the Moon had habitable conditions in the past. But Karanam added that more data is needed to develop techniques to extract and use ice for habitability on the Moon.
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Spy Satellites And The Ocean
PARCAE images
Launch of an Improved PARCAE atop a Titan IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1993 ended in failure. The failure was reported to cost over $800 million, although it is unclear if this cost also included the Titan IV. (credit: Peter Hunter)
Fate is in the stars: the PARCAE ocean surveillance satellites
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, March 31, 2025
On April 30, 1976, an Atlas F rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying a new type of satellite into space. Upon reaching its orbit of approximately 1,050 by 1,150 kilometers, the satellite dispenser ejected three suitcase-sized satellites that deployed solar panels and a boom that used gravity to orient them towards the Earth. They were placed into a triangular cluster separated by 30 to 240 kilometers from each other, and their orbits inclined 63 degrees to the Equator maximized their travel over the Earth’s oceans.
The secret codename for the satellite program was PARCAE (pronounced “parsay”), although it also had an unclassified designation, “WHITE CLOUD,” picked because the program manager had been born in White Cloud, Kansas.[1] Together, the satellites and ground processing systems dramatically improved intelligence collection for the United States Navy, providing timely information on the locations of adversary, neutral, and friendly ships around the world. In late 2023, the National Reconnaissance Office, which managed the program, officially declassified the existence of PARCAE, and in recent weeks the NRO has released limited additional information about it.[2]
PARCAE was comprised of multiple satellite clusters in different orbits around the Earth. Each PARCAE mission consisted of three satellites, and a full system consisted of three clusters, or nine operational satellites. The satellites, deployment system, and the CLASSIC WIZARD ground stations, were developed by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. By the 1990s, an Improved PARCAE system was developed. The last of the satellites were launched in 1996, and the program operated until 2008, replaced by something better, but still secret.
PARCAE images
The PARCAE satellites were based on techniques developed by the Naval Research Laboratory throughout the 1960s and a key technology was precise clocks for determining the time of intercept of signals. First launched in 1976, the PARCAE system ceased operations in 2008. (credit: NRL)
POPPY leads the way
The Naval Research Laboratory’s first intelligence satellite program was named GRAB. Initiated soon after Sputnik, GRAB (sometimes referred to as “GREB”) was a small ball-shaped satellite equipped with a radar detector. The first successful mission was in summer 1960. As it flew over the Soviet Union, GRAB collected radar signals that it immediately re-transmitted to ground stations on the periphery of the Soviet Union. GRAB revealed that the Soviet Union had many more radars than US intelligence agencies suspected. The program was declassified in 1998.
GRAB was revamped in 1962 and became POPPY.[3] POPPY was a multi-satellite system, employing new techniques such as measuring the difference in time that a signal reached one satellite compared to another and using this information to produce better data on the location of the emitter. Eventually POPPY consisted of four satellites launched together. Like GRAB, POPPY was focused on ground-based radars primarily in the Soviet Union. But by the later 1960s, the NRL began exploring using POPPY to locate ships at sea. Until the late stages of the program, it could take weeks or more to process the data: acceptable for fixed radar emitters, but a major impediment to using satellites to track moving targets. POPPY operated until 1977 and was partially declassified in 2004. [4]
An official history of American signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites indicates that ocean surveillance became a major mission for the National Reconnaissance Office only a few years after becoming an approved intelligence collection goal. According to a declassified NRO history of signals intelligence satellites: “By 1975 the National Reconnaissance Office SIGINT satellite world consisted of an effective set of complementary space vehicles. The low-orbiting POPPYs were busy searching for new signals and using their elegant relay techniques to provide the Navy especially with up-to-date locations of radar-equipped ships anywhere on the surface of the Earth. Going through a constant evolution from launch to launch, POPPY proved to be the best system for intercepting ship-based radars, which were sometimes only on for a few fleeting moments as the commanders used special tactics to avoid detection. This same main-beam intercept capability was immensely powerful in determining the power and scan properties of any ground-based radar that happened to illuminate the POPPY satellites.”[5]
The last POPPY launch, the ninth, took place in 1971. Whereas earlier satellites lasted in orbit for about two years, the POPPY 9 satellites lasted much longer. The program was finally terminated on September 30, 1977. By this time, POPPY had been replaced by PARCAE, designed from the start to hunt ships at sea.
PARCAE images
A PARCAE ocean surveillance satellite. First launched in 1976, three PARCAEs would fly in a cluster, detecting the radar emissions from ships at sea and geolocating their positions. (credit: NRL)
PARCAE enters service
The operation and purpose of the PARCAE space segment was consistent with the system’s codename—for just as WHITE CLOUD had not been a random unclassified designation, PARCAE had a hidden meaning as well. In Greek mythology the Parcae were three sisters, daughters of Zeus and Themida. One daughter spins the thread of fate for each mortal, while the second measures out the length of thread for each. Atropos (“the one who may not flee”) cuts the measured thread of life. It was a clever name for a trio of satellites intended to cut short the lives of Soviet warships.
PARCAE images
Three PARCAE satellites would be carried on a spinning Multi Satellite Dispenser which would deploy two of them, then move to a different position before deploying the third. The deployment sequence was complicated. (credit: NRL)
PARCAE utilized a “multiple satellite dispenser” developed by Peter Wilhem and Frederick W. Raymond of NRL. The MSD had deployable thrusters on arms that folded out from the dispenser and spun it up after it was deployed from the Atlas. It was a complicated deployment system involving dozens of discrete events, each posing a single point of failure. The MSD ejected the first two satellites simultaneously while deploying a counterweight to keep spinning while carrying the third satellite to its position and ejecting it to form the triangle. Wilhelm became a legend at NRL, working for 60 years until his retirement in 2015, directing the development of more than 100 satellites.[6] Lee M. Hammarstrom at NRL developed the theoretical concept and was the program system integrator for PARCAE, leading the development of the PARCAE satellite.
PARCAE images
Three PARCAE satellites were carried on a Multi Satellite Dispenser atop an Atlas rocket. The MSD was responsible for placing them in their proper orbits. (credit: US Air Force)
Whereas the existence of both POPPY and its predecessor GRAB remained classified for nearly four decades, PARCAE’s existence leaked to the press years before it was even launched. In August 1971, Aviation Week & Space Technology reported that the US Navy was planning an ocean surveillance satellite. On May 10, 1976, the magazine reported that a late April launch of an Atlas F rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base carried the “Navy’s first experimental ocean surveillance satellite,” built by the Naval Research Laboratory under the code name WHITE CLOUD. A follow-up article in June indicated that a rocket had deployed three small sub-satellites into orbit, dispensing them into near-circular 700-mile (1,130-kilometer) orbits. The magazine also reported that each of the sub-satellites was “believed to carry an infrared/millimeter-wave sensor,” which was not correct.
PARCAE images
The second set of PARCAE satellites was launched in December 1977 on an Atlas F rocket, a converted ICBM. (credit: Peter Hunter)
A second set of ocean surveillance satellites was launched on an Atlas F in December 1977 into a similar orbit. By July 1978, Aviation Week reported that there were three satellites in each constellation, dispensed by a carrier vehicle. Each of the satellites was separated from the others by approximately 27 miles (43 kilometers) and was capable of detecting signals from a ship’s radar up to 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away. According to the magazine, whereas the first two sets of satellites had been manufactured by NRL, production of the satellites had been turned over to Martin Marietta “under direction of USAF’s Space and Missile Systems Organization, with technical assistance provided by the Naval Research Laboratory.” The magazine scored another coup on May 24, 1976, when the editors published a line drawing of the satellite.
The three individual satellites deployed long gravity gradient booms to correctly orient them towards the Earth. That technology had been developed for POPPY. On PARCAE it was possible that the satellites might orient themselves upside-down, with their boom pointing at the Earth and antennas pointed at the sky. If this happened, ground controllers pulled in the boom until the satellites rotated to the proper orientation and then re-deployed it. The satellites were equipped with highly precise, synchronized clocks, which NRL had also developed for navigation satellites, forming the basis for the GPS system. Tiny differences in time when each PARCAE satellite received the radar signals were used to triangulate the ship’s location.[7]
The early PARCAE satellites were launched on converted Atlas ICBMs, which saved money at first, but eventually proved costly. An Atlas F successfully placed the third PARCAE cluster in orbit in March 1980, making the system operational. But a December 1980 launch of an Atlas F with three of the satellites ended in failure. The NRO began development of the Atlas H rocket, which was essentially the Atlas launch vehicle (not a converted ICBM) but with NRL’s Multiple Satellite Dispenser on top instead of a Centaur second stage. Atlas H was used to launch more PARCAE satellites in February and June 1983, February 1984, February 1986, and May 1987. But by the 1980s, the NRO had already begun work on a much-improved PARCAE that would require an even bigger launch vehicle.
PARCAE images
The Living Plume Shield (LIPS) was a communications system fitted to the plume shield mounted to the Multi Satellite Dispenser. It was used for relaying intelligence information to ships at sea. (credit: NRL)
Adding a new mission: LIPS
In the early 1980s, NRL engineers came up with an innovative solution to make use of part of the spacecraft that was normally thrown away. To protect the PARCAE satellites from the exhaust of the satellite dispenser while they were maneuvered to their final orbits, the spacecraft was equipped with a plume shield. This was then discarded after the mission. Pete Wilhelm proposed fitting it with a communications system and calling it LIPS, for Living Plume Shield. The engineers were given only six months to develop a flight version.[8]
The initial LIPS proposal appears to have been intended as a proof of concept, to demonstrate that a ship at sea could receive a signal from a satellite in a highly inclined orbit traveling in the far north. The longer-term goal was to establish a communications system for sending secure data from multiple sources through a “bent pipe” that would send that data down to users at sea or deployed in the field. LIPS-1 was launched with the primary PARCAE payload in December 1980, but the launch failed and none of the payloads reached orbit. LIPS-2 reached orbit in February 1983, and LIPS-3 was carried in May 1987.[9]
PARCAE images
The LIPS payload, which was deployed off the back of the Multi Satellite Dispenser, used a gravity gradient stabilization system. The boom unfolded from the disc-shaped MSD plume shield, making it look like a lollipop in orbit. (credit: NRL)
Exactly how LIPS was used is still unclear. PARCAE’s signals apparently had to be processed on the ground before being relayed to users, and LIPS may have been used to transmit the processed signals. But LIPS may have also been intended for the relay of signals directly from the PARCAE satellites to users.
In 1984, LIPS-2 relayed data to a Spruance-class destroyer and later to the aircraft carrier USS Midway. The successful test made Navy leadership more interested in the tactical use of satellite intelligence data and LIPS-2 was designated as an operational tactical data relay system, serving for eight years.[10]
LIPS was more than simply a relay system. The NRL led the development of a specialized broadcast format that became known as TADIXS-B (Tactical Data Information Exchange Subsystem B). TADIXS-B not only utilized the LIPS payloads but was also used on FLTSAT (“Fleetsat”) communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. When fully operational, the system enabled any user with the proper terminal to receive electronic intelligence intercepts. By the early to mid-1990s, the system was further modified to become the Integrated Broadcast System.[11] The development of LIPS and TADIXS-B and the specialized terminals for receiving the information emphasizes that the development of many systems and techniques were necessary for fully using the data. The satellites launched atop Atlas rockets were simply one part.
CLASSIC WIZARD
Although the National Reconnaissance Office and the Naval Research Laboratory have only released a limited amount of information about the PARCAE program and the satellites, they have released substantial amounts of information on other programs that help provide a better picture of PARCAE. The satellites were not covered with dishes or large antennas, and some information on the previous POPPY system indicates that they primarily intercepted the “main beams” of radars, not the fainter “side lobes” that fanned far out from either side of radar emitters. Intercepting the side lobes required dishes that could collect more and fainter signals. This also tended to limit the utility of PARCAE—it was optimized for locating and tracking ships at sea, not for identifying new and unique radar signals. Other satellites, with names like RAQUEL and FARRAH, which had dishes and other antennas, were used for that purpose.
Simultaneous detection of signals from different kinds of emitters from a single location made it possible to identify the class of ship doing the emitting and even the specific ship. This hull-to-emitter correlation was known as HULTEC.[12]
PARCAE images
A vandalized mural from the former Classic Wizard ground station in Adak, Alaska. Note the three crystal balls symbolizing satellite radomes as well as the three PARCAE satellites.
The ground stations for PARCAE were all operated by the Naval Security Group Command, which had also operated the POPPY ground stations. They were located both in the United States and overseas.[13] Domestic sites had been established in Adak, Alaska, and Winter Harbor, Maine. In the Pacific, a Guam station was also part of the CLASSIC WIZARD network. Two further stations were established with the cooperation of the United Kingdom, one in Edzell, Scotland, and the other on Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory. Diego Garcia was the only station in the southern hemisphere, although it was still relatively close to the Equator. Data received at the stations could then be quickly transmitted to regional ocean surveillance centers and then, via satellite, to a main downlink at Blossom Point, Maryland.[14]
The CLASSIC WIZARD ground stations were mostly located in the northern hemisphere, and the PARCAE satellites, at least initially, apparently did not have a record and playback capability, meaning that they could not provide timely data of any vessels detected in the southern hemisphere. For this reason, PARCAE was not useful for detecting Argentine warships during the 1982 Falklands War, although another satellite named RAQUEL 1A was used for this purpose.[15]
According to several accounts of American naval intelligence, the US Navy’s ocean surveillance capabilities improved substantially during the 1970s, and satellites were a key part of that. Desmond Ball and Richard Tanger, in their 2015 essay “The Tools of Owatatsumi: Japan’s Ocean Surveillance and Coastal Defence Capabilities,” noted that a major US Navy satellite ground station was built in Japan in the early 1970s, speculating that it was connected to the new Navy Ocean Surveillance System, or NOSS. This was not a CLASSIC WIZARD station, although it may have received data collected by the PARCAE satellites and transmitted through other communications satellites as part of TADIXS-B.
Sensor-to-Shooter via Outlaw Shark
The PARCAE spacecraft launched in the latter half of the 1970s and into the 1980s would help monitor the extensive Soviet naval presence outside home waters. By 1983, Soviet deployments reached a record high of almost 60,000 ship-days, which was five percent higher than the previous peak.[16] But in addition to greater time at sea, the Soviets were also operating newer and more capable warships, like the nuclear-powered Kirov and a class of small aircraft carriers equipped with anti-ship missiles. The massive Oscar-class nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines, which began entering service in the early 1980s, were expressly developed to launch large missile salvoes at American aircraft carriers.
A 1981 CIA report stated that between 1960 and 1970, the Soviet Union began construction of eight different classes of major surface combatants. By late 1980, 17 ships of eight different classes of major surface combatants were either under construction or fitting out at Soviet naval shipyards. These included guided missile frigates, guided missile vertical/short take-off and landing aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered cruisers like the Kirov, guided missile cruisers like the Slava class, destroyers and a new type of frigate. The Soviet Union was increasing its numbers of surface combatants and submarines, and operating them farther from the motherland, increasing the demand for better ocean surveillance for the US Navy.[17]
Whereas the early years of the PARCAE satellites gave the US Navy the ability to track Soviet warships on the open ocean, by the 1980s, the goal became to use the satellites to enable the Navy to directly target ships with weapons. The 2010 NRL book From the Sea to the Stars:A Chronicle of the U.S. Navy's Space and Space-related Activities, 1944-2009 described how the US Navy in the early 1980s sought to integrate satellites directly into their warfighting. According to the book, the Naval Ocean Surveillance Information Center (NOSIC) located at Suitland, Maryland, gathered and correlated intelligence information from all sources that would be useful to the fleet. Shore-based Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Centers or Facilities were located in each theater where naval forces operated. Information collected at these locations was then transmitted as classified messages to submarines, surface ships, and aircraft.
By 1983, the US Navy was facing a dilemma because its Harpoon and Tomahawk anti-ship missiles could reach beyond the sensor range of their launching ships. At the time, the PARCAE satellites were providing data to Regional Reporting Centers (RRCs), which then sent it to ships at sea as messages known as SELORs, for Ships Emitter Locating Reports.
Early in the PARCAE program, the locations of potentially hostile ships were plotted on naval charts with pencils. Ed Mashman, a contracted engineer who worked on PARCAE, said that in the early years, “Much of the data that had been coming in from CLASSIC WIZARD just went into the burn bag, because they could not keep up with the high volume.”[18]
The Navy sought to use the satellite data much more directly, sending it straight to shipboard computer systems. Although the details remain classified, the Navy soon adopted a new approach called the “sensor-to-shooter” concept. Instead of the PARCAE satellite data being sent to the RRCs and then to the ships, the information would be made automatically available to the weapons control stations in ships, subs, and aircraft. Navy ships and aircraft were already exchanging tactical data in near-real-time. This approach meant that more data could be delivered in useable form. The data would also go to the intelligence nodes on land to be combined with other intelligence data.[19]
This new concept required that the satellite systems collect, process, and automatically report the information. The initial plan was that space-based radar would be an additional component, but this was never developed. Captain Arthur “Art” Collier was the NRO program manager for PARCAE for six years. According to Collier, the “intercept-to-report” period had to be less than the time it took to fry an egg.[20]
The new approach required direct communications from satellites to the ships and aircraft via communications satellites. This was implemented as the Tactical Data Information Exchange System-Broadcast (TADIXS-B). It was later replaced by the Tactical Receive Equipment (TRE) and Related Applications (TRAP) Broadcast. Eventually this evolved into the Integrated Broadcast Service Simplex (IBS-S). The Ships Emitter Locating Report “evolved from crude teletype printouts derived from raw intercept data to more user-friendly forms such as automatically displayed maps.”[21]
Initially, prototype terminals known as Outlaw Shark were developed, but eventually this capability was incorporated into standard shipboard equipment upgrades. The Prototype Ocean Surveillance Terminal (POST) was also a stand-alone display system.[22]
Some participants came to think of the satellites as “orbiting peripherals,” or simply “the beginning of a complex system of complex systems.”[23] One problem with understanding PARCAE based upon the limited information released about it is that the satellites are floating in a sea of acronyms of all the associated processing and communications systems.
As the official NRL history From the Sea to the Stars has noted, this was more than just new equipment, it also required “revolutionary changes in the cultural traditions of professional communities. The fleet warfighters would have to learn to work with the satellite-generated contact reports—on occasions and under conditions selectable by individual users—as ‘tactical data’ rather than as ‘intelligence’ reports. Conversely, the national and naval intelligence communities would have to accept that, in many cases, timeliness of reporting can be more critical to tactical operators than information value added by evaluation prior to reporting. Moreover, the intelligence communities would have to recognize that Navy operators routinely evaluate tactical-data reports received, correlating these reports with information from organic sensor systems and other sources locally available.” Ships at sea had their own radars and sonars and data networks for precisely locating hostile threats, and the satellite data was one more input, albeit one that could cover huge areas of the ocean.
PARCAE images
The Shuttle Launch Dispenser at bottom was designed to carry three Improved PARCAE satellites to their operational orbits. It would be mounted to a large barrel that would swing the payloads out of the shuttle bay. The shuttle's tail would be located at the top of this photo. The 1986 Challenger accident led to Improved PARCAE being moved to the Titan IV rocket, and the SLD was redesigned as the Titan Launch Dispenser. (credit: NRL)
Improved PARCAE
Even as PARCAE was switching from the Atlas F to the Atlas H in the early 1980s, the NRL began development of an Improved PARCAE system intended for launch aboard the Space Shuttle. The new satellites were to take advantage of the shuttle’s greater lifting capability. Although no details have been declassified yet, according to somebody who worked on the program, they were squat cylinders, “tuna-can” shaped. They would be mounted atop the Shuttle Launch Dispenser, or SLD. The SLD apparently had propulsion engines mounted to the ends of two deployable arms that folded out horizontally from the satellite body and used bipropellant fuel and oxidizer. Based upon the design, it was spin-stabilized.
Inside the shuttle bay, the SLD and its three satellites would be mounted atop a large barrel structure that was apparently necessary to maintain the center of gravity in launch configuration so that the heavy payload was located near the center of the shuttle’s payload bay. The combination of SLD and three satellites was the largest spacecraft the NRL had ever built, too big to fit in its test facilities. To test the balance of the system and simulate how fuel would slosh about in the tanks, NRL engineers built a sub-scale model of the barrel, SLD and satellites.
The Improved PARCAE satellites were to be co-manifested with Advanced FARRAH signals intelligence satellites that were managed by the NRO’s Air Force Special Projects office in Los Angeles. The FARRAH I and II satellites were launched in the early 1980s and were box-like. They too were also enlarged to tuna-can shapes when the program was transitioned to the shuttle.
To launch both the Improved PARCAE triplets and the FARRAH satellites in a single shuttle launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base required upgrades to the basic shuttle design. A lightweight external tank and filament-wound solid rocket boosters (SRBs) would increase the shuttle’s lifting capabilities. But the head of the program that included the FARRAH satellites realized that these improvements were unlikely to be funded in time for the first launch, if at all, and that his satellite would be short-changed. He arranged to launch FARRAHs III-V on refurbished Titan II ICBMs.[24] It is possible that after the FARRAH was removed from the shuttle, this required NRL to add the barrel below the SLD and satellites.
The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in early 1986 led to the Air Force deciding to cancel the West Coast shuttle launch capability. This also forced the Improved PARCAE program off the shuttle. Because PARCAE was too heavy to launch on the Titan II, it had to use the more powerful, and much more expensive Titan IV rocket. It was the second time that a launch vehicle problem for PARCAE had proved costly to the NRO.
PARCAE images
The Titan Launch Dispenser was developed from the Shuttle Launch Dispenser after the Improved PARCAE was moved off the shuttle after the Challenger accident. A key difference was that the arms that held the propulsion engines folded down vertically on the TLD, vs horizontally on the SLD. (credit: NRL)
The launch dispenser that NRL designed for the shuttle had to be redesigned for the Titan IV. Like the MSD developed for the earlier Atlas-launched PARCAE satellites, it too had deployable arms with thrusters on the end for spinning up the satellite stack. For the SLD version, the arms folded out horizontally. For the Titan IV version (designated the TLD), they folded out vertically.
In addition to detecting radar signals, the Improved PARCAE added collection and recognition of selected foreign communications systems. The data was provided to, processed, and reported by the National Security Agency.[25] Although other details remain classified, the satellites almost certainly were designed to have longer lifetimes than their predecessors, probably five to seven years.
The first launch of an Improved PARCAE satellite constellation atop a Titan IV rocket took place in June 1990 from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. The second launch was in November 1991, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The third launch, in August 1993, also from Vandenberg, ended in failure when the rocket did not achieve orbital velocity. According to a New York Times article, this failure cost the National Reconnaissance Office over $800 million and was particularly aggravating to members of Congress who had just cut $700 million from the intelligence community budget. In their view, the loss of the ocean reconnaissance satellites wiped out their cost cutting. However, the NRO was already procuring a new set of Improved PARCAE satellites.[26]
PARCAE images
The first launch of an Improved PARCAE satellite in 1990 from Florida atop a Titan IV rocket. (credit: Peter Hunter)
The fourth and final Improved PARCAE launch took place in May 1996. The satellites, like their predecessors, were placed into orbits of approximately 1,071 by 1,046 kilometers at 64.3 degrees inclination.
The 1996 launch included a new On-Board Processor (OBP) that “provided real-time situational awareness information to military units located throughout the world.” It achieved this by enabling the receipt of the data by Navy, Army, and Air Force terminals—apparently without going through a ground station first. According to one Navy officer, “The satellites were so prolific in the amount of data they gathered that the fleet just wouldn’t be able to handle it,” without augmenting the system with new tools that could process and parse the data into actionable information.[27]
Up until that point, there was so much information coming in from the satellites that it was starting to overwhelm the users. The new system was necessary to make it manageable and useful. As the Navy put this capability into the fleet in the form of smaller, appliance-sized electronics racks, it attracted the interests of other potential users. The Navy then began working on smaller and more rugged units that could be installed in aircraft.[28]
Although details on OBP remain limited, there is sufficient information on the operations of the FARRAH low Earth orbit signals intelligence satellites to make it possible to speculate about the incorporation of OBP into the 1996 Improved PARCAE as well as later systems. FARRAH and several of its predecessors had a “direct downlink” capability that involved processing data onboard the satellite and then downlinking it to smaller, mobile “tactical” terminals operated by the Army and Air Force, as well as terminals on some US Navy warships (illustrations depict aircraft carriers, which often served as fleet flagships.) For FARRAH, that data was coming from only a single satellite. This capability may not have been available for much of PARCAE’s lifetime because a key aspect of PARCAE’s operation involved the processing and integration of signals from multiple satellites, possibly requiring multiple ground-based dishes and substantial computer power, which were beyond the capabilities of relatively simple, mobile terminals. According to one person who was involved in the negotiations with the NRO in the late 1980s about merging the ocean surveillance and low Earth orbit signals intelligence systems, a senior Army official insisted that direct downlink be included in any merged system or the Army would not support it. The OBP that flew on the last Improved PARCAE was probably the prototype for this capability for future systems.
PARCAE images
Patches showing the PARCAE satellites. These existed before the program was declassified in 2023. (credit: JB)
TALON TOUCH/SLDCOM
The larger launch dispenser required to put Improved PARCAE satellites into orbit enabled NRL engineers to develop a new capability called Satellite Launch Dispenser Communications, or SLDCOM, which had the unclassified designation of TALON TOUCH. This was an evolution of the LIPS payload that was added to PARCAE after the first several launches. The TALON TOUCH mission was apparently initially experimental and intended to provide secure transmission of intelligence products to high-latitude regions beyond the line of sight of geosynchronous communications satellites. NRL developed SLDCOM for the Navy Space and Warfare Command (SPAWAR). It consisted of a communications payload attached to each Satellite Launch Dispenser. A normal constellation consisted of three satellites placed into higher orbits of 1,100 by 9,000 kilometers with a period of four hours. Users could expect four passes from most sites each day, with each pass being as high as 110 minutes. Uplink frequencies were 345–355 megahertz, and downlink frequencies were 250–258 megahertz. The transmission modes included digital data and FM voice, as well as multisignal and spread spectrum. SLDCOM I had a single channel UHF transponder similar to the Navy’s Fleetsat communications satellites. SLDCOM IV was planned to have a dual channel UHF transponder, but with one channel enhanced with on-board processing store and forward.
PARCAE images
The Soviet heavy guided missile cruiser Kirov imaged by a US reconnaissance satellite in 1980. The Kirov was designed to attack US Navy aircraft carriers. PARCAE and other systems were used to track Soviet ships like the Kirov. (credit: Henry Stranger)
Declining threats, satellite consolidation
Thirteen PARCAE missions launched from 1976 until 1996, including failures in December 1980 and August 1993. The last PARCAE launch was in 1996. The satellites continued to operate until 2008.[19] By this time, the Soviet Union had dissolved and the Cold War ended. The former Soviet Navy fell into disarray: some ships such as the powerful Kirov and Slava cruisers were stuck at pierside for much of the 1990s. One Slava-class cruiser, Ukrayina, was launched in 1990 in Ukraine and sat unfinished at dockside, where it continues to rust away to this day. (Another one, Moskva, was later sunk in the Black Sea in 2022.) Naval deployments of Russian ships and submarines decreased to the point where they were almost nonexistent. The US Navy had far fewer adversaries to track.[30] The underwater SOSUS sonar listening arrays were decommissioned. The satellites, however, continued to fly.
By the early 1990s, the separate Improved PARCAE ocean surveillance and FARRAH electronic intelligence low Earth orbiting satellites were merged into a new program. The details of that program remain classified, although independent observers have noted multiple launches over the past decades, and clusters of only two satellites rather than PARCAE’s three.[31]
Changes in the satellites probably coincided with a new Improved Ocean Surveillance System, which From the Sea to the Stars described as “the first U.S. satellite surveillance system specifically designed for the tactical requirements of Navy and other users.” The IOSS provided “surveillance and processing of contacts everywhere in the world, reported automatically to all U.S. users, routinely, without the need to be specifically tasked (compared to the "intelligence" and "reconnaissance" systems that are focused on geographic areas based on detailed requests and tasking for collection and reporting).” It also included “all friendly, neutral, unknown, and potentially hostile contacts (compared to only the "hostile and potentially hostile" targets that comprise the defined charter of the Intelligence Community).” Ship commanders needed to know the presence and movements of all ships in an operating area to differentiate between hostiles, neutrals, and friendlies.
Data had to be updated frequently, and it also had to be provided at a classification level that could be processed by the Navy and its tactical-data systems, since not everybody who used the data would have a top secret clearance or a need to know that the data was coming from satellites. Finally, the data had to be presented in a format so that each tactical user could manipulate it based upon their own needs and local conditions.
As the threat evolved and changed, the NRO and NRL worked to provide new products that could take the intelligence data and provide it in a form that was useful and current. For instance, a new system was developed to aid in the tracking of pirates in areas where they increasingly attacked commercial shipping. [32]
For over half a century, the United States has fielded increasingly capable systems for surveilling the oceans, bringing the data they collect directly down to the captains of the ships that most need it, and into the electronic brains of the missiles they fire.
References
“Navy Ocean Surveillance Satellite Depicted,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, May 24, 1976, p. 22; “Expanded Ocean Surveillance Effort Set,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 10, 1978, pp. 22-23; Mark Hewish, “Satellites Show Their Warlike Face,” New Scientist, October 1, 1981, pp. 36-40.
Ivan Amato, “A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War,” IEEE Spectrum, February, 2025; National Reconnaissance Office Release #9-23, “NRO declassifies early ELINT satellite program, Announcement at Naval Research Lab Centennial celebrates historic partnership, September 28, 2023; National Reconnaissance Office, “America’s Ears in Space,” September 2023.
Amato, “A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War.”
Ibid.
National Reconnaissance Office, “The SIGINT Satellite Story,” 1994, p. 255.
Dwayne A. Day, “Above the clouds: the White Cloud Ocean surveillance satellites,” The Space Review, April 13, 2009; D.G. King-Hele, J.A. Pilkington, H. Hiller and D.M.C. Walker, The R.A.E. Table of Earth Satellites, 1957-1980 (New York: Facts on File, 1981), p. 444.
Amato, “A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War.”
Ibid.
Ivan Amato, Taking Technology Higher – The Naval Center for Space Technology and the Making of the Space Age, Naval Research Laboratory, 2022, pp. 108-110.
Amato, Taking Technology Higher, p. 313.
Ibid., p. 314.
Amato, “A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War.”
Ibid.
Paul Stares, Space and National Security (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 188.
Ibid.
Central Intelligence Agency, Soviet Naval Activity Outside Home Waters During 1983, August 1984, p. 1, CREST.
“STATUS OF SOVIET CONSTRUCTION PROGRAMS FOR MAJOR SURFACE COMBATANTS, DECEMBER 1980,” February 1, 1981, CIA-RDP81T00380R000100500001-7
Amato, “A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War.”
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
The Applied Research Laboratory and The Pennsylvania State University, From the Sea to the Stars: A Chronicle of the U.S. Navy’s Space and Space-Related Activities, 1944-2009, 2010, p. 128
Amato, “A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War.”
In 1993, three additional Titan II rockets that had been assigned to “classified payloads” were made available for other programs. It is likely that these three were originally allocated to FARRAHs VI-VIII. See Jeffrey Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 4th Ed. 1999, pp. 195-186.
C.J. Scolese, Director, National Reconnaissance Office, Memorandum for Director of National Intelligence Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, “Limited Declassification of PARCAE as a Signals Collection Satellite,” July 25, 2023.
Tim Weiner, “Titan Lost Payload: Spy-Satellite System Worth $800 Million,” The New York Times, August 4, 1994, p. 1.
Amato, Taking Technology Higher, p. 314.
Ibid., p. 315.
Amato, “A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War.”
Innovations and Innovators of the National Reconnaissance Office, 1961-2021, National Reconnaissance Office, 2023, p. 82.
See Jeffrey Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 4th Ed. 1999, pp. 195-186.
Amato, Taking Technology Higher, p. 314; Innovations and Innovators of the National Reconnaissance Office, 1961-2021, p. 82.
Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.
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