"In late 1965, the stage was being set for the final study of a new generation photographic satellite. It would be required to provide the resolution of earlier close-look satellites while simultaneously providing the broad area coverage capability of previous search/surveillance systems. On July 21, 1966 proposals for the Hexagon sensor were submitted to the government by both Itek and the Perkin-Elmer Corporation. At 1700 on October 10, Mr. Robert Sorensen, then Senior Vice President, Optical Group, received an important phone call from Mr. John J. Crowley, Director of Special Projects, CIA, -- Perkin-Elmer's proposal was accepted by the government. This is a story of the events that followed."--Introduction.
Presents the recently declassified story of the design, development, production, and operation of the Hexagon KH-9 reconnaissance satellite, that provided photographic intelligence to the United States government, and it stands as one of the most complicated systems ever put into space.
The United States developed the Gambit and Hexagon programs to improve the nation's means for peering over the iron curtain that separated western democracies from east European and Asian communist countries. The inability to gain insight into vast "denied areas" required exceptional systems to understand threats posed by US adversaries. Corona was the first imagery satellite system to help see into those areas. Hexagon began as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program with the first concepts proposed in 1964. The CIA's primary goal was to develop an imagery system with Corona-like ability to image wide swaths of the earth, but with resolution equivalent to Gambit. Such a system would afford the United States even greater advantages monitoring the arms race that had developed with the nation's adversaries. The system that became Hexagon faced three major challenges. The first was development of the technology, which was eventually overcome by the Itek and Perkin-Elmer Corporations. The second was bureaucratic, deciding how the CIA and Air Force would cooperate in building such a system because they each had strengths and weaknesses in the development of national reconnaissance systems. The third challenge was to secure the resources that were required to build the most complicated and largest reconnaissance satellites at the time. By 1971, the NRO overcame the challenges to successfully launch the Hexagon satellite and fulfill, or even exceed, expectations for unparalleled insight into capabilities of US adversaries.
The United States developed the Gambit and Hexagon programs to improve the nation's means for peering over the iron curtain that separated western democracies from east European and Asian communist countries. The inability to gain insight into vast "denied areas" required exceptional systems to understand threats posed by US adversaries. Corona was the first imagery satellite system to help see into those areas. Hexagon began as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program with the first concepts proposed in 1964. The CIA's primary goal was to develop an imagery system with Corona-like ability to image wide swaths of the earth, but with resolution equivalent to Gambit. Such a system would afford the United States even greater advantages monitoring the arms race that had developed with the nation's adversaries. The Hexagon mapping camera flew on 12 of the 20 Hexagon missions. It proved to be a remarkably efficient and prodigious producer of imagery for mapping purposes. The mapping camera system was successful by every standard including technical capabilities, reliability, and capacity.
The United States developed the Gambit and Hexagon imagery satellite systems in the 1960's to improve the nation's means for peering over the iron curtain that separated western democracies from East European and Asian communist countries. The programs were declassified in September of 2011, after which redacted documents and histories were released to the public, including the two contained in this volume. --Summarized from Preface.
"In late 1965, the stage was being set for the final study of a new generation photographic satellite. It would be required to provide the resolution of earlier close-look satellites while simultaneously providing the broad area coverage capability of previous search/surveillance systems. On July 21, 1966 proposals for the Hexagon sensor were submitted to the government by both Itek and the Perkin-Elmer Corporation. At 1700 on October 10, Mr. Robert Sorensen, then Senior Vice President, Optical Group, received an important phone call from Mr. John J. Crowley, Director of Special Projects, CIA, -- Perkin-Elmer's proposal was accepted by the government. This is a story of the events that followed."-- from Introduction.
Developed by French physicist Auguste Piccard and his son Jacques, the bathyscaph Trieste was a scientific marvel that allowed unprecedented scientific, technical, and military feats in the ocean depths. France and the United States both acquired and subsequently developed variants of the original bathyscaph. While both France and the United States employed the bathyscaph as a tool for scientific investigation of the deepest ocean depths, the U.S. Navy developed and employed the Trieste for military missions as well. From its earliest years, participants in the Trieste program realized that they were making history, blazing a trail into previously unexplored and unexploited depths, developing new capabilities and opening a new frontier. Comparisons with developments in space and the space-race between the United States and the Soviet Union often were made concerning the Trieste program and contemporary developments in undersea technologies and capabilities. The Trieste opened the entire oceans to exploration, exploitation, and operations. The bathyscaph was a first-generation system, a "Model-T" that spawned an entirely new industry and encouraged new concepts for deep-ocean naval operations. Advances in deep-sea technologies lacked the "gee-whiz" factor of the concurrent space race, but were highly significant in the development of new technology, new knowledge, and new military capabilities. Opening the Great Depths is the story of the three Trieste deep-ocean vehicles, their officers and enlisted men, and the civilians, often told in their own words, documenting for the first time the earliest years of humanity's probing into Earth's final frontier.
This volume is the story of a photographic satellite called GAMBIT, which was developed to perform at even better resolutions than CORONA and work against specified targets -- an operation usually referred to as "surveillance mode." GAMBIT fulfilled this surveillance function from July 1963 to April 1984.
