Ode to Big Bird, Part 4

Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Gangale
@ThomasGangale

R. J. Chester's "A History of the Hexagon Program: The Perkin-Elmer Involvement," written in 1985 and released in a redacted version in April 2012, refers to several additional precursors to the flight models (pp. 131-139): the Mass Model, Thermal Model, Engineering Model, and Development Model. These refer to the mid-section only, which contained the optical system, which was obviously the most technically challenging part of the bird. I don't know that there were as many non-flight items (NFIs) of the forward or aft sections, nor do I see why there would have been the need for them. So, there may be only the one complete non-flight item that is on display at the Air Force Museum.

As the Gambit and Hexagon programs were closing out in the mid-1980s, we joked about how someday the NFIs would be on public display in the Byeman Museum. It has come to pass.

The Hans Mark interview is a very interesting read. The transcription is rough, people's names are often misspelled, and Mark didn't need to the interviewer who these people were, so they are usually not identified by title. It is interesting to read a redacted document with some knowledge of the programs being acknowledged and others not being acknowledged, and being able to deduce some of the redacted material.

Despite the fact that both Hexagon and Hubble were assembled and tested in Building 156 at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company (LMSC) in Sunnyvale (I saw Hubble being assembled in the mid-1980s), there wasn't a whole lot of commonality in design and technology, despite what has been reported by some. After all, Hexagon was a film-based system, whereas Hubble was a digital imaging system. There is sufficient open source material to conclude that Hubble had much more in common with another classified satellite program. One space telescope looks up, another looks down....

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Thomas Gangale in Outer Space!