Hans Mark states on p. 18 of his 1997 interview, "...we wanted to have a payload on the shuttle, to use the shuttle as [an] intelligence bird. The idea then, and this was [director of special projects, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force Maj. Gen. John E.] Kulpa's idea, was to modify the last Hexagon, to put it in the payload bay, and to be something that you carry up, and then bring back.... I don't remember the code name. That was never done...."
From the context of the interview, this seems to have been in 1980. By the time I was briefed in, the idea had changed, probably due to delays in getting Vandenberg SLC-6 ready for Shuttle launches. In the version I heard, probably in 1984, the scenario was to launch a Shuttle out of the Cape into a sun-synchronous orbit to retrieve the last Hexagon satellite. There are some serious barriers to a sun-synchronous launch from the Cape, which is why it's never been done.
You can't launch to the south, as is done from Vandenberg, because the vehicle would overfly Cuba during the launch phase, presenting a serious risk to population and property, not to mention the diplomatic fallout. I haven't seen the calculations on where the Solid Rocket Boosters would have landed, but it seems to me that it would have been near Cuba.
Launching to the north from the Cape has its own set of problems. The Shuttle would need to fly north-northeast off the coast of Florida and Georgia until Solid Rocket Booster separation. Then the vehicle would need to turn inland, heading north-northwest, crossing the coastline near Charleston, because a sun-synchronous orbit is slightly retrograde. External Tank separation would have occurred over Detroit, more or less.
The payload penalty for launching into a sun-synchronous orbit versus a low-inclination orbit (which takes advantage of Earth's rotational velocity) is bad enough, but the penalty for flying a dog-leg trajectory into a sun-synchronous orbit would have been enormous. Probably the Shuttle's payload bay would have had to be essentially empty.
But the fun wasn't over yet. Since this was to be a highly classified mission, it wasn't going to be well publicized. About 15 minutes later, the Soviets would have seen two very large blips (the Orbiter and the External Tank) popping up from the Canadian side of the north pole, without prior warning, heading straight at them.
Some Soviet leaders were convinced that the Shuttle was capable of deploying nuclear warheads from orbit. The External Tank would have reentered somewhere over Siberia, Mongolia, or China. Now, this idea was being floated a year or so after the Able Archer 83 scare, when the Soviets wondered whether a NATO command post exercise was a prelude to launching a preemptive nuclear strike.
Anyway, once in orbit, the Orbiter would have chased down and grappled the Hexagon, and returned to Earth with the satellite in its payload bay, whereupon it would have been refurbished to be sent back into orbit on a Titan 34D, possibly to be retrieved, refurbished, and relaunched again. But film was passé by then, so the US government wasn't much interested in keeping the Hexagon program alive. It had served its purpose well, but the future belonged to a digital-imagery system.
Go to Part 4
Go to Part 6
No comments:
Post a Comment