Ode to Little Bird

Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Gangale
@ThomasGangale

Lockheed was involved in both the KH-8 Gambit and KH-9 Hexagon photoreconnaissance satellite programs. Originally they were managed separately, but by the time I was briefed in in 1982, the programs had been combined on both the contractor side and the government side. Gambit originally had the program number P-50, and Hexagon had been P-95. They were combined as P-950, with Hexagon being P-950A and Gambit being P-950B.

P-50, P-95, P-950 were "white world" program numbers; there were also "black world" program numbers, and all of these contracts were budgeted separately. A lot of work on these vehicles could be done in the unclassified environment, and therefore less expensively because the government didn't need the do the Single Scope Background Investigations on these people, which could take up to a year to complete. It was only in later stages of assembly and testing that the vehicles disappeared into the "black world," where it was worked on by the Byeman-briefed workforce. Thus, I saw Hexagon SV-20 in the "white world" a year before I was Byeman-briefed.

The KH-8 Gambit photoreconnaissance satellite wasn't as much of a big deal at Lockheed compared to the KH-9 Hexagon, and not just because of its smaller size. The only part of the vehicle that was assembled and tested in Sunnyvale was the basic Agena upper stage, which was unclassified and Lockheed built hundreds of them, and the roll joint, which was classified. Most often, I saw the vehicle in the "white world," and the roll joint was covered up with black visqueen. The front end of the vehicle, i.e. the camera and the two buckets, were mated to the roll joint at Vandenberg; I never saw them in Sunnyvale.

The roll joint was essentially a device for stabilizing the vehicle while the camera was operating. Since I never saw the camera system, and I haven't yet read the recently declassified documents, I can only speculate as an engineer according to physics. If the camera was a rotating system like on Hexagon, then the rotation would have caused a rolling moment on the entire vehicle.

It is pretty obvious that the roll joint was designed to counterrotate to cancel out the roll moment. However, since the camera's center of moment and the roll joint's center of moment were at two different points along the X-axis of the spacecraft, the counterrotations would have caused a pitch and a yaw. I deduce that the "black magic" of the roll joint was to also cancel out these moments. Pretty cool. The Hexagon didn't need such a device because it had two cameras that counterrotated, and they were at the same position on the X-axis.

Gambit was a very low-flying bird. On-orbit, the Agena engine was fired every few days to boost the vehicle into a slightly higher orbit, otherwise the orbit would have decayed due to atmospheric drag. I heard that there was measurable heating on the nose of the vehicle due to friction. This was not a problem since the nose of the vehicle was the heat shield of a film return bucket.

More Declassified Drawings of Manned Orbiting Laboratory (Dorian)
Hexadorian, the Ten-Bucket Abomination

Thomas Gangale in Outer Space!