Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  Building secret weapons during a time of war was nothing new. Building industrialized secret weapons, employing hundreds of thousands of workers, the world’s top scientists, dedicated factories, and multibillion-dollar budgets hidden from Congress—that was unprecedented. It would become a standard operating procedure.

  The Manhattan Project set the black world in motion, established its footprint on the landscape in New Mexico, in the nation’s capital, and on elite university campuses just as it brought new powers to the executive branch of the federal government. Hiding phenomenal sums of money from Congress had become a reality, a reality that trumped the clear language of the Constitution’s Receipts and Expenditures Clause: “a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time” (emphasis added). The bomb had begun to transform the state in its own image.

  As the war came to an end, scores of nuclear scientists joined Bohr in opposing military control over nuclear policy, opposing secrecy, and advocating for international cooperation to avoid a nuclear arms race. Leo Szilard joined other Manhattan Project scientists in 1945 to form the Federation of American Scientists to advocate against arms proliferation and secrecy, and for international cooperation and the development of rational policymaking. In 1946, the federation published One World or None, a pamphlet featuring essays by some of the bomb’s chief architects, including Leo Szilard, J. R. Oppenheimer, Eugene Wigner, Hans Bethe, and Albert Einstein. In its foreword, Bohr wrote that a new, international spirit of cooperation must take hold to “prevent any use of the new sources of energy that does not serve mankind as a whole.” He imagined a new age of worldwide openness when he wrote that “no control can be effective without free access to full scientific information and the granting of the opportunity of international supervision of all undertakings that, unless regulated, might become a source of disaster.” This new age would “demand the abolition of barriers hitherto considered necessary to safeguard national interests but now standing in the way of common security against unprecedented dangers.” For Bohr, what was at stake in ending the secret weapons research associated with wartime science was not just an abstract commitment to an idea of democracy, it was the survival of the human race itself. The other scientists’ essays echoed Bohr’s warnings, as did the title of the pamphlet. But the scientists made little headway. The secret state won.

  The Manhattan Project was a tremendous undertaking, involving thousands of people, a dedicated industrial base, a black budget of staggering scope, and a network of factories, laboratories, and testing sites, all compartmentalized to ensure maximum secrecy. Although the Manhattan Project reflected the Black Chamber in terms of organization and financing, its sheer scale dwarfed Yardley’s team of code-breakers by several orders of magnitude. The Manhattan Project, more than any other program in American history, was not only a blueprint for what would become the black world, it was the black world’s foundation.

  I decided to make a simple calculation. The Manhattan Project, a project lasting roughly five years from start to finish, had cost $2.3 billion in 1945 dollars. A contemporary sum of about $26.8 billion: a tremendous amount. But here, a startling fact: The budget for the entire Manhattan Project was still billions of dollars less than the present day’s annual black budget. Every year, the United States spends more black dollars than it took to build the bomb.

  In the few short years it took to build the bomb, and with the ensuing Cold War, the notion of having classified industries, multibillion-dollar secret budgets, legions of security-cleared personnel, and entire branches of science devoted to secret science went from being unthinkable to being so natural that few people even bothered questioning it.

  When you train yourself to see secret geographies, the Manhattan Project’s legacy, you start to see them everywhere. Back in the Antelope Valley, among the skyscraper-sized hangars built to house classified aerospace development, it had been relatively obvious. The same holds true for much of the southwestern deserts: the Nevada Test Site, the China Lake range in Southern California, the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, not to mention the launchpads at Vandenberg or restricted parts of Edwards Air Force Base. Closer to home, there were the recruiting letters from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency showing up each year at Berkeley’s geography department and the office of “torture memo” author John Yoo. I had learned to see secret geographies, but I had yet to see any of the classified machines that so much industry, wealth, secrecy, and ingenuity went into producing. On a high-rise balcony in downtown Toronto, Canada, I’d get the chance.

  7

  The Other Night Sky

  A Few Miles North of the U.S. Frontier

  Ted Molczan reaches into the filing cabinet behind his desk and pulls out a faded black notebook. We’re sitting in the living room of his Toronto apartment, a small, spartan abode on the twenty-second floor of the downtown high-rise where he’s lived for twenty-seven years. His two cats, Rusty and Sparky, lounge around on the hardwood floor. Molczan is a lifelong space buff and an amateur astronomer of sorts. A small bookshelf across the room is neatly stacked with books on two subjects: space and math. There’s Men of the Stars, The Sputnik Challenge, The Heavens and the Earth, along with the Handbook of Mathematical Functions, and a worn tome with the intimidating title Celestial Mechanics.

  Molczan knows more than just about anyone (who can talk about it) about the subject of his particular investigations: spy satellites. With little more than a desktop computer, some star charts, a pair of binoculars given to him by a friend, and an eastward-facing balcony, Molczan works with a team of global “observers” to keep tabs on almost two hundred spacecraft that aren’t officially there. Next to Molczan’s bookshelf is a framed cover of an issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology from the late 1980s. He won’t tell me its significance. I assume he played some unacknowledged role in the issue. Molczan has lots of stories; many of them are off the record.

  Molczan opens the notebook and carefully lays it out next to a neat stack of star atlases on his desk. In the middle is a piece of old, yellowed graph paper with a series of points and dates, and a curve drawn to connect them. The pencil points are a record of Molczan’s earliest observations. Little points are scattered from left to right in an arcing pattern. A delicate pencil mark drawn through the dots forms a slowly undulating sine wave. We’re looking at a decade’s worth of Ted’s observations of PAGEOS (Passive Geodetic Satellite), a giant balloon satellite launched in 1966 made mostly out of highly reflective mylar. The craft’s large area and relatively light weight meant that the spacecraft was highly susceptible to the effects of solar radiation pressure, an effect James Clerk Maxwell first theorized in 1871 and Pyotr Lebedev proved experimentally in 1901. SRP is pressure exerted on an object in space by solar energy reflecting off its surface. In most cases, it’s subtle but nonetheless detectable. Molczan learned about SRP by observing its effects on PAGEOS. Decades later, his ability to calculate its effects would come in very handy as he tried to track a spacecraft that wasn’t supposed to exist.

  Amateur satellite observing began as a civic institution, a state-sponsored hobby. When artificial satellites began filling the night sky in the 1950s, the dawn of the space race, the American and British governments established satellite prediction services, encouraging amateurs (and training them) to take up satellite observing as a national hobby. In the United States, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory organized Operation Moonwatch, enlisting and training amateur astronomers to observe and track the artificial satellites that were beginning to appear in the night sky. Moonwatch was an exercise in popular public science, but it was also a pseudomilitary institution, an extension of the U.S.’s Ground Observer Corps, which organized Americans to watch the skies for Soviet bombers. In the years before Cray supercomputers and worldwide networks of military satellite-tracking stations, the government could enlist hobbyist observers to help keep tabs on the artificial objects in
Earth orbit, a kind of citizen surveillance not unlike the civilians trained to spot Nazi bombers over Britain during the Second World War.

  The state-sponsored hobby trained a generation of observers to make highly accurate descriptions and predictions of satellites’ orbital characteristics. At the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh, Scottish observer Russell Eberst became one of the field’s luminaries. According to the hobby’s bible, Desmond King-Hele’s 1983 book Observing Earth Satellites, Eberst was “the world’s leading observer . . . who began observing in 1958 and had made more than 90,000 observations by 1982.”

  “One way to look at it,” Molczan, a tall, thin man with a pale complexion and graying blond hair, tells me in a deep, warm voice, “is that it’s a form of science-based investigation. . . . I guess that it’s like modern detective work, which is also based on science.” The hobby is possible, Ted explains, because no matter how many security classifications and code words the NRO uses to hide its secret satellites, the agency can’t classify the laws of Newtonian physics. The tools of satellite observing are so simple that they are almost anachronistic: a good pair of binoculars, some star charts, and a stopwatch. That’s it, really. To these tools, Ted adds a computer program called Obsreduce, which he wrote to put his observations into a sharable form. With these modest means, Molczan keeps detailed records about a different night sky than the one most amateur astronomers see once the sun sets each day.

  Molczan observed his first satellite by accident one high school summer in the 1960s, a bright, slow-moving object arcing over the night sky in his hometown of Hamilton, Canada. He flips back a few pages in his rumpled black notebook to his first observations from the early 1960s. “8:30, High in the east. 10:20, low in the west.” Molczan was having a rough summer. He’d failed all his classes the year before. Math looked like hieroglyphics, auto maintenance class had no appeal whatsoever (to this date, he’s never owned a car), and his parents were starting to worry about his performance. But he wanted to know more about Echo-2, the satellite he’d glimpsed by chance. Using the kitchen clock as a timepiece, Molczan would walk out in the backyard at the times he figured the satellite should be visible and take observations. As the summer wore on, he remembered a side exercise in his math textbook that showed how to calculate the speed of a satellite. It had piqued his interest as he’d flipped through the textbook the previous year while ignoring the lesson at hand, but the equations and square-root symbols made his eyes glaze over. When it was time for school to start again, Molczan went to buy some school supplies and picked up an eighty-cent slide rule. He knew from watching My Three Sons that engineers used them. That made him think having one might help him learn more about Echo-2. Over the next few weeks, he read through the little instruction manual that had come with the slide rule. By the time school started that year, he’d become enchanted by the power of his new school supply, attempting to regale anyone who’d listen with the fact that he could calculate how long it would take for a ball to drop from his hand using nothing more than the power of the slide rule. “They didn’t yet have the word ‘geek’ back then,” he laughs. Echo-2 put Molczan back on track. That year, he got straight A’s. He went on to become a technologist, analyzing energy efficiency for companies and eventually starting his own business as an energy consultant.

  Molczan started paying attention to classified satellites in the 1980s. Before then, in accordance with international conventions, the United States reported the orbits of all its spacecraft to the United Nations. It didn’t identify its satellites beyond their international designation numbers, but the data was public. That changed in the summer of 1983, when the Reagan administration abruptly and inexplicably stopped publishing up-to-date information about the orbital characteristics of its military and intelligence satellites. In the meantime, the Thatcher government was rapidly dismantling Britain’s prediction service. The sudden policy reversals on either side of the Atlantic created an unintended challenge for the teams of highly skilled satellite observers whose hobby now seemed to serve no purpose: Could they identify and maintain accurate orbital data for spacecraft that had disappeared from official maps? Molczan, Eberst, and others began mapping the “other night sky”—the mysterious, secret objects in orbit around Earth.

  Satellites come in all shapes and sizes, and dwell in all sorts of different orbits, depending on their particular job. The ones in low Earth orbit are visible just after twilight and just before dawn, gliding from north to south or south to north in what’s known as a polar orbit. But there are many more that can’t be seen with an unaided eye. Perched in stationary orbits 22,241 miles above Earth’s surface, the faintest objects in the other night sky are the geosynchronous satellites. From such a high vantage point, a reconnaissance satellite is able to provide coverage of about half the planet. Geosynchronous eavesdropping spacecraft have code names like MAGNUM, MENTOR, ADVANCED ORION, and MERCURY, while data-relay satellites in similar orbits purportedly have code names like NEMESIS and QUASAR. Then there are the military communication satellites of the MILSTAR constellation, perched on opposite sides of Earth: MILSTAR 5, for example, is parked on the equator over eastern Africa, about halfway between Nairobi and Mogadishu, while MILSTAR 6 hovers over the opposite side of the globe near the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. But one of the MILSTAR birds is visible with binoculars in the Southern Hemisphere as it arcs through the sky. MILSTAR 3 isn’t in a geosynchronous orbit. It is a corpse. The billion-dollar satellite spun into a useless orbit during its 1999 launch when someone entered the number -0.1992476 into the software controlling its “roll rate filter constant.” The correct number was - 1.992476. The cost of the misplaced decimal point? 800 million dollars for the satellite and $433 million for the rocket.

  Just visible to the unaided eye at an altitude of about 1,100 km are the Naval Ocean Surveillance Satellites (code-named PARCAE after Jupiter’s three daughters), designed to track naval vessels by eavesdropping on shortwave and other transmissions. The NOSS satellites cruise across the night sky in formations of twos and threes, appearing as points of light moving in a triangular formation. In other words, they look like a late-generation UFO or super-secret delta-winged aircraft with a cloaking device. In fact, they are so easy to mistake for UFOs or black aircraft that UFO researchers have come to realize that a great deal of “black triangle” sightings can be explained by the PARCAE constellations.

  The kings of the other night sky, however, are the imaging satellites. For an hour or two after sunset or in the predawn morning, these low-Earth-orbiting spacecraft appear as some of the brightest objects in the sky. The size of school buses, their polished hulls light up like meteors when they reflect sunlight toward the earth below. There are two basic variations of imaging satellites: those that use photographic imaging methods and those that use something called “synthetic aperture radar.” The primary photographic satellites are the KH series, namely USA 116, USA 129, USA 161, and USA 186, which circle the globe every couple of hours at altitudes between one hundred and six hundred miles.

  Even basic facts about imaging satellites, such as their names, are hard to come by: Are the contemporary “big birds” late-model eleventh-generation KH-class satellites, or do they represent an entirely new generation? If they’re updated KH-11s (KH-11Bs), then they probably go by the code names IMPROVED CRYSTAL (or ADVANCED CRYSTAL) and IKON. If they’re an entirely new generation, their manufacturer’s designation would be KH-12. Among satellite observers, the consensus is that they probably bear the manufacturer’s designation KH-11B, but for the purposes of amateur catalogs, it’s common to find them described as KH- 12s. Though the question itself might be moot: According to historian Jeffrey Richelson, after the KEYHOLE (KH) code name became publicly known, “the NRO decided to abandon such designations and refer to the satellites by a purely random numbering scheme.”

  The KEYHOLE’s cousins in the night sky are the ONYX imaging satellites, sometimes known by the old code name LACROSSE,
whose ground controllers and engineers sport mission patches with a pair of owl eyes along with the phrase “We Own the Night.” As of this writing, there are four ONYX satellites in low Earth orbits around Earth: ONYX 2, 3, 4, and 5. They appear as majestic points of orange light moving across the sky. But one of these birds is not like the others. ONYX 5 (launched April 30, 2005) has a tinge of white to its color. More interestingly, ONYX 5 has a proclivity for doing what satellite observers call a “disappearing trick,” a source of curiosity, if not heated debate, on satellite-observing Listservs. ONYX 5 will often appear at a predicted moment in a predicted place, shine brightly as it moves across the night sky, and then suddenly vanish for no apparent reason, only to reappear on its previous track a few seconds later. The disappearing trick isn’t consistent in any way. Satellite observers have so far failed to predict when it’s going to happen, and the amount of time that the spacecraft disappears isn’t consistent either.

  The ONYX satellites are designed to “see” at night and through cloud cover, hence their controllers’ motto. To do this, they use synthetic aperture radar to shoot microwaves down at Earth, measure the reflections, and create a composite image from the result. It’s the same basic idea as radar, hence the name. If the Hubble Space Telescope is a white version of a KEYHOLE, then a white version of the ONYX is the Magellan probe, launched on May 4, 1989, from the space shuttle Atlantis (five months earlier, Atlantis had deployed ONYX 1). Its mission was to map the surface of Venus, using its SAR to see through the dense clouds covering the totality of the planet.