Blank Spots on the Map Page 3

  “Are we going to be able to go visit the tracking station?” I asked. I figured it was a long shot, but I wanted to see where and how the people at the Vandenberg detachment of U.S. Space Command communicated with the launch vehicles and spacecraft under their control. I knew that there were a number of tracking stations on the base, the most well-known being the Cooke Tracking Station, also known as “Big Sky Ranch.”

  Stewart chuckled nervously at the question. “Ummm . . . not this time,” he said with a smile. “You need security clearances and stuff to go over there,” he explained. I wasn’t going to fight about it, but I did point out that a lot of that data was freely available from the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) in the form of a publicly accessible database called Space Track. Surely there couldn’t be too many secrets. “Maybe they’re just nervous about people having sticky fingers around all those computers,” he offered up as a kind of rhetorical compromise. Instead, we’d get a nice view of the base Burger King, see a couple of launch pads from afar, and take a quick tour of the base museum.

  I came to Vandenberg because I wanted to see a top-secret base up close. Vandenberg fit the bill. The base is the nation’s “other” gateway to space, the fog-enshrouded doppelgänger of Cape Canaveral along California’s craggy coastline. When we think of “the Cape,” as locals call it, we may think of Mercury and Apollo astronauts lifting off toward the heavens against the backdrop of Florida’s sunny azure coastline and pearl-white beaches. Countless reels of news footage shot at the Cape show expectant astronauts holding press conferences and televised countdowns spearheaded by black-tied NASA launch controllers and engineers. There is far less publicity surrounding the operations at Vandenberg. Although Vandenberg also sits along the beach, the gray waves perpetually crashing into the Pacific’s jagged coastline and the fog so thick that you can almost hold it in your hands are a far cry from the postcard-picture beaches of Florida. And the space operations at Vandenberg are decidedly less advertised. The base’s geographical location lends itself to putting spacecraft into what’s known as a polar orbit, the preferred orbit for photographic reconnaissance satellites. Vandenberg’s main tenant, the 30th Space Wing, is responsible for everything from launching experimental Minuteman ICBMs over the Pacific Ocean to putting billion-dollar classified satellites in orbit on behalf of an agency called the National Reconnaissance Office.

  The NRO is one of those “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” sorts of institutions. It is to NASA what Vandenberg is to Cape Canaveral. It is the United States’ “other” space agency. For most of its history, the NRO was black: Formed in 1961, its existence remained secret until 1992. For years, it was illegal for Vandenberg-based missileers to even utter the words “National Reconnaissance Office” in public. To this day, the agency’s budget, as well as almost everything it does, is classified. If NASA’s public mission could be symbolized by the Hubble Space Telescope, quietly orbiting Earth with its electronic eyes peering into the deepest depths of the visible universe for the benefit of us all, then the National Reconnaissance Office’s mission is symbolized by the fact that it controls dozens of satellites similar in design to the Hubble Space Telescope, labeled with code names like ONYX, IKON, IMPROVED CRYSTAL, and ZIRCONIC. But in contrast to the Hubble Space Telescope, the NRO’s electronic eyes are not interested in the universe’s furthest and most ancient mysteries. Instead, their lenses point directly down at Earth. Vandenberg, with its constant schedule of space launches, is the NRO’s gateway to the heavens.

  This base holds plenty of secrets, and plenty of cover stories designed to hide those secrets. On the afternoon of December 14, 2006, a Delta II rocket, by a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing called the United Launch Alliance, lifted off from Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex 2. The purpose and payload of the launch, known only by the name NRO L-21, was highly classified, although the spacecraft was suspected of being a prototype synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite for a next-generation series of spacecraft, part of the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) program.

  A month after the launch, journalists would learn that the National Reconnaissance Office lost communication with the mysterious satellite. The spacecraft, called USA 193, was beginning to look like a “comprehensive failure.” A year later, USA 193 would appear in newspaper headlines as it tumbled uncontrollably down toward the earth. After its initial launch, USA 193 was in a 349 x 365 km orbit (a typical satellite orbit isn’t circular, but oval), crossing Earth’s equator at a 58.48 degree angle. On February 11, 2008, its orbit had decayed to 255 x 268 km. Eight days later, it was in a 244 x 261 km orbit. USA 193 was falling from the sky at an increasing rate. The Pentagon decided to shoot the malfunctioning satellite down, but its explanation for the action looked like a cover story.

  The shoot-down was necessary, explained the Pentagon, “to rupture the fuel tank to dissipate the approximately 1,000 pounds (453 kg) of hydrazine, a hazardous fuel which could pose a danger to people on earth, before it entered the earth’s atmosphere.” The official explanation made little sense to defense industry analysts. Writing for Newsweek, John Barry pointed out that three quarters of the earth’s surface is water and 95 percent of the earth’s surface is uninhabited. The odds of the satellite hitting a person were “literally millions to one.” In the half century that satellites have been in the sky, about seventeen thousand objects have fallen back to earth. None have ever hit a person. The danger posed by hydrazine was also a dubious claim: It was exceptionally unlikely that the fuel tank would survive reentry. If it somehow did, the fuel would create a gas cloud the size of two football fields and would dissipate within a few minutes. How toxic was the gas? About as dangerous to people as ammonia or chlorine: The National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 704 standard characterizes the health risks of hydrazine as a three on a scale of one to four: “Short exposure could cause serious temporary or moderate residual injury.” “The claim there was a danger from the fuel is not the most preposterous thing the Pentagon has ever said. But it seemed to be a bit of a stretch,” said defense analyst John Pike.

  On February 21, the USS Lake Erie successfully shot down the spacecraft with an SM-3 missile over the Pacific Ocean. The Pentagon stuck to its story that the reason for the shoot-down was the dangerous fuel tank, and perhaps they were being sincere. Few foreign countries, however, were convinced. The Russian government claimed that the fuel-tank story was an excuse to test an antisatellite weapons system (ASAT), which the Pentagon denied. Nonetheless, six days after the shoot-down, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the shoot-down proved the potential of controversial missile-defense systems. If the fuel-tank explanation for the USA 193 shoot-down was in fact a cover story, it was just the latest in a history of misinformation and outright deception that has gone hand in hand with the history of reconnaissance satellites.

  As our white school bus lumbered along a small road toward the museum at Vandenberg’s northern end, an old-timer named John acted as tour guide, telling stories through a microphone from the front of the bus. The retired missileer told us that when Khrushchev had come to the United States in 1959, the Soviet premier had wanted to visit Disneyland but the American State Department told him it was too insecure. As a consolation, they put him on a train ride up the California coast, a route that took him right through this part of Vandenberg. Looking out the window of his train, said John, Khrushchev spied three Atlas missiles towering on the horizon, spewing thick white fog from the liquid oxygen in their fuel tanks. “Those missiles are pointed at the Soviet Union,” an American representative is said to have told the premier. “Yes, we have many more pointed at you, too,” came the reply. “If he looked out the other side of the window,” John offered up, “he would have seen a Titan rocket on the launchpad. That was for the Discoverer program that was declassified in the 1980s. It was actually the CORONA program,” he said, referring to the United States’ first spy satellites. The cover story held it wa
s a research program called Discoverer, when in fact the satellite was code-named CORONA and was designed to take detailed pictures of the Soviet interior. “We knew from CORONA that the Russians only had two missiles on pads and that only one of them worked.”

  I knew that John’s story could not have been true. Khrushchev had indeed come to the United States in the fall of 1959, but the first successful CORONA mission hadn’t occurred until nearly a year later. There may have been an Atlas on the launchpad that day—there was a long series of unsuccessful launches throughout 1959 and 1960 before the first success—but the United States certainly didn’t have a spy satellite in orbit yet.

  Ostensibly an Air Force project to conduct biomedical experiments in space, Discoverer’s true purpose was to explain away the new launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base and to hide—in plain sight—all of the attention-grabbing activities that go into putting a satellite in orbit. General Electric, which was building the camera capsule for CORONA, went as far as publishing a pamphlet on the Discoverer program, explaining how the satellite would ride an Agena rocket into space and how its capsule containing “scientific data” would be recovered. But it would be a while before the satellite made it into orbit.

  On January 21, 1959, Discoverer 1 aborted on the launchpad. Thirty-eight days later, the satellite reached orbit before its stabilization system failed and it spun out of control. Discoverer 2, launched on April 13 without a camera, achieved polar orbit, but its prototype capsule ejected prematurely. The CIA believed it landed somewhere on the island of Spitsbergen, north of Norway. Coal miners in the community of Longyearbyen reported seeing a “starburst” in the sky, followed by a descending parachute. In public, the Pentagon announced that it was not looking to recover the capsule, not knowing whether it had ejected or not. In private, they dispatched a search team to the Arctic island, looking for a gold sphere lying in the snow. The Air Force leader of the expedition, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mathison, wasn’t cleared to know about CORONA, so he didn’t know exactly what it was that he was looking for. Mathison ended the search on April 22, wondering if tracks he’d seen near a likely landing site meant that the Soviets had gotten to the capsule first. Another story about the missing Discoverer 2 capsule says that in the winter of 1960-61, a pair of Russian loggers stumbled on the metal globe north of Moscow and split it open with an ax but found it empty.

  Eleven subsequent Discoverer launches all failed over the following year. Discoverers 3 and 4 didn’t make it into orbit. Number five made it into orbit and ejected its capsule at the correct time, but when the capsule’s rocket kicked in it fired in the wrong direction, sending the capsule into a much higher, unrecoverable orbit. When Discoverer 6 deployed its capsule, the radio beacon malfunctioned and C-119 recovery crews failed to locate the payload. Discoverer 7 tumbled out of control after launch. The eighth flew into the wrong orbit. The Thor rocket booster on Discoverer 9 burned out prematurely, sending the satellite back to the ground. On the tenth launch, the booster rocket veered off course at twenty thousand feet, forcing mission controllers to blow the rocket up with a self-destruct button. The next mission, launched April 10, 1960, went into a perfect orbit. Then the capsule disappeared after being ejected. Discoverer 12 almost made it into orbit before an electrical problem on the Agena’s altitude control system sent the spacecraft and rocket hurtling back down to Earth.

  Discoverer 13, launched on August 10, 1960, was a success. When the CORONA team learned of the victory, they were overjoyed—pictures taken that night show the engineers, cigars in hand, prancing around in the middle of a swimming pool wearing their suits and ties.

  Bolstered by the achievement, the CIA’s Richard Bissell got to work on the next launch, set for August 18. On this mission, Discoverer would carry a camera and film. It would be a bona fide reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union. The Agena rocket thundered off the launchpad at Vandenberg, achieved a polar orbit, and began silently photographing swaths of the Soviet Union on each successive orbit. During the satellite’s seventeenth revolution, exactly as planned, the satellite ejected its film capsule, the heat shield and parachute worked, and an Air Force captain named Harold Mitchell hooked the capsule from a C-119 in midair.

  A remarkable trio of stories came together on the front page of The New York Times the next morning; behind all three of them was Richard Bissell’s unseen hand. On the top-left, the headline read SPACE CAPSULE Is CAUGHT IN MID-AIR by U.S. PLANE ON REENTRY FROM ORBIT. An illustrated diagram recounting Mitchell’s successful recovery of the capsule accompanied the article, which made no reference to the satellite’s actual mission. A subarticle read RUSSIANS ORBIT A SATELLITE CARRYING 2 DOGS AND Tv.

  On the top-right of the page, another secretly related headline read POWERS GETS A TEN YEAR SENTENCE; SOVIETS ASSERT PENALTY Is MILD, BUT EISENHOWER FINDS IT SEVERE. In an ironic twist of history, the first successful reconnaissance satellite images arrived on the same day that Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down near Sverdlosk, received a prison sentence for spying. The 3,600 feet of film from the CORONA mission covered more than 1.5 million square miles of the Soviet Union, returning, in Bissell’s words, “more coverage than all the pictures of that country taken during the entire U-2 program.”

  I’d wanted to visit Vandenberg for a long time. Like so many other boys fascinated by space as a child, I joined the Young Astronauts and collected newspaper clippings about shuttle launches. When they stopped class in sixth grade and brought in a TV so we could watch the news of the Challenger explosion, I sat in stunned silence. I remember how relieved I felt two years later as I listened live on the radio when the next space shuttle mission came back to Earth unharmed. Driving down Highway 101 the night before on the way to Vandenberg, I couldn’t help but keep looking through the sunroof of my car at the night sky, catching glances of the Milky Way, Jupiter, and the star Antares in the Southern Hemisphere. Approaching the Air Force base brought back that sense of wonder about space that has inspired so much human culture and science. For a few hours, I remained in awe of the fact that humans were able to travel into space at all, and, moreover, that it had become relatively commonplace. Vandenberg was a gateway between Earth and the night sky itself.

  Vandenberg’s museum wasn’t much more than a few models and displays thrown together in a dilapidated old one-story barracks. At minimum, I hoped that the museum would feature photos from all the space launches since the base’s opening. If that was the case, I’d be able to learn something about their payloads from the size of the rockets’ fairings. Instead, we got dioramas of astronauts, a model military weather satellite, and a rather terrifying display showing how the ironically named Peacekeeper missile can drop multiple nuclear warheads at different targets once it’s launched.

  “In the early days of the missile programs,” said John as we huddled in Vandenberg’s bare-bones museum, “there was a problem with missiles corroding on the launchpad. They were made out of stainless steel, but not every part was.” Water condensation could corrode parts of the rockets, leading to potentially devastating mishaps. “So the Air Force put out a request for someone to develop a water dispersion formula that would keep water off the missile. It would have to weigh less than paint,” he explained, “because paint is heavy and can alter the performance of the rocket. . . . An outfit in San Diego got the contract and tried formula after formula, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, until they finally got it. And from then until the last Titan Four I worked on,” he said, “we’d wipe those things down with WD-40.”

  On the bus ride back to the visitors’ center, John mused that a few years ago, it was illegal for missileers to say the words “National Reconnaissance Office.” Now the NRO had a sign outside their facility in the old space shuttle launch complex. We passed right by.

  Looking out the bus window, I could see the distant towers of the launchpads rising above the Pacific Ocean’s deep blue horizon. To my left, the golf-ball architecture of Vande
nberg’s space-tracking facilities sat like overgrown mushrooms on California’s green coastal hills. I was in the middle of a top-secret base, but the black world seemed as far away as if I were on a remote mountaintop looking through a telescope. I’d hoped to catch a glimpse of something unexpected, something I couldn’t find in books, in Vandenberg’s published launch schedules, in NASA archives, or in articles in Aviation Week & Space Technology. It was nowhere to be found.

  I should have known that if I wanted a glimpse of the Pentagon’s secret world, I’d never get one by going through the front door. My tour of Vandenberg was like GE’s little pamphlet on the notional Discoverer program or the Pentagon’s story about the incredible dangers of a falling fuel tank. The NRO’s gateway to the stars was as opaque as the surface of Venus. There was, quite simply, nothing to see.

  I was disappointed, but did I really think that Lieutenant Stewart or John would bend the rules and haul me up to a secure tracking station? That they’d let me into the room with the “big screen” and say “Hi, Trevor, let’s take a look at some black satellites! Over there are the Lacrosse/ONYX radar-imaging satellites over North Korea, and there’s USA 186 over there! Want to see some real-time images from one of them? How about we show you the camp in the Iraqi desert where we’re secretly training Sunni extremists to go after Iraqi Shiites sympathetic to Iran? Oh, and by the way, do you want to see the real orbit of MISTY, our stealth satellite? Everyone thinks that it’s in a 64.3 degree Molniya-type orbit, but that’s just a decoy; the real satellite is in a 58.6 degree low Earth orbit. Look, it’s over Albuquerque right now!”