The complete list of U.S. Reconnaissance Satellite from 1960 to current
days
TYPES OF RECONNAISANCE SATELLITE
Along with the all-important communications and GPS
navigation satellites, there are four other types of military reconnaissance
satellites.
1. Optical-imaging satellites that have light sensors in the
visible light, infra-red and ultra violet spectrum that can ‘photograph’
objects and weapon systems down to the size of a tennis ball. They can identify
targets, make maps and also spot dangerous events like enemy missile launches.
2. Radar-imaging satellites aimed at the same targets that
can observe the Earth using different radar wavelengths, even through cloud
cover, to cover targets invisible to visible light, infra-red and ultra violet
spectrum imagery.
3. Signals-intelligence, or ELINT-ferret, satellites to
collect the radio, microwave and electronic transmissions emitted from any
country on Earth.
4. Relay satellites that speed military satellite
communications around the globe by transmitting data from spy satellites to
ground stations on Earth. Most military satellites can now transmit
intelligence in real time.
All these satellites can be launched into a regular movable
orbit, or can be positioned to hover above a single target on the globe’s
surface in what is known as a geosynchronous (geostationary) orbit
As early as 1946, more than eleven years before Sputnik 1,
history’s first artificial space satellite, went into orbit the US Project RAND
released a remarkably prescient report: Preliminary Design of an Experimental
World-Circling Spaceship (SM-11827).
Although it was the US Navy that first mooted the idea of
space satellites, the then Major General Curtis E. LeMay USAF insisted that
space operations were just an extension of air operations and tasked Project
RAND to undertake a wider feasibility study. The resulting reports noted:
Since mastery of the elements is a reliable index of
material progress, the nation which first makes significant achievements in
space travel will be acknowledged as the world leader in both military and
scientific techniques . . . A satellite vehicle with appropriate
instrumentation can be expected to be one of the most potent scientific tools
of the twentieth century. The achievement of a satellite craft would produce
repercussions comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb . . .
Thus the space race was born.
Little could the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke,
often quoted as having come up with the concept of the communications
satellite, have realised that his 1945 article titled ‘Extra-terrestrial
Relays’ in the British magazine Wireless World would spawn a revolution in
global communications, intelligence, and mapping. Clarke’s article described
the fundamentals behind the deployment of artificial satellites in
geostationary orbits to relay radio signals.
Despite the optimistic RAND report little progress was made
in the following decade. For a long time the USAF did not believe that the
satellite could be a military weapon. They only saw its potential as a tool for
communications, and science. In 1954, the US Secretary of Defense stated
publicly, ‘I know of no American satellite program.’
It was only in 1955, as part of American plans for the
International Geophysical Year 1957–58 that the White House publicly announced
that the US intended to launch satellites by the spring of 1958. This became
known as Project Vanguard. Shortly afterwards the Soviet Union countered by
announcing that they intended to launch a satellite by the autumn of 1957.
After that the pace of satellite development accelerated. In
early 1956 President Eisenhower established an Intelligence Advisory Board, who
urged the development of a reconnaissance satellite. The Air Force’s WS-117L
project showed promise as it offered multipurpose technical reconnaissance
capabilities. The planned satellite included a SIGINT payload, an imagery
intelligence (IMINT) payload in which film from onboard cameras could be
scanned and transmitted to ground stations, and a hard-copy camera system by
which film would be returned to earth via a re-entry capsule. Hardcopy photographs
were important because their resolution would be pin-sharp, unlike the fuzzy
electronically transmitted images, which were comparable to 425-line
black-and-white television at best.
The Advisory Board was, however, concerned about the pace of
the satellite programme, which they believed was too slow to meet the threat
presented by the Soviets. They directed that priority be given to the USAF
WS-117L project and concentrated on the technology of hard-copy film recovery.
The Americans were right to be worried about the Soviets’
progress. On 4 October 1957, to the world’s amazement, the USSR launched a
football-sized satellite called Sputnik 1 into orbit. The global propaganda
impact was enormous as the 22-inch diametre sphere, weighing 190.5 pounds,
passed overhead making electronic beeping noises. The Soviets followed up their
scientific triumph when, a month later,TASS, the Russian news agency announced
the launch of Sputnik 2.
This second satellite was a 507 kg, 1.2 metres-long cone. In
addition to the scientific measuring instruments, it carried a live dog called
Laika inside a pressurised cabin. Laika was the first animal to reach the upper
layers of the atmosphere. The message was clear; if a dog could do it, then so
could a man. Sadly, the good-natured mongrel bitch only made a one-way journey.
Her planned launch was never designed to be followed by a recovery from orbit.
However, the launch of Sputnik and its display of Soviet
technical power caused serious concern in the United States. Any rocket capable
of launching such a payload into earth orbit was equally capable of carrying a
nuclear weapon and acting as an ICBM. America was shocked by the sudden turn of
events, and the Cold War ratcheted up another notch.
Desperate to catch up, the United States managed to launch
their first satellite, Explorer 1, on 31 January 1958. The programme was driven
by the need to be able to detect any Soviet nuclear build-up and, more
important still, to give any warning of a Soviet missile launch.
The First IMINT Satellite started under the name Discoverer
as part of the follow-on work on the USAF’s 1956 WS-117L satellite
reconnaissance and protection programme, soon to be renamed Corona.
The Discoverer/Corona programme carried out thirty-eight
public launches and achieved many technological breakthroughs. Discoverer 1,
launched in February 1959, was the world’s first polar-orbiting satellite. The
first mission returned with 3,000 feet of film (more than the entire U-2
program up to then), covering 1.65 million square miles of Soviet territory.
Discoverer II, launched in April of 1959, was the first satellite able to be:
Stabilised in orbit in all three axes
Manoeuvered on command from the earth
Separate a re-entry vehicle on command
Send its re-entry vehicle back to earth
These characteristics meant that the US now had the
potential for a new technical intelligence collection source, parked overhead
in space. Discoverer 8, launched in August of 1960, ejected a capsule that was
subsequently recovered from the Pacific Ocean, the first successful recovery of
a man-made object ejected from an orbiting satellite. It was Discoverer 9 that
inaugurated the age of satellite reconnaissance when its discharged film
capsule was recovered in the air over the Pacific by a specially-modified
JC-130 aircraft, making it the first successful aerial recovery of an object
returned from orbit. Satellite reconnaissance was now filling a crucial
strategic intelligence gap because, after the Gary Powers U-2 debacle,
President Eisenhower had suspended all overflights of the USSR.
The Corona programme continued in secret until 1972 (the
date of the last film recovery), with 144 launches. The growing importance of
the satellite reconnaissance and intelligence was recognised in 1961 when the White
House ordered that all satellite reconnaissance programmes would come under a
new intelligence agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
The NRO operated several different versions of Corona during
the program’s lifetime, introducing different camera systems and making
improvements. Eventually these so-called ‘Keyhole’ (KH) missions could produce
imagery with 5–7-foot resolution. It was Keyhole imagery from the Corona series
that showed that the Soviets had far fewer strategic missiles and bombers than
had been originally thought. For the remainder of the Cold War, technical
intelligence from satellite IMINT, combined with SIGINT, consistently gave US
officials accurate estimates of how many missiles, bombers, and submarines the
Soviet Union really had.
The second satellite programme to evolve from WS 117L was
called SAMOS, and was intended to carry a heavier reconnaissance payload. Four
of the eleven SAMOS launches failed and the image quality was poor. As a
result, the programme was stopped in 1962. SAMOS was accompanied by MIDAS early
warning surveillance satellites stationed in geosynchronous orbit over Soviet
missile sites. However by 1974 the Department of Defense had developed a new
system called GAMBIT, with a ‘77-inch focal length camera for providing
specific information on scientific and technical capabilities that threatened
the nation’, according to the NRO.
Later GAMBITs carried a state-of-the-art reconnaissance
pack, including a 175-inch focal length camera with a resolution of less than
two feet, and the ability to process, transmit, and receive electronic signals
while on mission, thus allowing dissemination of near realtime digital imagery
for targeting and strategic threat.
As the Cold War turned even more dangerous in the mid 1960s,
American planners conceived a new and highly advanced satellite codenamed
‘Hexagon’. Hexagon was an extraordinarily ambitious project to place a huge spy
satellite into space to look into the very backyards of the Soviet Union and
Communist China. At the time (1967), it was the most classified project in
America. It was also the most unlikely. Joseph Prusak, who had worked as an
engineer on earlier civilian space projects, spent six months waiting for his
security clearance, working in what the hirees called the ‘Mushroom Tank’
(because they were kept in the dark about what their new jobs were to be). When
he was finally cleared and briefed on Hexagon, Prusak wondered if he had made
the biggest mistake of his life.
The massive KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite was the largest
satellite up to that time. ‘I thought they were crazy,’ Prusak said. ‘They
envisaged a satellite that was 60-foot (18-metres) long and 30,000 pounds
(13,600 kilograms) and supplying film at speeds of 200 inches (500 centimetres)
per second. The precision and complexity blew my mind.’ Not for nothing was the
Hexagon dubbed, ‘Big Bird’. The plan to fire something weighing fifteen tons
and the length of two busses into space was, in 1970, almost beyond belief. The
project suffered a serious setback on its first launch when the delivery rocket
blew up on the pan. Undaunted, the American intelligence agencies persisted.
They knew that, potentially, they had a game changer on their hands.
Earlier space spy satellites such as Corona and Gambit were at
least a whole generation – if not two – behind the plans for Hexagon. But
neither offered the resolution nor sophistication of Hexagon, which was
intended to take thousands of high-resolution pictures of Soviet missiles,
submarine pens and air bases, even of individual bombers, missile silos and
army units on exercise.
Later launches were more successful. Early Hexagons could
stay up for 124 days but, as the satellites became more sophisticated,
follow-on missions were extended to last for up to five months in space. The
key to the missions’ success was the satellites’ revolutionary imagery package.
The so-called ‘Key Hole’ system was built around a suite of new cameras with a
panoramic ‘optical bar’ designed by Phil Pressel. Much later, Pressel explained
his motivation to work on the Hexagon. ‘I never wanted to work on an offensive
weapon system, something that would kill people. I am happy that I always
worked on reconnaissance or intelligence projects, projects that secured our
country.’ The result of his lifelong secret, one of the United States’ most
closely guarded intelligence assets, was a behemoth larger than a London bus:
the now declassified KH 9 spy satellite.
One of his revolutionary rotating cameras looked forward of
the long thin satellite as the other looked aft, thus capturing detailed
imagery in stereo, with a declared resolution of about two to three feet.
(Insiders hinted that it could spot and photograph much smaller objects.) The
Hexagon’s twin optical-bar panoramic-mirror cameras rotated as they swept back
and forth while the satellite flew over earth, a process that intelligence
officials referred to as ‘mowing the lawn’. The results were astonishing.
According to the National Reconnaissance Office, one single Hexagon frame could
cover a swathe of 370 nautical miles (680 kilometres) – about the distance from
London to Koln, or Washington to Cincinnati.
The film was recovered by dropping film return-capsules for
recovery. A specially equipped aircraft would try and catch the return capsule
in mid-air by snagging its parachute as it floated to earth after the film
canister’s re-entry. However, the very first recovery of the ‘film bucket’ from
a KH-9 Hexagon in spring 1972 went badly wrong. The Air Force recovery aircraft
failed to snag the parachute and the capsule, with its vital load of
high-resolution photographs of the Soviet Union’s submarine bases and missile
silos, plunged into the sea to sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The Americans were undaunted by the failure. In a remarkable
feat of Cold War clandestine ingenuity, the US Navy’s deep submergence vehicle
Trieste II managed to locate and recover the film bucket and its priceless
cargo at a depth of nearly 16,000 feet.
After that the Keyhole success rate increased and the KH
Series satellites became a vital part of the US intelligence effort, as the
Cold War went into its increasingly expensive end game and America ratcheted up
the price of staying in the fight. The Soviets were increasingly falling behind
in the race for eyes in the sky. By the early 1980s they were unable to invest
enough to keep up with burgeoning American technology, especially as the NRO
developed the Keyhole programme to operate the KH-8 Gambit 3 and KH-9 Hexagon
in tandem, teaming up to photograph areas of military significance in both the
Soviet Union and China. The KH-9 would make the first pass, imaging a wide
swathe of terrain, to be scrutinised by imagery intelligence analysts on the
ground looking for so-called ‘targets of opportunity’. Once these potential
targets were identified, a KH-8 would then be manoeuvred over the target to
photograph the precise location in much higher resolution.
The Hexagon’s final launch in April 1986 met with disaster
just like the very first launch, as the spy satellite’s Titan 34D booster
erupted into a massive fireball just seconds after lift-off, crippling the
NRO’s orbital reconnaissance capabilities for many months. However, by then,
the Hexagon satellites’ early warning job was nearly over as the USSR slid into
economic and eventually political ruin.
NASA’s Rob Landis was unequivocal about the contribution
satellites made to US and Allied intelligence during the Cold War: ‘You have to
give credit to leaders like President Eisenhower who had the vision to initiate
reconnaissance spacecraft, beginning with the Corona and Discoverer programs,’
Landis said. ‘He was of the generation who wanted no more surprises, no more
Pearl Harbors. Frankly, I think that Gambit and Hexagon helped prevent World
War Three.’
Few would disagree. The 1970s programme of Rhyolite/Aquacade
satellites were designed specifically to intercept Soviet and Chinese microwave
relay signals traffic, much of which missed the receiving dish and, because of
the curvature of the Earth, carried on into space. By placing a satellite in a
geosynchronous orbit at a position in the sky where it could intercept and
catch the beam, the US government was able to listen in on Soviet telephone
calls and telex cables during the Cold War. Even the Kremlin’s car-phone system
was vulnerable.
It was not just SIGINT. Jimmy Carter was astonished, on
coming into the White House in 1977, to be presented by the CIA with a series
of pin-sharp photographs of the movement of tanks in Poland in real time. The
images had been taken by the latest KH 11 satellite. Carter was delighted at
the intelligence that satellites could now provide to him as Commander-in-Chief.
From then on the US satellite budget has always been safe.
In 1991, the role of intelligence was revolutionised by the
Gulf War. Satellite intelligence was used to provide warning of Scud attacks,
to target Patriot anti-missile rockets, to provide weather data, aid with land
navigation and aerial bombardment, and serve as a communication channel. The
growing struggle against Islamic jihadi terrorists has also seen a heavy
reliance upon satellite imagery and electronic intelligence in efforts to trace
the movements of key terrorist leaders and identify targets.
This switch from strategic to tactical intelligence has
brought with it enhanced capabilities for reconnaissance satellites. For
example, the US government’s hunt for, and elimination of, the al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden could only have been accomplished with real-time satellite
surveillance.
And where the US led, other countries have followed; every
nation with the technical prowess and financial resources now has satellites in
space, from communications satellites to GPS navigation systems, as well as the
numerous intelligence platforms. Foremost among them is Israel, which,
unwilling to rely on the US for its satellite images, launched its first
reconnaissance satellite in April 1995. Japan has also acted on its own
regional security concerns and launched reconnaissance satellites; its first
launch was in 2003, specifically to keep an eye on China and North Korea.
Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, and Pakistan have all become owners of
the most expensive intelligence-collection assets in history.
Inevitably, much of the work and technology of the satellite
intelligence programmes has been highly classified and we can only guess at the
very latest intelligence collection systems. One satellite intelligence
programme, however, has been well aired in the world’s press: the US-controlled
ECHELON system.
ECHELON first made the news in 1988 when a Lockheed
employee, Margaret Newsham, admitted to a US Congressman that the telephone
calls of a US senator were being collected by the NSA. Congressional
investigators determined that ‘targeting of U.S. political figures would not
occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start’. Later that
year, British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell wrote an article for the
New Statesman called ‘Somebody’s listening’, outlining the signals intelligence
gathering activities of ECHELON. By 1996 the cat was truly out of the bag. Nick
Hager, a New Zealand journalist provided specific details about the ECHELON
satellite surveillance system, claiming that it was a joint
UK-US-Canadian-Australian system that could eavesdrop on any telephonic
communication.
In 2000 a former Director of the CIA confirmed that US
intelligence uses interception systems and keyword searches to monitor European
businesses. This prompted the European Parliament to investigate the ECHELON
surveillance network. The US refused to meet the members of a European
investigating committee, and the BBC reported that, ‘The US Government still
refuses to admit that Echelon even exists.’
According to the whistle blowers – or traitors, depending on
your point of view – ECHELON and its follow-on systems such as PRISM, DISHFIRE,
TURBULENCE and MYSTIC still exist, now with enhanced capabilities to monitor,
intercept, and record telephonic and email transmissions, as well as any other
communications in the electronic sphere. If ECHELON’S intelligence collection
capabilities in 2001 were described as ‘awesome’, then there is hard evidence
that that Big Brother’s electronic ear is today even more powerful: a
conclusion that raises serious questions for the citizen’s right to privacy,
democratic politicians and lawyers.
That the post-ECHELON systems exist is not in doubt. In 2012
a Royal Canadian Navy intelligence officer, Sub Lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle, was
sentenced to twenty years after pleading guilty to having downloaded and sold
information from the Codeword (the security level above top secret) STONEGHOST
communications interception system to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence
agency.
The digital age and modern communications systems have taken
satellite and intelligence collection to new heights, in every sense. Until its
retirement in 2011, modern intelligence satellites were intercepted and
refuelled in space using the Space Shuttle, whose design was specifically
tailored to include a cargo bay big enough to recover and repair America’s
intelligence collectors in space. Intelligence agencies and decision makers now
rely almost entirely on satellites for their technical intelligence.
Today’s satellites still have five major roles as
intelligence collection sources: early warning, to provide warning of an attack
by detecting ballistic missile launches; detecting nuclear explosions on the
ground and in space; photo surveillance, (IMINT) to provide images from space
using a variety of sensors that can see through cloud using synthetic aperture
radar and millimetric radar as well as spectral imaging; intercepting
electronic-reconnaissance radio waves across all frequencies (SIGINT); and radar
imaging to identify and measure any particular equipment or systems of
interest, (MASINT).
Inevitably, the market place has recognised the potential
profitability of satellites. Literally thousands of commercial satellites now
surround the earth, competing for commercial reconnaissance as well as
communications. This broader role for reconnaissance satellites was recognised
in 2005 when America’s National Geospatial Intelligence Agency used information
from US government satellites, commercial satellites, and airborne
reconnaissance platforms to support hurricane-relief efforts and provide
information to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
With the end of the Cold War, private companies even began
to sell declassified imagery as the distinction between government military
satellites and commercial satellites disappeared. Since the 1990s, commercial
vendors have entered the market and their modern, relatively high-resolution
imagery from satellites offer an invaluable tool to commercial enterprises such
as oil prospecting, geologists, weather forecasting, or crop production, as
well as many other applications. And, since the advent of ‘Google Earth’ in
2005, we can now all gain access to free satellite imagery. Google’s systems
are capable of excellent resolution — down to less than half a metre; and even
that is rumoured to be limited only by US government restrictions to prevent
the image quality from getting too good.
Today the NRO and its fellow intelligence agencies operate
ground stations around the world that collect and distribute intelligence
gathered from reconnaissance satellites, both imagery and electronic. Along
with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), with its primary
mission of collecting, analysing, and distributing geospatial intelligence
(GEOINT) in support of national security requirements, US hi-tech satellite
intelligence has reached a new level, providing comprehensive GEOINT for US
military and intelligence efforts, as well as assistance during natural and
man-made disasters, and even security planning for major events such as the
Olympic Games. It was the NGA that was credited by the White House and Pentagon
with providing critical intelligence for Operation Neptune’s Spear in 2011,
when United States SEALS raided a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and
killed Osama Bin Laden.
However, just as satellites seemed poised to take over the
role of image collectors entirely, there was a significant development in the
field of reconnaissance aircraft. In the last twenty years new Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs) have been developed for imagery and signals intelligence. These
drones are significant because they give the decision maker and the battlefield
commander an ‘eye in the sky’ without, crucially, risking an expensive and
vulnerable pilot. Moreover, modern UAVs are relatively cheap, they are
flexible, they can stay aloft for hours and they provide a remarkable
cost-effective force multiplier for commanders at all levels.
For example, at the time of writing (2015) the USAF’s RQ-4A
Global Hawk is a high-altitude, long-endurance, unmanned aerial reconnaissance
system which can give field commanders high resolution, near real-time imagery
of large geographic areas from thousands of miles away. It can carry out
reconnaissance missions in support of all types of operations. With its 14,000
nautical-mile range and forty-two-hour endurance, combined with satellite and
line-of-sight communication links to ground forces, the Global Hawk can operate
anywhere in the world. High-resolution sensors, including visible and infrared
electro-optical systems and synthetic aperture radar, will conduct surveillance
over an area of 40,000 square nautical miles to an altitude of 65,000 feet in
twenty-four hours.
Global Hawk is high-tech, big and expensive; but it is still
a great deal cheaper and more flexible than rocket-launched satellites. Its
smaller cousins are much cheaper still, and these smaller UAVs have the added
advantage of being very hard to detect, and even more difficult to shoot down.
Some are even expendable, designed to be abandoned once the mission is
completed; others are small enough to be shaped like birds. But all have the
capability of relaying intelligence images in real time to a commander at any
level from a reconnaissance patrol to defence ministers.
Even Britain’s cash strapped austerity MoD has confirmed
that the most cost-effective way ahead for aerial reconnaissance is the UAV,
announcing at the end of 2014 that Britain was adding extra Reaper
remotely-piloted aircraft to its forces deployed to fight Islamic State
militants.
In the twenty-first century, IMINT has come to dominate our
lives and the battlefield, from space and from drones, whether we like it or
not. Unless it is undercover, tucked away in a hangar, or out of sight,
nowadays nothing is secret from the eye in the sky that is aerial
reconnaissance.
