Remember Sputnik? I first saw it one day as I was out in the field choppin’ cotten (it pains me to realize that some of my readers will not even know what choppin’ cotten is). Sputnik I was a 184 pound ball launched by an SS-6 ICBM by Russia at 9:36 P.M. on October 4, 1957. It was highly polished to make it easier to see, and carried a radio transmitting at a frequency that made it easy for ham radio operators to track. Our government made fun of the rocket, contemptuously calling by the code name Sapwood. The MIT humor magazine Voodoo had a cartoon of a cutaway Sputnik with a bearded Russian inside saying, Beep...beep...beep. A month later Russia launched the Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,119 pounds which was in the warhead range. Although we still made fun of Russia (the Senate majority leader said we were going to launch a better satellite, with chrome trim and windshield wipers), President Eisenhower took special note of the missile. Russia had leap-frogged our expensive bomber system and was becoming able to deliver warheads with their ICBMs. Between 1956 and 1960 Ike sent over 20 U-2 flights over Russia to try to learn Russia’s missile capabilities. Every U-2 flight was monitored by radar by Russia. Our Air Force reported that Russia would have a thousand ICBMs by 1961. Two years after Sputnik we launched our Discoverer satellite, which had a camera and did a lot more than beep. We had a program called Pied Piper which did become SAMOS (Satellite and Missile Observation System). The first SAMOS launch was October 11, 1960, which failed, and SAMOS 2 was launched into orbit on January 31, 1961. The final SAMOS 30 was November 27, 1963, although officially the final Discoverer was 38 launched on February 27, 1962. At this point the program was changed and some of the satellites were back-named. The new program was KeyHole, and the satellites were called KH-1s (Discoverers were renamed KH-4s). One of the most secret branches of the government was/is the National Reconnaissance Office, established officially on August 25, 1960. I believe that one reason for its establishment had to do with flying saucers, but that is another story. NRO developed the KH-11 (By a man named Kennan) spy (photo [and other]-reconnaissance) satellite in 1972. One of the projects I worked on at Control Data involved the KH-11. The KH-11 was used for such things as finding where the hostages were held in the Iranian Embassy and supposedly for observing the heat shield tiles on the Shuttle. It is obvious to me that they were also used to observe flying saucers, but then we all know flying saucers do not exist so I must be wrong, right? netteandme.blogspot/2014/08/part-2-of-10-fire-from-sky.html
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 22:34:36 +0000
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