 Significant cash and effort was spent by the Air Force in the early Eighties to develop a shuttle launch web site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Many National Reconnaissance Office satellites required this launch web site. (credit score: USAF) |
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, March 30, 2026
There are few gaping holes in American area historical past, topics that haven’t obtained the protection they deserve. But an necessary and nonetheless uncared for historical past topic is the National Reconnaissance Office’s position in the Space Shuttle program. Much of that historical past stays categorised, however little by little, the NRO, which manages and operates the United States’ fleet of intelligence satellites, is releasing extra details about the workplace’s two-decade involvement in the Space Shuttle program. It was an often-rocky relationship.
| What we at the moment are studying is what the NRO thought-about doing with the shuttle in the years earlier than it flew, after they had been basically throwing concepts at the wall, evaluating what new capabilities shuttle would possibly present past merely changing the NRO’s present fleet of expendable launch autos. |
In early March, the NRO declassified a number of important paperwork as a part of the annual government-wide “Sunshine Week.” NRO coverage has been to declassify paperwork from 50 years in the past, and the NRO is now releasing paperwork from the mid-Seventies. This was an necessary transitional interval for the NRO in some ways. It was a time when the super-secretive group lastly needed to submit itself to common price range evaluate and scrutiny by Congress after largely avoiding that for over a decade. This was additionally a interval when “national” stage satellite tv for pc reconnaissance techniques had been starting to be made accessible to tactical-level army forces. And it was a time when the NRO was making ready to begin utilizing the Space Shuttle, and NRO officers had been asking what the shuttle may do and the way it may benefit the satellite tv for pc intelligence effort. Whoever selected the paperwork to declassify well offered a fantastic perception right into a key transitional interval for the intelligence area program.
By 1976, NRO payloads constituted 30–35% of the complete Department of Defense payloads designated for the shuttle. But in some methods the NRO had much more affect than the remainder of the DoD, as a result of they had been thought-about so very important to nationwide safety and understanding what the Soviet Union was doing. They additionally carried a mystique as a consequence of their extremely secretive actions.
The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981 and was declared “operational” a 12 months later. It served till 2011, with notable gaps following the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia accidents. During the shuttle’s lifetime, seven categorised NRO shuttle missions flew—all inside the first 11 years of shuttle operations—and little has been revealed about them. What we at the moment are studying is what the NRO thought-about doing with the shuttle in the years earlier than it flew, after they had been basically throwing concepts at the wall, evaluating what new capabilities shuttle would possibly present past merely changing the NRO’s present fleet of expendable launch autos. NRO officers did this with important skepticism.
 Launch of a Titan-IIID rocket in the late Seventies carrying a categorised payload. The Titan was then the most succesful rocket in the American stock. Shuttle supplied extra payload mass and quantity, but it surely was managed by NASA. (credit score: Peter Hunter Collection) |
Before the change
According to a July 1976 NRO report back to the Committee on Foreign Intelligence, an early thought proposed for the shuttle was to fly “covert piggyback reconnaissance packages with might be carried routinely on shuttle flights.” There isn’t any indication what they might be, however the more than likely candidate could be an digital intelligence sensor to find out if the shuttle was being tracked by radar throughout its flight. Similar sensors had been usually mounted on NRO satellites since the early Sixties. However, mounting a categorised sensor to an unclassified car that may presumably be maintained by NASA personnel and contractors with out safety clearances, and would additionally carry non-American astronauts, would have been dangerous, and there isn’t any proof that the NRO ever pursued this idea. The NRO was additionally finding out “the potential benefits of the Spacelab capability” to help its actions.
The report acknowledged that the NRO’s coverage on the shuttle was “to accomplish the Shuttle transition as early as is practical without degrading mission accomplishment, while maintaining the security of the NRP and considering the overall cost-effective operation of the programs.” (NRP stood for National Reconnaissance Program.) But this was not simple “because of continuing changes to the vehicle design and deployment strategies of NRO spacecraft systems.”
The shuttle did present new capabilities: extra elevate functionality than the Titan III rocket and a wider payload bay than present Titan III fairings. Other paperwork discuss with the shuttle’s massive payload bay and its skill to hold satellites with massive diameter optics, presumably bigger than the 2.4-meter-diameter mirror of the KENNEN reconnaissance satellite tv for pc then coming into operation. The shuttle’s payload bay was 4.6 meters huge, that means that it may have dealt with a spacecraft with optics as much as roughly 4 meters. Earlier in the decade, NASA had deserted plans for an area telescope with a three-meter-diameter mirror apparently as a result of the 2.4-meter diameter mirror for the KENNEN was already in improvement, and it might make it simpler for NASA to construct what grew to become the Hubble Space Telescope. Now the NRO was contemplating bigger optics.
The shuttle’s massive payload bay, in response to one doc, may be used to hold massive antennas, bigger than these already carried by the NRO’s present Titan III rocket. There are some indications that the NRO finally did this for a pair of satellites launched in the Eighties.
| The newly declassified paperwork sometimes suggest a sure reticence about utilizing the shuttle however couched in bureaucratic language. |
In congressional testimony in 1976, Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush acknowledged that each one NRO payloads could be transitioned to the shuttle by the early Eighties and predicted that the NRO prices could be round $250 million (see “The spooks and the turkey – Intelligence Community involvement in the decision to build the space shuttle,” The Space Review, November 20, 2006; and “The NRO and the Space Shuttle,” The Space Review, January 31, 2022.) But these prices had been growing, and extremely dependent upon what assumptions had been used about the transition.
A November 1977 prime secret report by the House Appropriations Committee famous that the NRO’s transition to the shuttle would have “extremely high costs.” There had been a number of causes for this, together with the NRO’s insistence on sustaining a backup launch functionality till the shuttle had demonstrated a excessive confidence stage, and “that stringent security requirements be maintained.” The NRO had projected that its 1975–1982 transition prices had been $467.1 million, of which $266.9 million was for expendable launch autos to again up the shuttle. This was extra money than the improvement prices of a wholly new satellite tv for pc program.
The report famous that “some knowledgeable officials have expressed reservations concerning the feasibility of optimizing intelligence payloads for the STS. The concept of recovering, refurbishing, and reusing intelligence satellites was viewed as most questionable.” NRO officers believed that their satellites had been too complicated, and intelligence necessities had been consistently evolving, making this impractical.
The mid-Seventies paperwork don’t focus on the shuttle’s skill to service satellites in orbit like NASA later did with the Hubble. However, in 1973, the NRO commissioned a examine about utilizing the shuttle with the HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite tv for pc and that examine evaluated a number of choices, together with servicing a HEXAGON satellite tv for pc that had been specifically modified to have its consumables, together with movie for its cameras, changed in orbit. But there have been folks in the NRO who had been cautious of such proposals, particularly for satellites carrying movie, which needed to be rigorously threaded by way of a fancy path inside the digital camera. Doing this on the floor would have been extraordinarily troublesome; on orbit it might have been practically inconceivable (see “Black ops and the shuttle (part 1), On-orbit servicing and recovery of the HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite,“ The Space Review, February 13, 2017.)
The newly declassified paperwork sometimes suggest a sure reticence about utilizing the shuttle however couched in bureaucratic language. NRO officers didn’t enthusiastically embrace the shuttle all through a lot of the Seventies. This reluctance might be the most fascinating, necessary, and troublesome historic side of the NRO’s relationship with the shuttle. To date, we now have few declassified interviews with NRO officers from this period about their views on shuttle.
 Two DSCS-III satellites had been carried into area on a categorised shuttle mission. This was not an NRO mission, however is the solely declassified shuttle mission. (credit score: USAF) |
The massive push
In January 1977, Charles Cook, the deputy NRO director, up to date NRO’s steering to be used of the shuttle. He recognized 12 planning goals, together with having ample management over operations involving NRO payloads in addition to designing no payloads as shuttle-only. Cook acknowledged: “No NRP [National Reconnaissance Program] spacecraft will be designed in a space shuttle-only configuration prior to the demonstrated capability and reliable operation of the STS,” a reiteration of the “fly-before-buy” coverage. Cook additionally indicated that the DoD ought to keep an expendable launcher functionality. This was additionally vital in case utilizing a shuttle on a mission throughout heightened world tensions was undesirable, or if a shuttle was, in his phrases, “neutralized.” Later on, as plans for launching shuttles from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had been formalized, one in every of the necessities was to retailer a number of exterior tanks close to the launch web site, in case enemy motion closed the Panama Canal and prevented them from being shipped to the West Coast.
| “I was very anxious to get the military involved in the shuttle because it was in fact the most capable launch vehicle that we were building at the time,” Mark defined in a 1997 interview. |
Cook additionally needed the NRO to have the ability to reap the benefits of the shuttle’s capabilities in a stepping-stone style. All new NRO spacecraft or main block adjustments to present techniques coming into design subsequent to fiscal 12 months 1976 “will be designed in a modular configuration (provided the additional weight capability of the Space Shuttle would be advantageous to mission accomplishment) so that when the Space Shuttle has demonstrated its reliability, improvement modules can be added to the NRP spacecraft. This will allow us to take maximum advantage of the increased Space Shuttle capability.”
This interval from mid-1976 to mid-1977 was when the anti-shuttle holdouts at the NRO had been beginning to lose the battle. In summer season 1977, Hans Mark grew to become director of the NRO, serving from August 3, 1977, to October 7, 1979, and then changing into Secretary of the Air Force. Mark closely pushed the NRO to make use of the shuttle.
In a 1987 ebook, with out mentioning the still-classified National Reconnaissance Office, Mark wrote:
During my service in the Pentagon from 1977 to 1981, I attempted to change the insurance policies of the Air Force towards the Space Shuttle. One factor I attempted to do was to induce folks to design their spacecraft in such a manner that full benefit could be taken of the functionality of the Space Shuttle. I used to be partially profitable in doing this, and sure spacecraft had been designed to take full benefit of the payload capability of the shuttle and of the quantity of the payload bay. (It is fascinating that seven years earlier the design of the shuttle was, after all, developed in such a manner that simply these items could possibly be performed.) In addition, I additionally succeeded in getting a few of the folks in the Air Force to consider the chance of constructing their spacecraft in such a manner that they could possibly be retrieved and then refurbished and used once more. There was even the chance of repairing, replenishing, and sustaining spacecraft on orbit through the use of the skill of the shuttle crews to exit and carry out extravehicular actions.
Ten years later, Mark offered extra of his rationale. “I was very anxious to get the military involved in the shuttle because it was in fact the most capable launch vehicle that we were building at the time,” Mark defined in a 1997 interview. “I was very anxious to have the military take advantage of the human capability in orbit to check out satellites before you dump them” in orbit, Mark defined, “then later on to repair them on orbit. We were going to launch satellites out of the West Coast so that you could repair and fix polar orbiting birds too.”
 Hans Mark was Director of the National Reconnaissance Office from summer season 1977 to fall 1979 and pushed for elevated NRO use of the Space Shuttle. (credit score: USAF) |
The newly declassified paperwork point out that the shuttle’s bigger payload bay may carry bigger antennas. Mark pushed for a big indicators intelligence satellite tv for pc that might solely use the shuttle, arguing that it was very important for arms management. The shuttle ultimately launched two of those throughout the Eighties.
Many particulars stay categorised, though it’s also identified that Mark was the major advocate for the Wide Area Surveillance Payload research about utilizing the shuttle to host a digital camera that might picture massive parts of the Earth. This later remodeled right into a system named DAMON to fly a transformed HEXAGON satellite tv for pc reconnaissance digital camera in the shuttle bay, basically utilizing the shuttle like an SR-71 spy airplane. This would have required two or three devoted reconnaissance missions per 12 months. (DAMON was “Nomad” spelled backwards, a reputation apparently chosen by some NRO Star Trek followers in reference to an episode of the unique sequence.) DAMON was later canceled by Congress after Mark left the NRO (see “Top Secret DAMON: the classified reconnaissance payload planned for the fourth space shuttle mission,” The Space Review, July 1, 2019.)
To his credit score, in his 1987 ebook, Mark admitted that the NRO’s shuttle critics in all probability had some extent:
On stability, I imagine that the conservative angle of the Air Force towards the Space Shuttle at the time was in all probability justified. We had been to come across delays and issues in the Space Shuttle program that may certainly name for a cautious strategy. Perhaps the most articulate exponent of the Air Force place at the moment was Mr. Jimmie D. Hill, who was then a member of the undersecretary’s employees and who would later change into the deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for area techniques. Hill had an encyclopedic information of Air Force area techniques in addition to a first-class intelligence that he utilized to the issues at hand. By taking positions that had been usually against mine, we normally arrived at workable compromises that could possibly be carried out.
Slowly, ever so slowly, we’re getting nearer to a time when NRO will start revealing one in every of the necessary remaining eras of American area historical past, when the intelligence neighborhood reluctantly climbed on board the Space Shuttle.
Dwayne Day is all the time researching the NRO’s curiosity in utilizing the area shuttle. He might be reached at zirconic1@cox.internet
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