Science: All-Seeing Satellite

Just two hours after Ham the chimp began his pioneering trip through space, another U.S. missile, bearing an earth satellite, was launched from Point Arguello Naval Missile Facility, 170 miles northwest of Los Angeles. It was an Air Force Samos (from Satellite and Missile Observation System), and it went into an almost perfectly circular polar orbit 300-350 miles above the earth.

Other facts and figures were known: the launcher was an Atlas, and the second stage was an Agena, which spun into orbit, weighed some 4,000 Ibs., including 2,000 Ibs. of instruments and equipment. But the most significant thing about last week’s Samos was the secrecy that shrouded it. Said an official Air Force spokesman in a masterpiece of Pentagonese: “The purpose of the initial Samos flights is component testing bearing on the engineering feasibility of obtaining an observation capability from an orbiting satellite.”

It was not always thus. Less than a year ago, the Air Force was talking fairly freely about its Samos program. Samos was quite frankly designed to be a “spy in the sky”—a satellite carrying telescopic camera equipment that could take pictures of the whole earth. But then came the U-2 incident, sky spies became unpopular among diplomats (if not among military men), and mum became the word for Samos. Last week, the most the Air Force would admit, even unofficially, was that the orbiting Samos contained “test photographic and related equipment.”

The secrecy seemed academic, since in its more talkative pre-U-2 days the Air Force had pretty well let the Samos cat out of the bag. In 1958, Air Force General Homer Boushey explained the principles of Samos to a House committee. When an earthbound telescope looks up from the ground, its vision is dimmed and distorted by nearby irregularities in the atmosphere. But were that same telescope to look down from space, the same irregularities would have much less effect. On a clear day, a 40-in. telescope 500 miles up would theoretically see and photograph objects on the earth only two feet across.

Plainly, Samos cannot carry a 40-in. telescope, but just as plainly, it can carry a telescope that can perform an invaluable job of reconnaissance photography. A major problem is in getting the pictures back to earth. If they are to be sent by radio —as was the case with last week’s Samos —they will lose priceless detail. Ideally, the actual films would be shot back to earth in a recoverable package braked by heat-resistant wings or parachute—but at the present state of the science, this is a highly problematical maneuver.

There are other difficulties. But the Samos program, which has cost $300 million so far, still looks better than good enough to keep a high priority among military space projects, and last week’s shot may well have been one of the most important so far in the missile-satellite cold war. And the Soviet Union could not reasonably raise as much of a row about Samos as it did about the U-2 flights.

After all, Russia was the first to launch satellites that passed over the territory of both friendly and unfriendly nations—and it was the fault only of their technology that, as far as is known, those satellites were blind.