aoperation of a ground terminal at Hawaii; the Signal
Corps was responsible for the payload and the operation of a ground terminal
at Fort Monmouth. The overall operational phase was directed from the Space
Operations Control Center of NASA, with the NASA Computing Center and a
Weather Bureau Meteorology Satellite Center, both in Washington, D.C.,
playing a major role.
The results of the TIROS were
most gratifying and fascinating. Besides the cloud formation, the first
set of pictures -depicting a sweep along the east coast -clearly showed
the contours of the coast and the St. Lawrence River.
These
first pictures were immediately flown to Washington where the head of NASA
presented them to President Eisenhower for public release. Later, even
more impressive images were obtained from many parts of the globe, among
them pictures of the Baja California Peninsula and the Suez-Canal-Red Sea
area which are still vividly in my memory.
We received fair credit for
our contributions through the news media and some official channels, but
were muzzled by NASA in the release of any information or results from
our ground terminal at Fort Monmouth. We ended up as mere messengers to
deliver the goods for further analysis to the various centers.
My contacts with NASA officials
at that time were not particularly pleasant. On the very first day of TIROS
operation, after some congratulatory pleasantries in a telephone call,
the head of NASA accused us of having leaked information on Signal Corps
participation to the UPI without his specific authorization. It was quite
obvious that the Signal Corps' role in the project was to be subdued. Other
conversations with NASA people led me to the strong belief that a determined
trend was in the making to reduce and erase the credits of the military
services on their pioneering space accomplishments. I even came to the
sad conclusion that this was done with the |
knowledge or consent of the White House to ascertain
quickly a prominent role for NASA as the newly established civilian space
agency.
Nevertheless it was our gut
feeling that we had made significant contributions to the meteorological
satellite development both in the concept of our first cloud-cover instrumentation
and our technical directorship of the TIROS payload.
Before we had to experience
some more frustrations, we were fortunate to further advance the communications
satellite development. Already in September 1958, while the SCORE project
was in progress, SRDL submitted to ARPA a technical proposal of a similar
but greatly expanded and much more sophisticated store-and-forward, or
delayed repeater, system named COURIER, which called for a 500-pound satellite.
ARPA operated, and through their authority covering all three services,
they were in a position to select one favorable subsystem from one service
and marry it to a timely available favorable subsystem of another service.
This is what had happened in SCORE, and for COURIER, the Army Signal Corps
payload was again scheduled for an Air Force vehicle.
This concept did not please
Gen. Medaris. Unfortunately, however, top government decisions had not
favored Army space vehicle developments in spite of their pioneering role
and demonstrations of capabilities.
The COURIER I B satellite, which
provided basically the same communications modes as SCORE, plus facsimile,
but with an immensely larger capacity, was successfully launched from Cape
Canaveral on 4
COURIER IB was an advanced
communications satellite for its time (19601. It could see, it could speak
and it could remember. But after 228 orbits in 17 days, technicians were
no longer able to communicate - although the electronics seemed to be in
working order.
|
October 1960. An earlier launch attempt in August had
resulted in vehicle failure. The tremendous communications capacity can
probably be best dramatized by the fact that it could carry the text of
the entire Bible and communicate with ground terminals at an effective
message transmission rate of 55,000 bits/sec. It was also the world's first
communications satellite equipped with a complete long life solar power
supply, using approximately 19,000 solar cells and associated nickel cadmium
storage batteries. As had SCORE, the satellite carried a patriotic message
by President Eisenhower, which -in view of the large satellite capacity
- was accordingly longer. The Philco Corporation was the prime contractor
on the project.
The COURIER system operated
perfectly in all modes and practical Signal Corps use was envisioned particularly
for the large volume logistic overseas traffic. But after 228 orbits in
17 days, somehow we were no longer able to interrogate, although the electronics
seemed to be in working order. No conclusive failure diagnosis was ever
achieved, but we speculated that we had lost the access code. Because of
a disturbing experience with SCORE, which had a simple access code and
obviously could be triggered accidentally by FM broadcast
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