Italy

The San Marco project, named after the patron saint of seamen, was a major cooperative effort to build an Italian satellite and to launch it using a Scout rocket.32 In October 1962 NASA deputy administrator Hugh Dryden described it as “the biggest and most important international program in which NASA was presently participating.”33 Its novelty lay in the use of a sea-borne platform to launch a payload that measured the atmospheric density and the character of the ionosphere in the equatorial region.

The driving force behind the project was Luigi Broglio, a professor at the University of Rome, a lieutenant colonel in the Italian Air Force, and the rec­ognized Italian authority in the field of aeronautics. Broglio discussed the San Marco project tentatively with NASA officials at the COSPAR meeting in Florence in April 1961. US interest in the scheme led him to coauthor a proposal to Prime Minister Fanfani. He was attracted by the idea: it was suitably ambi­tious to capitalize on the Italian public’s fascination with space flight, it har­nessed science and technology to industrial development and national pride, and it would provide government support for the aerospace industry. In May 1962, just a year after the preliminary contacts were made at COSPAR in Florence, Broglio and Dryden signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the Italian Space Commission and NASA for the realization of the San Marco project. It entered into force in September 1962.

As defined in the MoU the project had three phases. In the first a satellite would be designed and built by the Italians and its instruments would be tested on sounding rockets launched from Wallops Island. A prototype of the satellite would then be launched by a Scout rocket from the same base. Finally, in phase three the satellite would be launched by a Scout from an Italian platform located in equatorial waters.

NASA offered to help the Italian scientists and engineers at all stages of the project, in the spirit of Porter’s proposal at COSPAR in March 1959. It would provide sounding rockets and two Scout launchers. It would provide technical support and training for the design, fabrication, and testing of the payloads, and in vehicle assembly, launch, and range safety. NASA would also provide tracking and data-acquisition facilities for the sounding rockets and the first Scout launch from Maryland. The Italians would take over this function when they launched the second San Marco satellite from their floating platform in the Indian Ocean.

During 1963 and 1964 over 70 engineers from Broglio’s group were trained in the United States. They learnt about spacecraft at the GSFC. At the Langley Research Center they were trained to use NASA’s Shotput sounding rockets, a two-stage unguided vehicle stabilized by aerodynamic fins and developed at Langley by combining standard solid-propellant motors.34 They learnt range procedures and safety practices on Wallops Island. The prime contractor for NASA’s Scout rockets, Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV) instructed them on the assembly and checkout of the vehicle. All of these exchanges seem to have gone smoothly until Broglio asked if he could buy all the components of the Scout in the United States and assemble it in Italy to save costs and to acquire significant technical information. This was refused point blank, in line with a general policy of not proliferating sensitive rocket/missile technology even with one’s closest allies. A compromise was struck in which the cost of the launcher was reduced by $150,000 (to $495,000). Broglio and LTV also signed an agreement in which three of the contractor’s senior engineers would assemble the Scout in Rome along with people from the CRA (Centro Ricerche Aerospaziali—Aerospace Research Center) and from Italian industry.

The Italian spacecraft was tested using several Shotput launches in the first six months of 1963. In parallel Broglio began setting up the floating launch platform off the African coast. An oil-rig platform was purchased and towed to Formosa Bay off the coast of Kenya. The site chosen was near-equatorial at about latitude 3°S and longitude 40°E. The Santa Rita platform, as it was called, was validated using three Nike-Apache rockets in the spring of 1964. In December that year, with extensive help from NASA and LTV, an all-Italian CRA crew successfully orbited the San Marco 1 satellite from Wallops Island with a Scout rocket.

The floating platform was the centerpiece of the final phase of the joint proj­ect. The Italian authorities decided to use a new platform for launching pur­poses, and to commission the Santa Rita platform as a control center. The new San Marco platform, acquired from the US Army, was a rectangular steel barge 90 feet wide, 300 feet long, and 13 feet deep. It was towed to Kenya via the NATO Mediterranean base in La Spezia, just south of Genoa. Once embedded in the ocean floor it supported the launcher and its transporter, as well as the electrical and mechanical ground support system for servicing and testing the rocket. Santa Rita, anchored about 1,800 feet away in the bay, housed the range control, blockhouse and telemetry gear, and living quarters for about 80 people. A small tower attached to the platform supported the generators that provided the electrical power for the launch complex. On April 26, 1967, the San Marco 2 spacecraft was successfully launched into an equatorial elliptic orbit by a Scout Mark II rocket. It remained in orbit for almost six months, providing valuable new scientific data on the structure of the ionosphere and on local variations in its electronic density.35

The San Marco project was an essential component of the early Italian space program. NASA and the Scout’s prime contractor LTV did not simply provide invaluable technical training and support in all aspects of satellite construction and integration, launcher use, range management, and tracking and data analysis. They also provided Broglio with the arguments and the additional credibility that he needed to persuade his authorities to invest in a major space effort, and to release funds to support the people, the institutions, and the industries that would become the backbone of an autonomous space program. For the State Department the venture provided an opportunity to express US solidarity with an administration that was a faithful American and NATO ally, and that was under constant domestic left-wing and communist pressure in the 1960s. For NASA the project was coherent with its mission to promote international coop­eration. It produced valuable scientific data on the ionosphere in the not-easily accessible equatorial region.

To conclude it is worth quoting Frutkin’s account of his visit to the San Marco complex shortly before the launch took place. It provides an entertaining antidote to the dry account one gains from official records, which really cannot do justice to the spirit of adventure and personal satisfaction derived from these early, sometimes artisanal collaborative space research efforts:

We had the agreement for the Italian San Marco project for a launch from their platform launch site. It’s a marvelous, marvelous program, and the greatest fun in the world. [. . . ] You see what happened was our project people within NASA who were pursuing, monitoring the Italian effort to get prepared for a Scout launch from this platform came in and said, “We’re not going to be able to do this. . . We’ve been out there to that platform, it’s a mess. It’s a god-awful mess.” Well, that was the first occasion when I was threatened with a cancellation. So I got hold of one of my buddies, somebody in the program, a very able, capable guy, Jack Townsend, who was then number three man at Goddard, and we went out to Africa together and climbed up onto that platform and looked around. There was water on the deck and there were wires snaking all around in the water and every­thing else, and it did look a bit of a mess. After a careful look-around Townsend said, “No problem, it’ll work.” [. . .]

We went out to see the first launch, went up to the top of this Texas tower they were using and when it came time for lunch, they said, “Let’s go up to the terrazzo.”

We went up to an upper deck under a striped awning where a great tribal warrior with scars, ritual scars, on his face made the pasta. [ . . . ] The Italians are more fun than anybody.

—Arnold W. Frutkin, in conversation with the author.36