NOTSNIK

It has generally been believed that the Navy’s Vanguard and Army’s Jupiter C programs were the only two active U. S. satellite programs in early 1958. There was actually a third one, but it was so secret that information about its existence did not surface until much later. Certainly we knew nothing about it at Iowa. Not even the Navy officials who were building Vanguard were aware of it.

The program was conceived and carried out by physicists and engineers at the Naval Ordinance Test Station (Naval Air Weapons Station) located at China Lake, a dry lake bed southwest of Death Valley National Park, California. After the Sputnik 1 launch, a number of the physicists who were then working on the Sidewinder missile came up with the idea of launching satellites via a small multistage rocket from an aircraft. At first, the idea was carried out sub-rosa using limited internal research funds, but in November 1957, the idea was exposed to the Navy’s Bureau of Aerospace and Bureau of Ordinance in Washington. Very limited start-up funding was approved in February 1958. The effort came to be known as project Pilot officially, but as NOTSNIK by the participants. NOTS stood, of course, for the Naval Ordnance Test Station, and NIK was borrowed from Sputnik.8

The satellite payload was a very small one, even by Explorer I standards. The pack­age was eight inches in diameter and weighed only 2.3 pounds, with the electronics arranged in the form of a donut. It was to be launched by a Douglas F-4D1 Skyray aircraft at a launch altitude of about 12,500 feet, at a speed of 450 miles per hour, and with a climbing angle of 50 degrees. It was planned that after separation from the aircraft, the first pair of Hotroc motors (a derivative of the Subroc antisubmarine missile) would be ignited. Five seconds later, the second pair was to be ignited, placing the payload with its final stage into a transfer trajectory. Half an orbit later, the final stage was to be fired to put the payload into a near-circular orbit. The all solid-stage rocket assembly was designed for maximum simplicity, with no moving parts.

The earliest conceived mission for the NOTSNIK satellite was for either military reconnaissance or weather observation, or both, depending on which report one reads. Its original sensor was a small infrared camera, designed to take images of the ground or weather patterns. Even though its ground resolution was only about one mile, it was still feared that the satellite might have been construed by the Soviets as a reconnaissance satellite, and therefore contrary to the U. S. desire to avoid emphasizing the military uses of space. Thus, the project was classified Top Secret and remained so for a considerable period.

As the Argus Project began to take form, NOTSNIK gained a more concrete mission—to be part of the Argus observational network. For that mission, its sensor was changed to a radiation detector. Circumstances, however, established a nearly impossible schedule. Two ground test launches and one air test launch were made

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during July 1958, of which the ground launches resulted in vehicle explosions. After the first air launch, radio contact with the satellite instrument was lost, and it was never determined whether the instrument might have gained orbit. Two more ground launches were made during August, but both failed due to structural failures of the fins shortly after takeoff. Air launches in direct support of Argus were attempted on 12, 22, 25, 26, and 28 August, but none resulted in verifiable satellite orbits.

After that record of performance, the project had a sporadic life, finally dying after several different incarnations. The basic concept lived on, however, leading to the highly successful Pegasus project which also involved rocket launches from aircraft. The first Pegasus launch took place in April 1990, and by April 2008, 34 successful Pegasus launches have been made.