[Leica] Cold War Space Radars

[hlritter at bex.net (Howard Ritter)]

Another part of the defense system during the Cold War (and now) is the USAF 
Spacetrack System and the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). I 
was part of this as a junior USAF officer from 1967 to 1971, first at a 
satellite-tracking radar at Moorestown, NJ and later at BMEWS at Thule Air 
Base, Greenland. Since Herb opened the door to photos of electronic 
technology of this era, here's my offering.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Cold+War+Space+Radar/

The AN/FPS-49 was the prototype that RCA developed for the USAF to use as a 
tracker at the BMEWS sites in Greenland and Alaska. The tracker would lock 
in on suspicious space objects picked up by the huge detection radars, 
giving much finer information about the object's trajectory in order to 
decide whether it represented a threat (i.e., could be an ICBM). Invariably 
(needless to say!) these turned out to be low-orbiting or re-entering 
satellites. After development the prototype, on the grounds of RCA in 
Moorestown, was put into use by the Air Force to track satellites in order 
to maintain up-to-date orbital elements for the benefit of BMEWS. This was 
the 17th Surveillance Squadron on Moorestown Air Force Installation, quite 
possibly the smallest patch of land in the whole Air Force inventory, about 
the size of two football fields IIRC. It was my first Air Force assignment 
out of ROTC.

Leica M2X, Canon 50/2 collapsible, available-light, handheld except for the 
nocturnal time exposure. Scanned from Ektachrome shot in 1969.

?howard


On Jan 18, 2013, at 11:51 PM, Herbert Kanner <kanner at acm.org> wrote:

> In the early 1950's, there what was called the "Cold War". With the 
> realization the that Soviet Union had nuclear weapons and bombers capable 
> of getting here via the North Pole without refueling, some kind of defense 
> system became mandatory. The SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) 
> System, a multi-billion dollar system was developed. It had twenty one 
> main sites. The computers, which received radar information and then 
> directed fighter places, had forty-nine thousand vacuum tubes. Because 
> this system was to be operational 24/7, each site had two such computers, 
> and the magnetic drum memory units in the two were updated often enough so 
> that they could switch computers and the guys on what looked like radar 
> displays wouldn't know that they had switched. Here is the console of one 
> computer.