[Leica] Cold War Space Radars

[hopsternew at gmail.com (Geoff Hopkinson)]

Very interesting Howard and Herbert.
Now I also know that "DEFCON " was not just a word made up for movies and
technothrillers.

*If you want to take more interesting pictures,
stand in front of more interesting stuff* -- Joe McNally

Cheers
Geoff
http://www.pbase.com/hoppyman


On 19 January 2013 18:07, Howard Ritter <hlritter at bex.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
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