The Glade 4.0

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2005/0 ... ory13.html



I was lucky enough to be assigned to this unit briefly early in my Air Force career.

I've had a difficult time over the years convincing people that this kind of thing actually happened (catching spy satellites out of the sky).

I was a C-130 crew chief at the time, and had the responsibility to operate the winch that pulled the satellite into the cargo bay, into the loving arms of the NSA folks who eagerly wanted the data.

Fun times!

that looks awesome

_________________
Ron Paul 2012

Wow, that's damn nifty.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

good times!

How well did it actually work?

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I have no idea what the overall success rate was.

The system for pulling the thing in worked fine. It was very exciting as you can imagine, but once you get the thing hooked, getting inside was pretty much a given.

The wire harness hanging out the back had hooks on it that were intended to snag the shroud of the chute. In our training, and the few actual missions we had in my 6 months tour, we had 100% success for actual attempts.

The thing is, as air crew we didn't have a lot of insight into the intelligence. On actual missions, we were just told to be at a certain place at a certain time. This happened every few days or so, and with zero notice ( a crew was always dressed and ready to fly), but we only did 4 actual retrievals in the 6 months I was there. I suspect many of the 'missions' were decoys. I have no idea how common it was for one to come out of orbit in the wrong place.

There was always a navy presence in the water below the suspected drop point, for the possibility that we did miss and the thing ended up in the drink. You could see the ships in the water. I also know that some of those ships were probably Russian. This was at the height of the cold war after all.

We were not allowed to handle the 'cargo' at all. There were civilians, presumably NSA people with no names, on the plane that did all of the handling. The thing was literally packed up and palletized before we landed back at Hickam, and was transferred to a waiting C-141 for a flight to the east coast (presumably Langley).

These were the last of a generation of old-tech imagery satelites (I believe it was imagery) that had to be retrieved to obtain the data. Once technology was available to transmit the data back to earth, the satellites had a much longer production life, and when that life ends, they presumably are just allowed to burn up on re-entry.

Another interesting tidbit, other than a few administrative folks, and perhaps a few senior leaders, there were no permanent party people assigned to the unit. It was all temporary special duty tours of about 6 months or less. Presumably to prevent anyone from getting too familiar with the operations.

Edit: Spelling, grammar, content.. gah.. i need sleep...

Thats pretty cool, Midgen.

_________________
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

I read about this in The Wizards of Langley!


As I recall, it worked about as well as you would imagine. They got better, but there were a whole lot of failures before they finally got a successful retrieval. Probably by the time Midgen was doing this they had a reasonable success rate.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.