PBS Nova Astrospies
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00August 18, 1960, 100 miles above Earth, a secret race in space has started.
00:14Corona, America's first photographic spy satellite, has just been deployed.
00:24The capsule was packed with over half a mile of film.
00:29The camera could capture images of objects as small as a truck on Russian territory,
00:35at least on a clear day.
00:39The satellite would be taking pictures, a parachute would open, and they'd go to all
00:50this trouble of capturing this capsule that's coming back down to Earth.
00:56The aircraft would rush it from Hawaii, where they're capturing it, to Washington, where
01:01they're developing the film, and then they put it on these big light tables, and they
01:06look at these pictures, and what do they have?
01:08They have pictures of the tops of clouds.
01:15It was the nuclear missile bases under those clouds that Corona was supposed to find.
01:23The smartest engineers the CIA could find had gotten it off the ground.
01:28But in space, it was missing a human touch.
01:33Some thought it could never work without a human at the controls, without a finger on
01:38the shutter.
01:39The argument was that if we had a man up there, he would have more flexibility and judgment
01:48in looking at areas of interest.
01:52And spying was just one possibility.
01:55One of the more amazing documents that we got was this list of experiments.
02:00Among those were going up there and capturing a Russian satellite, maybe knocking a Russian
02:05satellite out of orbit, or completely destroying a Russian satellite.
02:11But the risk of launching astronauts on covert missions to space was enormous.
02:17Any attempt had to be kept completely secret.
02:22Only a handful of people know what really happened.
02:26You just couldn't tell anybody about it.
02:28Nobody.
02:29I didn't tell my wife anything.
02:31I wasn't allowed to.
02:32The program is still classified.
02:35Nobody's ever told us it wasn't.
02:37Up next on NOVA, a space story you've never seen, the story of the astrospies.
03:05Mayday, 1960.
03:18The height of the Cold War, and 13 miles above the Soviet Union, all systems will go.
03:29The CIA's secret U-2 spy plane was on a mission to confirm an alarming intelligence tip.
03:35A new Soviet nuclear missile base close to the Arctic was about to become operational.
03:41So this made the White House very nervous.
03:44It was in a position where it could launch missiles over the North Pole, which was the
03:49shortest route from Russia to the United States.
03:53The U-2's cameras were technological marvels, but the key to the U-2's success was the pilot's
04:00ability to find and photograph the best targets.
04:03The Soviets, you know, would threaten us when they could get away with it.
04:08So we needed to know where their technology was.
04:13We needed to know what they were doing in the missile field, where the silos were, what
04:19kind of missiles they had.
04:23The U-2's pilot was Francis Gary Powers.
04:28He thought if he flew above 60,000 feet, he should be safe.
04:32No Soviet anti-aircraft missiles could reach him.
04:40He was wrong.
04:43When Gary Powers was shot down, the president said, no more U-2 overflights.
04:49So that put the United States in a very bad position.
04:52We had these U-2's, and we couldn't fly them over the Soviet Union.
04:56You don't want to cause a provocation, and you don't want to be shot down.
04:59You know, what's the answer?
05:01Well, you go up into space.
05:07Launch Complex 5-6 at Florida's Cape Canaveral is a monument to the early days of space exploration.
05:15Now a museum, it was once NASA's command center for the launch of Alan Shepard, America's
05:29first man in space.
05:35In December 2004, NASA Special Agent Dan Oakland was called over to the old blockhouse to help
05:41solve a problem.
05:44I was trying to find some keys to a door that was closed for a good number of years.
05:49The lock was so old, Oakland's office was the only one that still had the master key.
05:55There was no lights or anything, and we started looking around with flashlights.
06:01Buried back in the corner was a blue box.
06:05Inside the box, he found something extraordinary.
06:10Two spacesuits, different from any NASA spacesuits.
06:13The suits were in pretty good condition, and they were just a little bit swollen.
06:19There's one that was 007 and then 008, and they're just printed on the suits themselves.
06:24And there was something else that seemed strange.
06:26That was a name tag that was actually on the sleeve, and it just said lawyer.
06:33I've been following space and espionage for a long time.
06:39And after I heard the story of Dan Oakland finding these spacesuits, I thought it was
06:43extremely interesting.
06:46For James Bamford, an author and investigative reporter, that name, lawyer, became a window
06:51into a hidden world.
06:54There was a small article about these suits on a space website, and it was very curious.
07:01Because if you look at the list of NASA astronauts, there's never been a NASA astronaut named
07:06lawyer.
07:07But I did find the name lawyer, Captain Richard E. Lawyer, on a list of pilots chosen to be
07:16part of an Air Force space program in the 1960s.
07:20When I looked closely at the program, I realized it had been run by a secret agency inside
07:27the Pentagon.
07:28Well, I did manage to get some documents.
07:31Much of the program, even 40 years later, is still officially secret.
07:36Lawyer's name was on a list of 17 pilots who were chosen for the program.
07:41I managed to talk to him off-camera about a month before he died, and the information
07:47he gave me helped me find 10 of the other pilots who are still alive.
07:52It's an impressive group.
07:55Some of the pilots Bamford found became space shuttle astronauts.
08:01Vice Admiral Richard Truly even became the head of NASA.
08:05Lieutenant General James Abramson was put in charge of President Reagan's Star Wars
08:11program.
08:12General Robert J. Jerez would become vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
08:17None of them has ever talked publicly about the secret that ties them all together.
08:23An Air Force program called MOLE.
08:26It's one of the great untold stories of the Cold War.
08:38The story begins in January 1964, with a new group of America's best military pilots arriving
08:46at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
08:50They had been assigned to train at a place called ARPS, the Aerospace Research Pilot
08:56School.
08:59So I arrived at Edwards into what they called ARPS.
09:03Didn't know a soul.
09:06Run by Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, ARPS was a
09:11school where some military pilots with the right stuff were groomed to become astronauts
09:17in NASA's Civilian Space Program.
09:21This year, it was different.
09:24As we went through our student year and got toward the fall, we realized that something
09:32funny was going on, and the thing that was funny going on was they were actually conducting
09:39a secret, I guess you'd say, a crew selection.
09:47Without them knowing it, they were actually competing with each other for this program.
09:54They were being watched and being evaluated by these people to see who would make the
09:58best astronauts.
10:00The program was so secret, it was even kept from the potential astronauts themselves.
10:05We'd fly in the morning, we would have classes in the afternoon, and we'd study and reduce
10:12data at night.
10:14They would teach you astronomy and flight mechanics, orbital mechanics, the relationship
10:20of bodies that are in orbit, are either around the earth or going to the moon, stuff like
10:26that.
10:30For the students, it was more than just books and flying.
10:34They were poked and prodded, spun in centrifuges, bounced in chairs, and battered with psychological
10:42testing.
10:46And lo and behold, they finally came out with a list, and I was on the list.
10:52I almost fell over.
10:54I had no idea.
10:55Then I had to go through a screening with a couple of other guys to see whether I would
10:59fit.
11:00The previous height limit had been six feet, and I was almost 6'2".
11:05I was determined, so I pulled that helmet down so tight I was almost dying, but I just
11:10barely made it.
11:11I think there were about 100 people that started out, and to survive down to eight or so made
11:20you feel pretty good.
11:23This was 1964.
11:26In 1964, only Mercury had flown.
11:30The Gemini astronauts were down at NASA, and here we were going to get to fly in space,
11:36even though it was a military program.
11:40So we were sitting on the top of the ant hill.
11:46And they finally did tell the people that they selected, but they only told them a cover
11:51story.
11:52They didn't tell them the real story about what they were being selected for.
11:54What they told them was that they were just going to go up to space and do experiments.
11:59Unlike U-2s or spy satellites, launching man into space just couldn't be kept secret.
12:05So a decision was made to call it a laboratory, and to try hiding the project by putting it
12:11in plain sight.
12:13Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
12:16President Lyndon Johnson announced the program and gave it a plausible cover story, something
12:22that Americans, if not the Russians, would possibly believe.
12:26Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
12:29I am today instructing the Department of Defense to immediately proceed with the development
12:36of a manned orbiting laboratory.
12:39This program will bring us new knowledge about what man is able to do in space.
12:49The cover story was that the manned orbiting laboratory, or MOL, would be a space station
12:55crewed with two military astronauts for 30-day missions.
13:00During that time, they'd perform routine experiments on themselves and test their ability to do
13:05military tasks in space.
13:08There was no mention of an operational mission, nor any hint of espionage.
13:14The cost of developing the manned orbiting laboratory will be $1,500,000,000.
13:23It took three more months until the crew was finally told their real mission.
13:29And that day really was an amazing day.
13:32We got briefed into the program as to what it was about.
13:41The MOL was actually an orbital spy station, equipped with a camera the size of a car.
13:48It would fly in orbit that would give maximum coverage to Russian targets.
13:53And the crew were no longer going to be astronauts.
13:57They were going to be astro-spies.
14:01In essence, they're going to become the successors to Francis Gary Powers, basically.
14:05They're going to be the people who are going to be flying over Russia now.
14:10I think everybody was tickled.
14:12I mean, it was something that we really thought would contribute.
14:16We weren't going to go check how the African flute flight worked under zero gravity.
14:22We were going to do something worthwhile that we thought was worthwhile.
14:27Before, I was going to go play with something.
14:30I wasn't really impressed by that.
14:33But now we were going to take pictures and blah, blah, blah, blah.
14:39The argument was that if we had a man up there, he would have more flexibility and judgment.
14:52The plan was to launch a two-man Gemini capsule atop a 56-foot-long laboratory module.
14:59In orbit, the crew would unlock a hatch cut into the capsule's heat shield
15:05and crawl through a narrow tunnel into the pressurized crew compartment.
15:10Inside, as seen in this newly discovered government film,
15:14the astro-spies could look through a viewport
15:17and observe and photograph high-priority targets in Russia and elsewhere.
15:22When the 30-day mission was completed,
15:25the astro-spies would return to Earth in the Gemini capsule,
15:30leaving the laboratory module to de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
15:36With their highly classified mission in hand,
15:39the astro-spies disappeared into a hidden world.
15:44The only people you could really communicate with about what you were actually doing
15:48were people within the program office.
15:51When we traveled, we didn't identify ourselves as MOL or crew members or anything else.
15:57And I think once in a great while we traveled on ID that identified us as somebody else.
16:03We didn't go around and knock on everybody's door and say, hey, I was an astronaut.
16:07Although we did have a joke in the program that one day there was going to be a little article
16:12back on page 50 of the newspaper that said,
16:16an unidentified spacecraft launched from an unidentified launch pad
16:22with unidentified astronauts to do an unidentified mission.
16:26That's the way it was.
16:29But despite the carefully crafted cover stories, despite all the safeguards,
16:34half a world away the Russians were carefully watching and listening.
16:39And they didn't believe a word.
16:42We had some information about the MOL program from open and closed channels.
16:50We had our sources.
16:52These guys in Russia were smart.
16:55They could look at MOL.
16:56They could see sort of the general systems layout.
16:59And they could tell you, well, this is for something much more serious
17:02than simply applied military experimentation.
17:05Russia was being surrounded by a network of American nuclear missile bases.
17:10And we needed information on the location of these bases.
17:14Reconnaissance from outer space was absolutely necessary.
17:20We faced the problem of how potential targets could be identified and located.
17:24That's how the Almaz project was born.
17:28In Russian, Almaz means a diamond in the rough.
17:33Almaz was the code name for the Soviet spy ship,
17:36a code name that could never be spoken.
17:41Almaz was a state secret,
17:43a spacecraft the Soviets hoped would dwarf the American MOL.
17:48It's not just a satellite or a spaceship.
17:50It's a whole complex, a whole system that consisted of a number of elements.
17:55Its overall weight was about 20 tons.
17:58We're talking about two massive 20-ton spaceships in space docked to each other,
18:06cosmonauts photographing the Earth,
18:08perhaps even doing some sort of battle simulations.
18:13And it wasn't just going to be bigger.
18:15It was meant to be better.
18:17Unlike the MOL, Almaz was designed to stay in orbit for years at a time.
18:23Supply ships would ferry cosmonauts and equipment back and forth on a regular basis.
18:30The Soviet Union at that time was ahead in many ways.
18:35We launched the first satellite.
18:37We had the first spacemen.
18:39So we believed we were ahead of everybody.
18:42Almaz and MOL were, in some sense, kind of the shadow space race.
18:47It was the one without the parades.
19:02It's hard to remember the sense of conflict.
19:07The Russians were the enemy. They really were.
19:10And the game became, we need to beat the Russians into space.
19:19During the heart of the Cold War, we thought of this big Russian bear as being all-powerful and all-knowing.
19:26I was always afraid that they were ahead of us quite a bit.
19:30You can see the timelines of these two programs, and they were very much close.
19:41Hidden from view, an intensive training program began.
19:47MOL crew members began simulating life in zero gravity.
19:53We did some of the work in zero-g airplanes,
19:58particularly learning how to crawl through that hatch in the Jiminy B.
20:04One task the astro-spies simulated over and over was one of the most basic,
20:10going back and forth through the hatch and narrow tunnel that connected the Gemini capsule to the laboratory module.
20:17One would go back into the Gemini through this really awkward tunnel.
20:24As we progressed on the program, we got better at what we were doing.
20:30In an eerie parallel world, cosmonauts were practicing exactly the same maneuvers in Russian airplanes.
20:41Even though there was no exchange of information between the Americans and the Soviets,
20:46we were thinking in the same direction.
20:50We also had a special hatch linking the main unit of the orbital station to the return capsule.
20:57To simulate life on board the Almaz, Russian designers built underwater tanks with a mock-up of the spaceship.
21:05There, planners had more time to study complicated maneuvers, like loading film capsules into the station.
21:12Half a world away, the Americans had developed the same solution.
21:17Former test pilot Bud Evans was put in charge of designing the underwater training program.
21:23In the airplane, when you reach zero-g, and you had maybe 40 seconds to maybe a minute, 15 seconds,
21:32you had to go back to zero-g.
21:35You reached zero-g, and you had maybe 40 seconds to maybe a minute, 15 seconds at the most.
21:43So you really couldn't get a timeline on how long it would take somebody to do a task.
21:49And following that, we went full bore on simulating the Boe astronaut's task underwater.
21:57They created an undersea training facility off Buck Island in the Caribbean.
22:02Underwater, they dropped this very large mock-up of the Mole spacecraft.
22:08In film that has never been shown publicly before,
22:11you can see Mole crew members first putting on scuba gear, then donning their full spacesuits.
22:25It was very similar to what it would be in space,
22:29cutting out some of the gravity.
22:31You can't move very well.
22:35With a more complete mock-up, the Mole crew members practiced more mission-critical tasks,
22:41like simulating how to move the packages of exposed film
22:45back through the narrow tunnel into the Gemini capsule.
22:49We had to know how long these tasks were going to take.
22:53This was one way to get some real timeline studies.
22:56While both the astronauts and cosmonauts were training for reconnaissance,
23:00military planners saw orbiting spy stations as just a first step.
23:10Any nation sufficiently advanced in space technology
23:14can convert a vehicle into a military spacecraft to deny the use of space to the free world.
23:21A 1963 Air Force briefing film titled Space and National Security
23:26depicted space as a battlefield
23:29and showed just how far the military thought that battlefield might extend.
23:36In the 60s, this was a time of big thinking on both sides.
23:42The Russians were really interested in space.
23:45It was a time of big thinking on both sides.
23:49The Russians were really thinking grand.
23:52We're talking multiple battle stations in Earth orbit,
23:55reconnaissance stations manned by dozens and dozens of cosmonauts.
24:07One of the more amazing documents that we got was this list of experiments
24:12that were going to be used on the Mole.
24:15Among those were things that would be considered outrageous today.
24:20Going up there and capturing or stealing a Russian satellite.
24:24Going up there and maybe knocking a Russian satellite out of orbit.
24:29Or completely destroying a Russian satellite.
24:34Of course, we did realize that the Americans tried to develop the satellite interceptors
24:40and killer satellites.
24:43So we decided to develop a special cannon that was placed on the orbiting station.
24:49We just wanted to test and see how it worked in outer space.
24:53If somebody wanted to inspect or even attack the Elmas, we could destroy it.
25:02But first, engineers and designers from both sides
25:05had to contend with some fundamental laws of physics
25:09so that astro-spies could monitor enemy territory from 100 miles in space.
25:15It's a mystery to most people who haven't flown in orbit
25:18what it's like trying to look at the ground as it's going by
25:22when you're going 18,000 miles an hour.
25:30Just looking out the window with normal or the equivalent of 20-20 vision,
25:35you could see tankers, oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
25:40They looked about that big.
25:42You couldn't see anything smaller than that without magnification.
25:49The magnification system developed for MOLE
25:52was the state-of-the-art in optical engineering.
25:55The camera system and optics, an advanced set of folded mirrors tucked into the station,
26:01were so far ahead of their time
26:03that a nearly identical configuration is still in use today.
26:09So if you picture a Hubble Space Telescope,
26:12this huge bus-size telescope in space pointed out at the stars.
26:18If you just turn it around and point it towards Earth, that would be the KH-11.
26:24We had very high resolution.
26:27For photoanalysts, it is all a question of resolution.
26:31The higher the resolution, the smaller the object you can see on the ground.
26:37Extraordinarily, the MOLE's camera was designed to spot objects as small as three inches.
26:45The three-inch resolution was pretty critical
26:48to providing our people with the technical details
26:52of what the threat was and what the capability was.
26:56The goal of people who do reconnaissance has always been to get the highest resolution.
27:01But it's a trade-off.
27:03Tighter you get the picture, the better resolution you get, but the less coverage you get.
27:07What you really need is to be able to look at a big scene
27:10and say, oh, there's something interesting I really need to look at over there.
27:14Inside a MOLE training simulator,
27:17joysticks could zoom the lens both in and out and from side to side.
27:22A wide-angle viewfinder could spot targets at the very edge.
27:27We had optical eyepieces to look through with ways to point the line of sight.
27:33And they had photographs simulated to give you something to look at,
27:39to test your ability to zero in on a point of interest quickly and accurately.
27:47The camera system was a huge engineering challenge.
27:51It required great precision while the target was in motion
27:55and the station was orbiting over the poles.
27:58They're trying to take a picture of something on Earth.
28:01As the Earth is going around on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour,
28:05and they themselves are traveling around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour,
28:10it was an extremely difficult scientific task to try to create a camera system
28:15that could take a very accurate picture,
28:18knowing that everything is moving at a different relationship to each other.
28:23In both countries, engineers struggled to create rudimentary motion tracking systems.
28:30We had other devices for reconnaissance, but we needed to create a control system
28:35that could fix the camera on the targets to avoid blur.
28:39On Almaz, they had a particular instrument which would basically freeze the image.
28:45They would actually have the camera move and compensate for the angular distance
28:49between a particular point.
28:51So as Almaz was flying over, the camera would sort of shift slowly
28:55to keep its sights on the particular territory.
28:59Moll's tracking and targeting system was computerized,
29:02but computing was still in its infancy.
29:05And by today's standards, they're really crude.
29:08They were IBM 4 Pis.
29:11I don't think they had 50,000 words of storage in them.
29:15You could actually go to IBM, actually went there and watched,
29:19believe it or not, these ladies sitting there stringing these little magnetic cores
29:23on these wires to form the memory of this thing.
29:27You've got more in your cell phone probably than they had in those computers.
29:34But orbiting computers and tracking systems weren't what made the Moll extraordinary.
29:40And the difference between the Moll and an unmanned system
29:44is that here's a system with people in it.
29:48People are, you know, hands-on in the spacecraft,
29:52making decisions and adjusting it and so forth.
29:55That's the difference.
29:58You have to ask yourself the question,
30:00I'm investing an enormous amount of resource to maintain a crew up in space.
30:05Now what they can provide is a real-time analysis of the targets.
30:09They can look at something and they can say, well, this is something interesting
30:13and we should be able to, we should find out more about this.
30:16But is it worth that amount of resources to have a crew just tell you that?
30:25The Moll program to put human beings in orbit was going to cost more money
30:30because everything had to be man-rated.
30:33There had to be safety features.
30:35It's extra weight.
30:37It means the vehicle has to be bigger. It has to have more fuel.
30:40It just adds cost everywhere along the line.
30:43Moll was a very expensive program.
30:46It seems like chicken feed today, I think it was a $3 billion program.
30:51But in the 1960s, that was a lot of money.
30:56Think back in the mid to late 60s.
30:59Johnson was the president.
31:01He was trying to fund all the Great Society programs.
31:04He was trying to fund the expansion of the war in Vietnam.
31:08He was trying to fund going to the moon on Apollo, and here we were.
31:14And we would take a cut basically every year.
31:18And we used to jokingly tell ourselves that the only thing that remained constant
31:23on the program was the number of days until the first launch.
31:28The scheduled launch date for the first Moll mission was August 1970.
31:34The Russians planned to launch Almaz that April to commemorate Lennon's 100th birthday.
31:41But in November 1966, the Americans seemed poised to make a huge leap forward.
31:50At Cape Canaveral, a unique rocket configuration was rolled out to the launch pad.
31:56Atop the standard Titan 3C solid rocket boosters was a hollow mock-up of the Moll laboratory.
32:05Atop that, workers attached an unmanned Gemini B capsule.
32:11Designers needed to test whether the Gemini's heat shield would still work
32:16after the Moll's access hatch had been cut into it.
32:20Unlike most NASA launches, there were no astronauts on display.
32:26You know, the NASA astronauts back in the 60s were all good friends of ours.
32:32We knew them all. We went to Houston.
32:34And when we went to Houston, they'd tell us all about what they were doing
32:38and we wouldn't tell them anything about what we were doing.
32:41We were different, that's all.
32:44We weren't on the cover of Life magazine. We weren't driving Corvettes.
32:48We were, you know, just doing different things.
32:52At 8.50 on November 3rd, the Moll program literally got off the ground.
33:08Just over 100 miles in space, the unmanned capsule was ejected.
33:15U.S. Navy ships recovered it 5,500 miles out in the Atlantic.
33:27The capsule was intact and proved that pilots could survive re-entry.
33:35But surviving their training program was another question.
33:40Major Robert Lawrence was one of the final crew members chosen for Moll.
33:45He was one of the Air Force's best pilots.
33:48He had a Ph.D. in chemistry and he was the first African-American selected to be an astronaut.
33:55Bob was such an excellent pilot that the idea of him having an accident really had never entered my mind.
34:04They were doing a simulated shuttle approach in an F-104, which was a very difficult maneuver.
34:10I think Harv Royer was flying the airplane.
34:13He just misjudged a second or two, and that's all you had.
34:18And I think they got too low, pulled out too late, actually hit the ground hard,
34:24bounced in the air, and as I understand, the airplane rolled.
34:28And Royer managed to, they both ejected.
34:31Royer survived the ejection and Bob didn't.
34:41I was standing at home changing the buttons on a dress,
34:44and I looked out the window and saw Bob Harris coming up the wall.
34:51I thought, I don't have to ask.
34:55I guess it's what they call a life-changing experience, you know.
34:59Suddenly, you know, in the morning, everything seems okay,
35:04and then a few minutes later, it's all over.
35:10That morning, Bob wanted to change his flight.
35:15He wanted me to fly in his place on that particular flight.
35:21That's about all there is to say.
35:27I should have been in the back seat of that airplane instead of him.
35:34The accident served to make us realize that we really were a very small group
35:41and we had a big problem, and that meant lots of training,
35:46and that we expanded our efforts and increased our efforts.
35:55By the beginning of 1969, the secret race between Russia and the U.S.
36:00to launch the first spies into space seemed to be neck and neck.
36:05Both sides had made significant advances, but they were both years behind schedule.
36:11We thought that in the coming year or two,
36:14we would be able to launch the space station into orbit.
36:17Still, our program fell behind by three years.
36:21For the first time, I know I personally was beginning to believe,
36:24I believe this can work.
36:26Well, some of them might have been a bit worried
36:29about what the Russians were doing at this point.
36:32What they really didn't know was that the competition was less with the Russians
36:36than it was within their own government.
36:41Right around the corner from them was another agency called the NRO,
36:45the National Reconnaissance Office.
36:48The National Reconnaissance Office was extremely secret during the 1960s.
36:53As a matter of fact, even its name wasn't declassified until the early 90s.
36:58Their job was to try to find out who was behind all of this.
37:04Their job was to try to find a way to put satellites up there
37:08that could get the very same resolution.
37:11They were going to develop a competitive system, and the CIA backed that.
37:17Larry Scantz, who had worked at NRO and later helped plan MOL,
37:22was one of the few people with a security clearance for both programs.
37:27Both systems were aimed at developing three-inch technical resolution.
37:34From a technical point of view, they kind of wound up in a dead heat.
37:40We were aware that there were unmanned reconnaissance satellites
37:44with truly impressive capability on the drawing board.
37:48You know, there's the unmanned guys that said, you know, we don't need you,
37:51and then there's the manned guys that say, well, you can't live without us.
37:55It was obvious to me the first time I went to a place where the unmanned system was being run,
38:00they didn't want any part of us.
38:03And somebody bigger than them told them to let us in to see it.
38:09Unknown to the MOL crew, the secretary of the Air Force went to the White House
38:13to make a last-minute plea to President Nixon.
38:17And the MOL's future hung in the balance.
38:25For Hank Hartsfield, the morning of Tuesday, June 10, 1969, was like any other.
38:40I jumped in my little MG, and as usual, I had a little plug in my ear to listen to the local news,
38:46and was happily driving down 405.
38:52They came in with an announcement.
38:54This morning, the manned orbiting laboratory has been canceled by the Department of Defense.
39:01Holy cow, what's going on here?
39:05There were two news stations.
39:07I switched to the other one to see if the story would be any different, and it wasn't.
39:12I was in a meeting, arguing with an engineer, and I felt this tap on my shoulder,
39:17and I looked around, and it was Mack.
39:20And I looked in his eyes, and he said, real low.
39:24Nobody else in the room heard him.
39:26He said, the program's canceled.
39:29And I turned around to this engineer that I was arguing with, and my mind was blank.
39:35I didn't know what we'd been talking about.
39:38What happens to the 14 astronauts now who've been training for lengthy missions?
39:43Well, they'll find, I'm sure, appropriate assignments elsewhere.
39:48They're a very good bunch of boys,
39:50and I'm sure they'll have many opportunities to use this experience in the furtherment of their careers.
40:01The end of the mole program turned out to be as low-key as its beginning.
40:06Six weeks later, the world focused on man's role in space,
40:11but they were watching Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.
40:15Oh, that looks beautiful from here, Neil.
40:17It has a stark beauty all its own.
40:22The world was unified at that point,
40:25and I think everybody was happy that a human being had landed on another planet.
40:32By the same token, I would say that I still cry at night a little bit about not getting to go.
40:39The Americans had just landed on the moon in 1969,
40:42which was probably the greatest event in the history of space exploration so far.
40:46The Russians had completely been upstage.
40:48They'd lost the moon race.
40:50So Dmitry Ustinov, who's basically the effective head of the Soviet space program,
40:54demands something to respond to this.
41:00This is what the Russians came up with.
41:03This is what the Russians came up with.
41:07This is the spy station called Almaz.
41:11Thirteen years in the making,
41:13the sole remaining capsule is locked away in a warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow.
41:19It is a closed facility, a place foreigners are still denied access.
41:25Nova's cameras were allowed inside, but only with a Russian camera crew.
41:30The Almaz capsule was divided in three sections.
41:34One section was the crew quarters,
41:37a rudimentary bed, a table where cosmonauts could sit and prepare food,
41:42a tank to sip water from.
41:47Another section was mainly taken up with the sensors.
41:52Largest among them, the Agat camera,
41:55the Agat camera, weighing more than two tons,
41:58with six-meter mirrors folded inside.
42:02And in the middle, the operations module,
42:05where astro-spies could zoom down to almost any point on Earth
42:10to show them where they were, a simple globe that depicted their point in orbit,
42:15a screen they could look at that showed them a hundred-kilometer panorama of the world below.
42:21In front of that screen, a viewfinder that could zoom in to 100 meters.
42:28We could see details that were half a meter long from 250 kilometers in outer space.
42:35For example, we could see the make of the car, if it's a Ford or Toyota.
42:43The entire station was gyroscopically controlled,
42:47designed to pivot as it passed over its target
42:50so that when the shutter was triggered, the pictures wouldn't be blurred.
42:54And on the outside of the station, a first for manned spaceflight,
43:00a weapon, a 23-millimeter cannon that could fire on an enemy satellite
43:06that might be flying too close for comfort.
43:11In June 1974, all of this was loaded on top of a giant proton rocket
43:18and rolled out to the Baikonur launch site.
43:21The ALMA's capsule was covered with a shroud,
43:24so American reconnaissance satellites couldn't photograph it.
43:36Nine days later, Colonel Pavel Popovich and his flight engineer,
43:40Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Artukhin, were launched into space to dock with the ALMA station.
43:46They were the first astro-spies to orbit the Earth.
43:50Their mission lasted 15 days.
43:57Valery Romanov is a cosmonaut who trained on the ALMA's program in the 1970s.
44:03Inside the command center, he demonstrates how Popovich's mission worked.
44:10These are the synchronization levers.
44:12By pushing the button, we could switch on the camera.
44:15But the process itself went like this.
44:19Here is the panoramic screen where I can see the ground beneath the station.
44:27And this is how I zoom in.
44:30So, for example, I'm flying over the ocean and I spot a warship.
44:34I can see it's going a little bit to the right,
44:37so I can rotate the station a little to keep watching it and then film it.
44:42One, two, three, and I have a picture.
44:46We had a special system to develop the film.
44:49You turned off all the station's lights,
44:52and in complete darkness, you put the film in the developer,
44:56then moved out a projection table to fix the exposed film.
45:00Then you could select the most interesting parts
45:03and transmit it back to Earth with a video camera.
45:06So about an hour after you took a picture, people on Earth could be studying it.
45:12Now let me show you the periscope and how it could protect you from attack.
45:18If you look through here, you can see outside the station and what's happening around it.
45:23Ground control can tell me something is going on.
45:28If something is approaching here, and that might be a killer satellite.
45:34We had the noodleman cannon right below the station's belly.
45:41So I tried to rotate the station to face the object head-on.
45:49And then feeding the command to fire.
45:56Fortunately, that never happened.
45:59We were afraid about what would happen to the station if we fired the cannon,
46:04so we never tested it with the men on board.
46:07But after the crew left, we fired the cannon by remote control,
46:11and the station survived the intense vibration.
46:17Subsequent missions to the Almaz seemed star-crossed.
46:21On two missions, cosmonauts failed to dock with the spy station
46:25and returned to Earth empty-handed.
46:29On the third attempt to reach Almaz, things got worse.
46:33The cosmonauts docked successfully and entered the Almaz.
46:37But on their 42nd day in orbit, as they passed over the dark side of Earth,
46:43the station's electrical system suddenly shut down.
46:47Alarms sounded, and the station was plunged into darkness.
46:52Out of radio contact and drifting in space,
46:55the cosmonauts struggled for two hours to bring the craft back to life.
47:00When power was restored, the frailty of man in space became clear.
47:06The flight engineers suffered a breakdown and began experiencing audio hallucinations.
47:12No medicine on board could help.
47:16Six days later, the cosmonauts were ordered back to Earth.
47:22In February 1977, Victor Gorbatko, a Soviet Air Force colonel,
47:27was the last pilot to command Almaz.
47:31His mission was almost flawless.
47:34When we flew over the United States,
47:37I looked down and immediately recognized New York.
47:41We could see human beings on the streets.
47:44I would say we could see objects about one meter in size.
47:48I had enough time to count planes on the ground when we flew over military bases.
47:53We just had to shoot film of any weapons we could spot.
47:57That was about all we had to do.
48:00We had to be very careful.
48:03We had to be very careful.
48:05We just had to shoot film of any weapons we could spot.
48:09That was about all we had to do.
48:11Circling the Earth every 90 minutes,
48:14he said the Almaz orbit was useful not only for spying on the U.S.,
48:18but also on its allies.
48:21Our main assignment with the AGAT system
48:24was to film ships and planes on the other side.
48:27There was some military tension in Israel,
48:29so we had to count how many planes they had.
48:32To Colonel Gorbatko,
48:34there was a big difference between space espionage and space wars.
48:39My mission has a peaceful character.
48:42We didn't shoot, we just took pictures.
48:45So we were space spies.
48:47That would be a good title for your movie.
48:52But far below, in Moscow,
48:55senior Kremlin officials were asking the same question
48:57their American counterparts asked eight years before.
49:01Was this really worth the effort and the risk?
49:05One of the biggest ironies here was that
49:07the Russians probably felt that they won,
49:10but in the end it was a hollow victory
49:12because they ended up basically coming to the same conclusion.
49:17It just took them about a decade longer.
49:21On February 25, 1977,
49:24at 9.21 a.m. Moscow,
49:27Colonel Gorbatko undocked from Almaz
49:31and descended toward central Kazakhstan.
49:34He and his partner would be the last astro-spies.
49:42After 13 years of extraordinary effort by scientists from both sides,
49:48with billions of rubles and billions of dollars spent,
49:52only five missions had been launched,
49:55all by the Russians,
49:57and almost two of those were deemed a success.
50:01For all the effort,
50:03astro-spies had managed just 81 days in orbit.
50:09In the end, it came down to a competition of man against machine,
50:13and machine won.
50:16I absolutely think it was a premature decision to close down the program.
50:21They insist the space stations without the pilots are more efficient.
50:25I would insist that is wrong.
50:30I thought it was a good program.
50:34I think we could have done something really worthwhile.
50:38It was aborted prematurely as far as we were concerned.
50:42I think it was positive.
50:44I'd like to think, and I believe I'm correct,
50:46that we had a positive influence on the way things would be going in the future.
50:50Two months before the last Russian cosmonaut left the Almaz,
50:55America's National Reconnaissance Office
50:58successfully launched its first KH-11 unmanned spy satellite.
51:04Said to be capable of capturing images with 3-inch resolution,
51:08but using video sensors instead of film,
51:11this was the digital age of espionage.
51:14This was what had rendered America's astro-spies obsolete before they ever flew.
51:27Thirty years later, dozens of unmanned satellites silently monitor the world below.
51:34They are also the astro-spies' legacy.
51:39When I look back at what we did on Mahal,
51:41we didn't, as far as I know, develop something that has led to another man's system.
51:46I think that the work we did helped provide data for future systems.
51:57Just yesterday I went to the Google search engine,
52:00and I could actually see my own house.
52:03Thirty years ago, who would have thought I would be able to see something like that?
52:41NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.