The utility of space-based imagery was obvious almost from the moment that people thought of putting cameras in space, but for the first decade or so of spaceflight, the ability to launch things was limited to only the USSR and the US, and they used this capability primarily for military purposes, with limited exceptions for communications and meteorology.

Dick Gordon sets up a Hasselblad camera in the Apollo 12 simulator

Because of the cloak of secrecy that shrouded both side's reconnaissance satellite programs, the first good look anyone in the wider world got at the Earth from space was through cameras carried aboard manned spacecraft. At least on the US side, these were Hasselblad handheld cameras, and produced stunning photos that had nowhere near the resolution of something like Corona. But they were still of great interest to researchers in fields like agriculture, forestry, hydrology and geology, who had a new window onto the planet that they studied. Pressure began to build for a dedicated platform to produce low-resolution imagery for Earth scientists, finally culminating with the flight of Earth Resources Technology Satellite-1, later known as Landsat-1, in 1972. Read more...

One of the major issues that I didn't discuss in my early coverage of military spaceflight was operations by nations outside of the United States, most notably the Soviet Union. The Soviets were somewhat slower to adopt satellite reconnaissance than the United States, as they were able to take advantage of the openness of American society to gather information on their enemy. Instead, they spent the late 50s protesting the "illegal" American satellites, although development began on recon satellites shortly after Sputnik went up.

A Zenit capsule

The Soviets faced several challenges. They were shorter on technical skills than the Americans, limiting the number of programs they could run at one time, and because, unlike the US, they had not spent the last decade and more building up their strategic reconnaissance capabilities, they were also short on the sophisticated cameras that would be needed by a reconnaissance satellite. Fortunately, they could kill two birds with one stone, by using the same Vostok capsule that carried Yuri Gagarin into orbit, but with a bunch of cameras instead of an astronaut. This was very useful, as it meant the cameras and film were kept in a pressurized environment, and the cameras could be reused, although it required a significantly larger booster than the American system.¹ This program, codenamed Zenit, lasted until 1994, although with significant evolution over its lifespan. The early versions had no ability to alter their orbits, and relied on batteries, limiting them to only a few days in orbit, while later versions could stay up for two weeks thanks to solar panels and could remain over a specific area for most of their operational life. Read more...

After the attempt to visit Hornet fell through, we took a look around for other museums to go to. There was discussion of trying to hit Jeremiah O'Brien, but timing ruled that out, and eventually we decided to stay in the area and go to the Oakland Aviation Museum, which we had found out about because we noticed a sign to it on the way up from San Jose. And I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

Website

The museum is small and kind of out of the way, on the outskirts of Oakland airport. But the collection was better than I would have expected for a museum that is pretty clearly taking whatever planes it can get. Inside, there's a replica of the Vin Fiz Flier, the first airplane to fly coast-to-coast (not nonstop, and definitely not without crashing), a MiG-15, a couple of light planes and a few helicopters. There was also a room of Navy artifacts and models, which allowed me to recycle a lot of the material I had prepared for Hornet, and another room dedicated to Jimmy Doolittle, which was mostly notable for having a Norden Bombsight on display in a replica bombardier's position, as well as discussing events that I think are overdone. Read more...

It is time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Cassander, long-time commenter here, is looking for a managerial data science/product management role, preferably in aerospace. Email tint.michael@gmail if you have suggestions or leads.

Overhauls are Falklands Part 3, Coastal Defenses Part 3, Coastal Defenses Part 8, On the Border of Land and Sea, and for 2024, Distributed Maritime Operations, Military Spaceflight Parts seven and eight and Air Attack on Ships Part 5.

In 1979, the Shah of Iran was overthrown, bringing a new government, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, into power. Khomeini's vision of an Islamic state was very different than what had been there before, and the country was in chaos even before students seized the US embassy and kept its diplomats hostage for 444 days. Saddam Hussein, who had recently seized control of Iran's neighbor Iraq, was irritated by Khomeini's description of him as a "puppet of Satan", coupled with calls for the majority Shia population of Iraq to overthrow the Sunni-dominated government. There was also the question of who should control the Shatt al-Arab, the river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates that serves as an important outlet from Iraq to the sea. In 1975, Saddam had signed a treaty drawing the boundary at the center of the river, but in September 1980, he tore that up, reasserting Iraq's traditional claim to the entire river and ordering his forces into an Iran that he expected would be unable to effectively resist due to the tumult of the revolution.

In this, he would be gravely disappointed. Although his forces made reasonable gains early on, Saddam was not a particularly good commander and the war unified the Iranian people behind the new government. By the end of 1980, the Iraqi offensive had ground to a halt, and after staying stalemated through 1981, the Iranian counteroffensive in 1982 drove Iraq back to its start lines, often making use of human wave attacks, massed charges driven by religious fervor that were sometimes used to clear minefields in the fastest and highest-casualty way possible. But there was also enough technical skill left in Iran to conduct operations against the Iraqi Navy and generally make the Iraqi coastline unsafe, slashing oil revenues. After a key pipeline through Syria was closed, the Iraqi war effort was sustained only by loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,² as well as material and technical support from both sides of the Cold War, neither of which was eager to see Khomeini's version of Islam spread. Read more...

Things have settled enough that I'm going to give my current thoughts on the recent fighting between Israel and Iran.³ This is approximately half commentary on the specifics of that conflict, and half broader lessons we can take from this and apply more generally.

I think the first and biggest lesson is that the results of battle, and thus the lessons to be drawn, are really contingent on the details of who is doing the fighting, and on the difficult-to-measure aspects of their competence and capabilities. If you look at the Ukraine War, ground-based air defenses (GBAD) looks formidable. Nobody dares fly over the enemy, and the most effective air-launched weapon is a long-range glide bomb. If you look at Iran, Israel has effectively neutered Iranian GBAD and rules the skies, striking what it wants. So, all we can definitively say is that Russia and Ukraine appear to be broadly matched in capability, while Israel is much better than Iran. We can't say for sure how Israel (or the US) would fare against Russia. Read more...

After our visit to Fort Point, we headed across the Golden Gate bridge to the Marin Headlands. The whole area on the north side of the Golden Gate used to belong to the Army, which installed numerous batteries there from the 1890s to the 1940s, many of which can be visited. But that was only secondary to our real objective, Nike Site SF-88, a Cold War-era SAM site that is the only real memorial to a massive network of air defenses built in the 1950s to protect America from Soviet bomber attack.

The Nike system grew out of concerns in late WWII that aircraft would soon be flying too high and too fast for existing gun-based systems to handle, necessitating a weapon that could alter its course in flight. The obvious answer was to use a rocket, and both Army and Navy began developing systems on that basis. The Army's was called Nike, and it was designed primarily to protect American cities and military bases from Soviet bombers. The first site became operational in 1954, and the system was rapidly built out, with a total of 265 batteries built around the country. The initial Nike Ajax missile, had a range of only 30 miles, and with no more than four launchers per site, it would likely be overwhelmed by a large attack. The answer was the bigger Nike Hercules missile, which could not only reach out almost 100 miles, but also carry a large nuclear warhead, hopefully capable of taking out multiple bombers at once. Most Ajax sites were modernized to take the new missile, although a fair number were shut down as no longer needed. The follow-on to Hercules, called Nike Zeus, would have been intended to shoot down ballistic missiles, but it was sadly cancelled. The majority of the American Hercules sites were shut down in 1974, leaving the country without any serious ground-based air defenses, although a few soldiered on for another 5 years. Read more...

While in the Bay Area for the DSL meetup, I finally managed to get inside a Third System Fort, specifically Fort Point, built in the 1850s to guard San Francisco Bay. It's a late addition to the Third System, and shows all of the various features developed during that system's life. And if the thought of mid-19th century coastal defenses isn't enough to excite you, you should consider going anyway, because it's right under the Golden Gate Bridge and the area is stunning.

The Golden Gate, the stretch of water between the Pacific and San Francisco Bay, is an obvious chokepoint for anyone trying to protect San Francisco, so the first fortification in the area was built by the Spanish in 1794, with only a handful of cannons. It fell into ruin after Mexico gained independence, but when gold was discovered in California in 1849, only a year after the US seized the territory from Mexico, there was interest in protecting the rapidly-growing city from attack. The result was the only Third System fort on the West Coast, started in 1850 and completed in 1860. Like most of the Third System, it was built with casemated guns inside the walls, although it is unusual in having three tiers of casemates instead of just one, as well as a barbette tier on top of the wall. Unfortunately, just after it was completed, the performance of several other brick forts in the Civil War, most notably Fort Pulaski, showed that rifled guns had made masonry forts like this obsolete, and the fort was placed in reserve, even as new batteries were built starting in the 1890s. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

The LA meetup last month was excellent, and everyone seemed to have a great time. Next year, the plan is to go to the Air Force Museum in Dayton. There may not be ships, but it is a really impressive museum, and unlike museum ships, I have much less concern about the size of the group. You should plan to come.

Overhauls are Battleship Aviation Parts One and Two, FFG(X) and for 2024, reviews of Bovington Tank Museum, museums around Boston, places we went during last year's meetup and my piece on Eagle.

I attempted to visit Hornet while in the Bay Area as part of the DSL meetup in May 2025. Unfortunately, when we arrived, there was a long line to get onto the ship, as they were hosting a furry convention⁴ that day. Now, I have nothing against museum ships doing unusual things for money, and I'd heard of CarrierCon, a more general fandom convention hosted aboard Hornet, but that was a few months ago.⁵ The real problem was threefold. First, one member of our party had checked their website that morning, and not seen anything about this, so it was a unpleasant surprise to find the ship full of people, with an hour-long line. Second, upon arrival we were told that admission would require a con pass, which was $50 instead of the normal $25. Third, it was Memorial Day weekend, and while I'm sure that this wasn't one of their busier weekends,⁶ doing a convention of any sort⁷ on that weekend feels tacky and a bit disrespectful.

That said, I do want to zero in on the second of the three issues. My basic problem is that because the ship was hosting a con, the experience onboard would be much worse than it would normally have been. I got a look at their map, and pretty much every large public space aboard was being used for panels and the like, which is going to make talking about them much harder, even with the relatively small group (8 people) I had. The only open area on the ship looked to be the flight deck, which is fun, but not $50 worth of fun. And while I am sympathetic to the operational difficulties of trying to separate the general public from con guests, charging people who actually want to see your ship (instead of the thing on it) more for a worse experience isn't a great look. Read more...