Rescue agents for NASA

Behind NASA's successful space spacecraft launches a shadow of a secret US government agency.

Apollo 11 was launched on July 16, 1969.(Photo: NASA)

The fever on the Moon was not the only race during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. While the two sides sprinted to orbit the Moon, there was another secret competition taking place between the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) and the military to gain influence in space projects, according to The Daily Beast.

The two sides confronted each other in April 1981, during the pilot orbit of the first space shuttle, Columbia . NASA's flagship product, the symbol of this US military and scientific power, had trouble when part of the heat shield was broken. No one knows whether this damage will prevent Columbia from returning to Earth safely.

In that moment, it seemed that only the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which controlled most government spy satellites, had employees throughout the Air Force, Navy and the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA), is able to save the ship with the crew, also to save its own competitors.

It was an important piece in the book by Rowland White, an aviation expert and author of several records of avant-garde pilots controlling high-tech aircraft.

The author interviewed many of NASA's veteran astronauts and leaders, and wrote a book entitled " Into the black ". The book is about the Cold War space race from the perspective of a small group of test pilots, including Bob Crippen , NASA Navy officer, who travels between the Air Force and NASA factions in contest, before joining NASA space shuttle crew.

Crippen took control of the Columbia in his first mission, the task of almost killing him and possibly making the US manned space program suspended.

The story begins on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The US government was also studying its own satellite, but Sputnik panicked them. In 1958, Congress passed a law allowing the establishment of NASA's Aerospace Agency - NASA. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the decision to establish.

Money was poured into NASA and on September 12, 1962, Kennedy's successor president declared in Houston: " This country must fulfill its goal of bringing people to the Moon and returning safely, before this decade. finish". Meanwhile, the Apollo program for this purpose has been underway for two years.

But NASA is not the only US agency about space then. In 1961, President Eisenhower secretly established the NRO , the US satellite monitoring agency, combining personnel and equipment from the Air Force, Navy, and CIA. The existence of this agency was top secret until 1992.

The NRO and the Air Force even have their own manned space program, with the goal of secretly monitoring the Earth. They have successfully built a part of the prototype of " manned orbital laboratory ". If not canceled by Nixon in 1969, this will be the first US Space Station.

The NRO and Air Force have also developed and launched a series of increasingly sophisticated , unmanned reconnaissance satellites into orbit. The Keyhole satellite series is equipped with state-of-the-art film cameras with large lenses with lenses that allow detailed images of the Earth's surface.

The finished film will be put into the box, attached to the umbrella and released into the atmosphere. Special Air Force cargo planes will be responsible for collecting movies. By the mid-1970s, satellites were able to transmit digital images directly to Earth in real time. In 1973, Keyhole satellites also helped NASA's Space Station repair broken solar panels.

But the Keyhole program is classified as top secret, the public cannot know it. And despite the success of the NRO, key Air Force officials are committed to a manned space program. Chief among them, Air Force military astronauts recruited the crew of the previously canceled " manned orbit" program, including Crippen.

The Columbia was supposed to be launched in 1979 to repair the failing Skylab space station. However, the heat shield resistant to 2,300 degrees Celsius when returning to the Earth's atmosphere has been shown to be very easily detached. NASA initiated a new shield design program but did not keep up. The launch schedule had to be relegated in 1981, two years later than expected. The untreated timely Skylab fell to Earth in June 1979.

Although Air Force Secretary Hans Mark provided a billion dollar budget to save this project, the NRO and Army still objected to the plan to use the spacecraft to bring their reconnaissance satellites into orbit. They prefer to use disposable boosters.

According to Mark, the reluctance of agencies to work with NASA and spacecraft programs will undermine the US manned space plan. Therefore, he asked the Air Force and NRO to redesign the satellite to suit the spacecraft.

Soviet first Sputnik satellite, weighing about 84 kg.(Photo: NASA)

Columbia's first launch was on April 12, 1981, at Cape Canaveral. While in orbit more than 270 km from Earth, Crippen and his commander John Young were frightened to see some heat shields disappearing from Columbia's tail.

The tail sections are not very important, but the abdomen is very important. If a few sheets were dropped, Columbia would undoubtedly be destroyed when it returned to the atmosphere, and rescue operations would be required.

However, the two had no way of observing the abdomen to assess the failure, forcing NASA to order Crippen and Young to attempt a risky landing or preparing to rescue the two astronauts.

Luckily for them, the Keyhole satellite can take pictures of Columbia's abdomen. It transmits images to the NRO station located in Virginia. Soon after, NASA had these images in hand and confirmed that there was no damage in the abdomen.

Columbia landed on April 14, opening a new era of flights into human space. But as revealed in White's book, NASA's 31-year spacecraft operation will never happen without its help.

The following time proved that the Air Force and the NRO were right about spacecraft, expensive, unreliable and insecure, in stark contrast to the qualities that NASA committed. From 1981 to 2011 only 135 tasks were performed, an average of 12 flights per 12 weeks. The cost per pound is still stuck at about $ 10,000, much larger than the $ 20 figure predicted by NASA.

There were even two catastrophic accidents in 1986 and 2003, killing 14 astronauts.The Challenger has caught fire when a rocket has exploded while flying. Columbia in 2003 was damaged by debris on the wing protection during launch and accident, an accident it may have encountered two decades earlier.

It was the agencies that objected to this plan from the beginning and did their best to prevent it from developing before being forced to join Mark's project, eventually contributing to its rescue.

The NRO also consulted the US Air Force's first X-37B unmanned aircraft, which was launched into orbit a year before the shuttle fleet stopped operating in 2011.

The X-37B is launched by automatic, low-risk missiles, carrying equipment that can be considered the best of spacecraft and reusable. If it explodes while returning to the atmosphere there will be no human damage.