No introduction

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On the Hexagon program whenever we met someone new who was cleared for the program, we had to be introduced by a third party that knew each of us and that we each had the proper top secret clearance. Mike Krim told me this story many years ago.  

 

“I remember a long time ago was invited to some British friends and they arranged a dinner with some people and they had also invited someone with whom they thought I would be very interested in speaking with. Apparently, he was from a British organization that parallels our   customer, the CIA in one way or another. So, after dinner they brought out cigars and that is typically British, and pipes and MacCarrans 18 -year old whiskey and this fellow says, “what have you been working on?” I said I don’t think I can talk about it because we really haven’t been properly introduced. What have you been working on? He said “I’m sort of in the same situation.”  So we sat and drank whiskey and didn’t say a damn word The whole evening.  

Three short stories reminiscing about some old Hexagon history

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Here are several stories about Hexagon including two about testing to see if a caging mechanism was necessary to keep the Hexagon film rolls from telescoping during launch’s severe vibration. By Phil Pressel.

 During some reminiscing discussions that I had with Paul Brickmeier, Paul Convertito, Mike Krim and several other Hexagon alumni well after the program ended, we had talked at the beginning of the program that we wondered whether the film reels might telescope during the severe g loads in the direction of the central rotating axis of the reels. Paul told the following story:

 “I remember going for a centrifuge test on a supply film stack. It was mounted in a box and brought up to MIT’s Lincoln Lab centrifuge facility. to see if the film would telescope while undergoing high g loads.  Telescoping meant whether the film layers would slide with respect to each other in the direction of their central rotating axis.

 Our customer, the CIA had cleared everybody at MIT’s Lincoln Lab centrifuge facility for Top Secret security. However for some reason even though the staff there was professional we all felt, not entirely to be trusted completely. There were a bunch of customer guys outside, security types in case there was a breach of security. There was a lot of concern that the test article was going to go through the wall of the centrifuge facility. You don’t think much of that until the centrifuge gets wound up and comes past the window and you wanted to duck because even though the absolute angular velocity doesn’t sound very impressive but when you have a 1000 pound article on a radius arm, it comes by fast and is scary.

 The guys in the lab were absolutely pissed off that they didn’t know what was in the box being tested. I think that if we had driven a Volkswagen in from the street and mounted it to the centrifuge they would have done it in a half hour. They knew what was up though because they had probably done work with Itek before on a similar reconnaissance program, but the fact that we wouldn’t tell them had them slightly miffed so they did everything reluctantly.

 Bill Hample was the loads guy at TRW and worried that the stack would become oval and shift the center of gravity. We conducted the test and everything was fine. The stack did not telescope and that was what we hoped and expected. I remember the worst part of it was when we told them to shut it down. Nobody including me was prepared for it. They stopped the thing and when it stops, it stops on a dime and makes a loud bang and generates huge loads that could cause the film to telescope. It didn’t telescope but we were shocked by the big bang.”  

 Here is another story Paul Brickmeier told us about caging film..

 “I remember one of the first visits to Rochester on the caging mechanism there was a guy named Hans, a German and he had a scaled model of a roll of film, maybe 35 mm about 2 feet in diameter and he couldn’t understand why we would need a caging mechanism. The more we discussed it the angrier he got. I told him we had some people who were concerned, primarily Ken McLeish one of our vice presidents who had some prior experience where they had telescoping problems. But Hans takes this roll and he got so pissed off that he began banging it on the side of the table, smashing it against the wall and nothing happened to it. It was like a brick. He was right and it took 6 flights before we pulled the caging mechanism off the supply reels.

 Paul Convertito told a story about a trip that he took to visit our customer in DC and that Mike Weeks, our then General Manager also wanted to go to. Mike was not liked by many of us but he was a character.        

 “I remember once I was headed down to the customer shop to et a briefing on some new thing, I don’t remember what. So Weeks says to me “when are you going down.”  I said tomorrow. Weeks  says “I think I’ll head down too. Are you staying a couple of days?” I said yes. He said “Good, I can’t come tomorrow but I’ll be there the following day. I’ll be taking such and such a flight on the shuttle, can you pick me up?” I said yes I’ll pick you up.

 So that morning I head to the airport. It was National Airport where you have to go around and around until somebody shows up.. What happened was that when I got to pick up my rental car at Hertz they didn’t have a car for me. The only car they had was a brand new bright red Cadillac convertible with white leather seats. So I’m driving around and Mike is there and I’m waving to him; he ignores me and I go around again and I’m waving to him and blowing the horn; he is ignoring me; he must have said that can’t be the car. Finally I get an opening and pull up to the curb and blow the horn. I said Hey Mike what the hell is the matter with you. He said “where the f--- did you get that lady chick wagon? When I get to see your expense account I’ll fix you.”

 Then he comes over and he says, “can I drive it?”

My old flag

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The only thing this posting has in common with Hexagon is that I   survived some terrible experiences during World War II, otherwise I would not have had the opportunity to work on this “career job.”

 Most of you with whom I worked for so long at PE do not know that I am a Holocaust survivor. I was born in Belgium and when the Nazis invaded my parents and I escaped to France. We were in hiding there for 5 years in various locations. In 1944 at the age of seven I was separated from my parents. I was sheltered by a kind Catholic family in a small village that happened to be a center for the French underground.

 Not only did I live and witness many shootings, bombings, killings and extremely frightening things, I was so lonely and heartsick being separated from my parents. I am still somewhat traumatized by this. Fortunately we were eventually re-united.

 When the United States army started liberating France in September of 1944, during a rare visit by my parents to this village, my mother made me a French flag to wave to the liberating troops as they were to pass by that village. This is a photo of that 75-year old moth eaten flag that I have hanging in my office in archival protective material.

French flag.jpg

I personally drew with a light blue color pencil the “Cross of Lorraine” symbol of Charles De Gaulle’s Free French group in the middle of the flag. It is one of the few articles I have of my youth other than my memories.

 These experiences are why I totally understand and empathize about the horrible and cruel treatment of today’s immigrant children separated from their parent and caged in this country’s crowded “concentration camps.” It is inhumane treatment and needs to be stopped. This is my political statement.

 Immigrants were and are major contributors to most of the major American milestones, scientific, art, music, sports, health, technology and literature.

 Phil Pressel

 

 

 

 

Technology Related to Hexagon at Perkin-Elmer

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During the development and design of the Hexagon spy satellite system starting in 1966, with the first launch 5 years later in June 1971 and continuing on we at Perkin-Elmer did not have the following technologies until much later in the program and yet we achieved great success on the most complicated satellite of its day and perhaps still today.

  • NO CAD

  • NO MICROPROCESSORS

  • NO LED’S, NO CCD’S

  • LIMITED COMPUTER USE

  • NO POCKET CALCULATORS

  • NO DIGITAL PRINTERS (tracing paper drawings were converted to blueprints using large ammonia machines)

The tools we used were:

  • The Abacus (not really)

  • The slide rule

  • eventually the pocket calculator

  • eventually much more sophisticated computers programs

None the less our talented staff proudly developed the following new technologies that are in use today:

  • optical encoders

  • brushless DC motors

  • light pipes

  • complicated film handling mechanisms to move film at high speeds both linearly and in rotation

  • closed loop phase-lock servos

  • Kodak developed hi-resolution films both black and white and color

The incredible success we achieved really did provide so much intelligence for United States agencies and the military that enabled our government to make decisions that not only protected our security but helped keep peace in the world between 1971 and 1986, during the “cold war.”

 Credit must be given to over 1000 Perkin-Elmer employees   and of course to associated contractors, government agencies and Air Force and Navy personnel. In all of my work experience through retirement I have never worked with such a wonderful collection of smart and extremely competent people.

 They belonged to all of the following departments:

o  Systems engineering

o  Mechanical engineering

o  Electrical engineering

o  Design and drafting

o  Manufacturing

o  Optics

o  Testing

o  Quality assurance

o  Reliability

o  Technical documentation

o  Research

o  Program management

o  Sales and contracts

o  Upper management and technical staff

o  Administration and secretariat

o  Security

o  Machine shop

o  Building and facility staff

o  West coast field office

 I thank them all for their significant contributions and each time that I speak about Hexagon I honor them and Perkin-Elmer.

Phil Pressel

Fiftieth Anniversary of the July 20, 1969 Moon Landing

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I found this interesting article about the moon landing that I had not heard about. It is not related to Hexagon but is interesting by itself and also that there was some work done at Perkin-Elmer related to the moon landing (not sure which program).

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were lost on the Moon. Really

 

 

•   06.22.19

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were lost on the Moon. Really

Neither NASA nor the Apollo 11 astronauts knew exactly where they were when they landed on the Moon. Yet it didn’t impede the mission.

 

[Photos: Joel Kowsky/NASA; Pavlo Stavnichuk/iStock; 1697726/Pixabay]

         




BY CHARLES FISHMAN4

 

Once Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed Eagle on the Moon, the Apollo 11 astronauts and their spaceship were actually lost.

Oh, Mission Control never lost radio contact with them. But NASA was never able to figure out where, exactly, on the Moon they had set down, while they were on the Moon. And NASA sure did try.

The landing area on the Moon that had been picked out for Apollo 11 was about the length of Manhattan and twice as wide. In photo surveys, it looked plain, flat, and bland—not interesting for geologists but a safe place to land a spaceship, the first time human beings ever tried that on a place off of Earth.

But up close, the Sea of Tranquility was anything but tranquil. As Armstrong and Aldrin flew down toward the Moon in their lunar module, Armstrong was looking out the window and the spot the autopilot was flying them toward was, as Armstrong described it, a crater the size of a football field, littered with boulders, some as large as cars.

 

Not a comfortable place to try to land a gangly four-legged spaceship.

So Armstrong took manual control of where the lunar module was flying to—the spaceship computer still did all the actual flying, but Armstrong was instructing it where to go and at what speed.

In the end, he and Aldrin set down several miles from the original landing spot—on safe, level Moon ground, but not where they had planned to land. Armstrong, in particular, had studied photographs of the Sea of Tranquility in preparation for flying to it and knew the landmarks and the landscape of much of the area.

Andrew Chaikin, in his account of the Moon landings, A Man On the Moon, describes Armstrong’s reaction to landing in unfamiliar Moon terrain: “As he looked out (at Tranquility Base), Armstrong wondered where he and Aldrin had landed . . . . (He) searched the horizon for some feature he might be able to identify, but found none.”

There had been some worry inside NASA about whether, from Earth, they would be able to pinpoint the lunar module’s landing location. The Moon was mapped, but not in anything like fine, up-close detail; there were no constellations of tracking satellites around the Moon in 1969. “With a wry smile, (Armstrong) radioed Houston, ‘The guys who said we wouldn’t know where we were are the winners today.’ ”

In the 22½ hours Armstrong and Aldrin were on the Moon in Eagle, NASA never found them. Their crewmate, Michael Collins, was overhead, orbiting the Moon in the command module Columbia. The command module had a telescope as part of its navigation instruments, and Mission Control asked Collins to search for the lunar module—and his crewmates—every time he flew over.

It was a bit of a wild request, even with a telescope: Collins was orbiting at 69 miles, looking down on a space bigger than Manhattan, trying to find a spaceship that, looking down from above, was just 31 feet across, with himself traveling at 3,700 mph.

According to Chaikin’s account, Collins had just two minutes to search the landing area during each overflight—using coordinates radioed up from Mission Control and which he programmed into the command module’s computer for help aiming the telescope.

“Each time (Collins) went around . . . Mission Control had a new set of coordinates for him to try.” But those search areas were often far off from each other, lending the effort a haphazard air. “It didn’t take Collins long to realize that no one had a handle on the problem. His search continued fruitlessly for the rest of his 22 solo hours.”

Among the tools that proved in vain: Armstrong and Aldrin actually carried with them, in their lunar module cabin, 95 detailed paper photo-maps of the landing area, but as they looked out from the windows of the lunar module cabin, and then walked around, they were unable to connect any of the nearby features they could see with the features on those maps.

One reason to know where you were on the Moon was to make navigating back to orbit–and the flight home–safer and easier. But even without those coordinates, on blastoff, the radar and computers in the lunar module and the command module had no trouble finding each other and guiding Armstrong and Aldrin back to rendezvous with Collins.

NASA was later able to figure out where Armstrong and Aldrin had been, and the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base has been photographed by orbiting Moon probes, including the bottom stage of the lunar module, along with the sites of the other five Moon landing bases.

The fact that no one actually knew, at the time, where Eagle had landed is a mostly overlooked fact of that first Moon landing, but it did make news at the time. “The Apollo 11 astronauts took off from the Moon today still uncertain of exactly where they had been,” opened the story in the New York Times. Still, the Times reassured readers, “It was abundantly clear that they had been on the surface of the Moon.”