Kingdom Come

“He who occupies the high ground…will fight to advantage.” – Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategist and philosopher, 544 BC-496 BC.

From the start, the military rationale for space exploration was to control the high ground. Such an attack, generals and politicians argued, would be impossible to stop.

The military has always played a role in its exploration. Military officers piloted most Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft.

Preparation for war is the context in which every activity in space must be viewed.

Creating a timeline of significant events is helpful for determining where we’re at today.

In 1898 a Russian schoolteacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsy (1857-1935) proposed…Exploration of the Universe with Rocket Propelled Vehicles. Tsiolkovsy has been called the Father of Modern Astronautics..

In 1926 American Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) achieved the first successful flight with a rocket that flew for 2,5 seconds, climbed 12.5 meters, and landed 56 meters away. Goddard has been called the Father of Modern Rocketry.

In 1923 Herman Oberth (1894-1989) and other German engineers and scientists assembled the most advanced rocket of its time under the direction of Wernher von Braun. The V-2 rocket was able to lob a one-tone warhead 50 miles high and hundreds of miles down range to devastate entire city blocks. Oberth has been called the Father of Space Flight.

Space Flight? That’s about as ambiguous a plaudit as one can get.

Beginning in September 1944, over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the Nazi Wehrmacht against Allied targets, first London and later Antwerp and Liège. The rockets were 76 feet tall, streaked through the skies faster than the speed of sound to targets over 200 miles away carrying over a ton of explosives.

According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks from V-2s resulted in the deaths of an estimated  9,000 civilians and military personnel. Over 10,000 concentration camp prisoners died in their creation. 

The rocket was no longer something of fantasy or the movies. 

It was now a weapon of mass murder.

Can we not recognize that all the rest of the rocket science is likewise advertised as being peaceful when in fact it is developed for destructive purposes?

1946 – As Germany was losing the war and the Allied Forces advanced across Germany, the Americans packed up 300 rail cars  loaded down with V-2 parts – fuel tanks, fins, nosecones, servomotors, and engines.

Over 100 key V-2 personnel surrendered to the Americans rather than be captured by the Russians. These Nazi brilliant designers who had been involved in crimes against humanity would receive awards, honors, ticker-tape parades and showered with riches by America for their contributions to their new country.

Wernher von Braun became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle.

The V-2 was studied, examined, copied, and made better.

The Saturn V was monstrous. Colossal.

Today, rusted out parts of V-2s are still buried in the tunnels of Dora-Mittelbau [slave factories complex], and an entire Saturn V in pristine condition is on display at the Kennedy Space Center.

Wernher von Braun was in charge of both.

Walter Dornberger, a leader of Nazi Germany‘s V-2 rocket program, played a major role on the creation of the X-15 aircraft and the Space Shuttle.

Their stories are about who we are, and what we have become. 

The choice of the name Saturn is not a highbrow nod to the classics. It is a deliberate association with the power of Lucifer, the Roman translation of Greek Cronus and Hebrew Lucifer, while Apollo is the cloned grandson of Lucifer. See the post The Clone Wars for details.

Saturn V was an American human-rated super heavy-lift launch vehicle used by NASA between 1967 and 1973.

As of 2022, the Saturn V remains the only launch vehicle to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit [defined as 1,200 miles above earth].

Saturn’s successor is NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, AKA Artemis I. Its flight test on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022 is the first integrated flight test of the agency’s deep space exploration systems with the unmanned Orion spacecraft and ground systems. 

WWII Nazi rocket science seized as spoils of war by winners Russia and the US  permits the existing concept of a space-based telescope to be studied for practical implementation.

1956 – President Eisenhower initiated the secret Corona satellite reconnaissance program managed jointly by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Air Force (USAF).

1957 – the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, orbiting Earth at a height ranging from 200 km to 950 km atop a modified Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Sputnik launched the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race with new political, military, technological, and scientific developments.

1958 – the US Department of Defense transferred the Corona program to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same agency responsible for helping create DARPANET- the forerunner of the Internet. The goal of the program was not revealed to the public at the time; it was presented as a program to investigate the communication and environmental aspects of placing humans in space The primary goal of the program was to assess how rapidly the Soviet Union was producing long-range bombers and ballistic missiles and where they were being deployed, and to take photos over the Sino-Soviet bloc. In all, 38 Discoverer satellites were launched by February 1962 and the satellite reconnaissance program continued until 1972.

1958 – 1963 – Project Mercury – named after the Roman god of communication and travel – was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. Taken over from the US Air Force by the newly created “civilian” space agency NASA, it conducted 20 uncrewed developmental flights (some using animals), and six successful flights by astronauts.

1959 – The United States created the secret National Reconnaissance Office / NRO in the U.S. Department of Defense, funded through the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), to design, build, launch, and maintain America’s intelligence satellites. The existence of NRO and its mission were not declassified until 1992. 

1961 – In his farewell address, President Eisenhower, unable to slow the arms race, warned of the dangers posed by the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.“

1962 – The first communications satellite, Syncom II, is used for U.S. military communications.

1963 – Director of CIA created the Panel for Future Satellite Reconnaissance Operations, to be briefed on the various technologies that people in the optics field – that would be telescopes of course – believed could have a major impact on the development of reconnaissance satellites. 

1963 – 1971 – GAMBIT 1, GAMBIT 3 and the HEXAGON system satellites became America’s eyes in space. The declassification of GAMBIT and HEXAGON was announced on 9/17/2011. I think we can all agree that this was announced more to America’s enemies during the response to 9/11/2011 than to the American public. 

1963 – 1969 – “The U.S. Air Force’s MOL [Manned Orbiting Laboratory] program…spent $1.56 billion…“Is the MOL a laboratory?” reads one of the newly released [declassified] documents. “Or is it an operational reconnaissance spacecraft? (Or a bomber?)” Even today, aspects of the MOL initiative remain secret with a superpowerful camera system. The historical documents suggest numerous other jobs were on the MOL docket, including the use of side-looking radar, the evaluation of electronic intelligence-gathering gear and the assembly and servicing of large structures in space…“negation missiles”…the inspection of satellites, and the encapsulation and recovery of enemy spacecraft…using rocket-propelled net devices.

1964 – 1969 – First geo-stationary communication satellite (GOES), Syncom 3, used provide continuous visible images of the same area on Earth 24 hours a day by hovering over a single point above the Earth. Department of Defense provided the communications ground stations used to relay transmissions On January 1, 1965, NASA officially transferred operation of the satellites to the DOD along with telemetry, command stations, and range and rangefinding equipment which was implemented to support the DOD’s communications in Vietnam. Syncom 3 remains in geosynchronous orbit as of 2024.

1968 – The most tenacious anti-war movement in U.S. history forces an end to U.S. combat operations against Communist forces in Vietnam and a suspension of the draft. The National Academy of Sciences publishes “Scientific [clearly as opposed to Military] Uses of the Large Space Telescope.”

1969 – The KH-10 DORIAN, a massive reconnaissance camera being developed for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory was terminated after accumulating costs of $8 billion in today’s dollars, with still more funding and years of development before operation. Six mirrors up to 8 feet across were mothballed. 

Or were they?

Why would any intelligent person unquestionably believe a government known for lying to the public, specifically during this era?

Rather than shout down conspiracy theorists, we should be grateful for those who question if the most powerful government in history is being honest.

Remember Woodward and Bernstein in the same era? No?

On June 18, 1972, a Washington Post front page story reported the previous day’s break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC….The White House dismissed the crime as a “third-rate burglary,” and much of the nation’s media soon dropped interest in what some jokingly referred to as “the Watergate caper.” But two of the reporters who worked on that first Washington Post story, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, continued tracking down sources and pursuing leads on what became the biggest story of twentieth-century American politics…[leading to] Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974…

1971 – the USSR sent their first space station, Salyut 1 to 138 miles above earth. This was followed by seven more “space” stations.

In 1973 NASA set Skylab 275 miles above earth, using the same Saturn rocket famed for carrying men to the moon and back. After 24 weeks its orbit decayed, and it disintegrated in the atmosphere on July 11, 1979.

From 1981 – 2011 twenty-four successful “space” shuttle round trips accomplished “space” exploration up to a maximum of 390 miles above earth.