Bolden, almost immediately after the Challenger accident, the Air Force withdrew from any involvement in human space fl ight, and SLC-6 was disassembled. “President Reagan made the conscious decision that they were going to stop allowing NASA to deploy military satellites from the shuttle [due to the potential risk],” Bolden notes. “Up until that time, NASA had deployed some- thing like 80 satellites. But President Reagan felt that could be done more safely with an expendable vehicle. “Had the Challenger accident not
occurred, the shuttle program would have gone in a dramatically diff erent direction. We would have been fl ying shuttles into polar orbit, and DoD would have had its own astronaut corps,” Bolden suggests. Though DoD stopped using space shuttles to deploy satellites, it con- tinued to use the program for other missions, including space-based experiments. Understandably, many such missions were classifi ed.
Classified payloads According to NASA spokesperson Michael Cabbage, shuttles made seven totally classifi ed fl ights, one unclassifi ed fl ight, and one partially classifi ed fl ight for DoD. Many of the payloads are believed to have been intelligence-gathering satellites and subsequent rescue and repair of mal- functioning military satellites. The fi rst all-military shuttle mis-
sion was STS-51-C in January 1985. Led by Col. Loren J. Shriver, USAF- Ret., it deployed a modifi ed Inertial Upper Stage vehicle for DoD. An- other notable military mission was STS-116 in December 2006. That mission carried 1,350 pounds of DoD payloads, including two DoD experi- ments that were carried out aboard the ISS and three that were deployed into space from the shuttle cargo bay. Two additional DoD experiments used ground- and space-based sen-
PHOTOS: FROM TOP, DOD; NASA; NASA; CORBIS
sors to collect data from the shuttle over the course of the mission. Interestingly, Bolden’s fi rst shuttle
fl ight, STS-61-C, while not strictly a military mission, carried a classifi ed payload: an experimental infrared imaging camera manufactured by RCA. Riding with it was an RCA engineer named Bob Sinker. “Even though I operated the payload, I was not allowed to know anything about the details of the camera’s intended use or its capabilities,” Bolden recalls. “Bob Sinker kept all the data, and every day after we ran ex- periments with the cam- era, he did a classifi ed communication with DoD repre- sentatives in mis- sion control.” Bolden also
recalls missions that included the deployment of unclassifi ed DoD UHF communica- tion satellites, as well as surveillance satellites for the intelligence commu- nity. There were also “dual use” Earth observation fl ights that included the use of an Army- developed, handheld camera with a geo-reference locator, [CONTINUES ON PAGE 81]
The world was shocked when Challenger (left) broke apart in 1986, killing its crew (inset above). After Colum- bia (top) broke apart during reentry in 2003, a roll of film with this in-flight crew photo (top inset) was recovered from the wreckage.
JANUARY 2012 MILITARY OFFICER 69
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