Introduction

"The real national battles, just as it was 50 years ago, are happening in the military sphere with several countries investing in military spy satellites". Pat Norris, globalsecurity.org

"It would have an enormous impact if a country were able to destroy those satellites". Pat Norris, guardian.co.uk

Following the Soviet triumph of Sputnik, a nervous world watched events at Cape Canaveral in Florida as America tried to catch up with its superpower rival. Meanwhile the American element of the real space race was taking place in California.

Driven by fears of a build-up of ICBMs, both countries developed spy satellites able to monitor the strategic arsenal of its rival. Satellites in the CORONA (USA), Zenit (Soviet) and related families were launched every couple of weeks for more than a decade as the superpowers strived to stay abreast of a dangerously escalating nuclear arms race. The political, military and technical stories behind these programmes are the subject of this lecture.

The lecture also explains why the politically stabilising influence of these satellites is one of the lessons for today, given that new nuclear arms races are currently underway or threatened in several regions of the world.

Background

Since the launch of Sputnik 1 on 04 October 1957, the contribution made by satellites to society has been enormous: instant awareness of sporting, political, and human events across the globe; immediate communication undreamt of 50 years ago; and the chance to see close-ups of planets and stars and share the excitement of astronauts in space. But this book casts a spotlight on a little-known aspect of the Space Age – the military dimension and how the superpowers used spy satellites.

Today, military satellites represent 25 percent of all satellites in orbit. Pat Norris argues that the development of spy satellites has prevented nuclear armageddon. Mr Norris believes that the "race to the Moon" between the two superpowers was a side effect of the Cold War, and that the most important event was the use of spy satellites by military powers to prevent the Cold War becoming a "hot war". Pat will conclude by focussing on the regional tensions of today, and look ahead to what the future holds – a time when spy satellites could be the only defence against a nervous nuclear power using its nuclear weapons needlessly.

 
Mr Pat Norris

Pat Norris has worked in the space and software industries since the 1960s. Born and educated in Ireland he started his working life in the UK at the radar laboratories of Elliott Automation.

He moved to the USA in 1966 working for the RCA Service Company at the Goddard Space Flight Center, supporting NASA's activities in precise orbit determination, gravity field modeling and satellite geodesy. In 1967 he joined TRW to work on the Apollo moon landing program in Houston Texas. He led a small team of engineers analysing the challenges of navigating between the earth and the moon, and around the moon. He received the Apollo individual Achievement Award from Neil Armstrong in August 1969 for his endeavours - in particular the determination of accurate geodetic locations for the one third of NASA tracking stations whose data had to be binned in the Apollo 8 mission. From 1971 to 1980 he worked for the European Space Agency as system and software engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the Meteosat weather satellite, the Aerosat navigation satellite and the OTS telecom satellite.

Since 1980, Pat has worked for multinational software company LogicaCMG (formerly Logica) in the UK. The company is now the European leader in space software - its software currently supports the missions of more than a third of the world's satellites. Space missions in which Pat has been involved in this role include the Giotto probe to Halley's comet, the Hipparcos star mapper, the Huygens probe to Titan, the Galileo navigation system, the Inmarsat-4 global mobile broadband network, the XMM X-ray astronomy observatory and the Skynet 5 military communications satellite.