Eyes of the Big Bird

The KH-9 HEXAGON on display at the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. (credit: D. Day)

by Dwayne Day
Monday, October 14, 2013

In 2004, I wrote an article about why there was no KH-9 HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Museum near Washington Dulles International Airport (see: “The invisible Big Bird: Why there is no KH-9 spy satellite in the Smithsonian”, The Space Review, November 8, 2004). The first HEXAGON launched in 1971 and the last in 1986, and the huge satellite had earned the nickname “big bird.” It used high-speed film to record images that covered vast amounts of territory, returning the images to the Earth in film-return capsules. In the late 1990s the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) was actively working on declassifying the HEXAGON and the GAMBIT satellite programs, but that effort had ground to a halt.
Shortly after I wrote that article I received a phone call from a man named Phil Pressel. “Are you the person who wrote the article in The Space Review?” Yes, I replied. “I’m the guy who built that thing!” he said. He wouldn’t say the name of the “thing” or even what it did. But he said he had worked for the Perkin-Elmer Company, had helped design the “payload” on the satellite, and that he was writing a history about it.
Phil Pressel’s history has now been published by AIAA Press. Titled Meeting The Challenge: The Hexagon KH-9 Reconnaissance Satellite, it is a detailed, behind-the-scenes account of designing the most complex mechanical device ever flown in space, and one of the most powerful reconnaissance cameras ever built. It is a great read.

Shortly after I wrote that article I received a phone call from a man named Phil Pressel. “Are you the person who wrote the article in The Space Review?” Yes, I replied. “I’m the guy who built that thing!” he said.

During that 2004 phone call, Pressel wondered if I had any idea about when the program might be declassified. I thought it would not happen soon. I told him that it was originally supposed to happen in the late 1990s, but had been put on hold. Ever since then, there was no indication that it was likely to happen. Furthermore, the Bush Administration had clamped down on the declassification of even old historical records. The NRO’s fiftieth anniversary was in 2011 and government agencies like to throw parties on their big anniversaries and they like to have something to show off at them. So my best guess was that the earliest it would be declassified was sometime in 2011.
Pressel was disappointed, but said that he was going to ask his contacts in the government if they had any information as well. A month or two later he called me again and said that he had confirmed that there were no plans to declassify the program anytime soon, but he was going to continue working on his history of the program.