posted 07-13-2007 10:36 AM               

Agena was under development for a lot of USAF payloads: Samos, Midas, Discoverer (Corona). There was a coordinating board between NASA and DoD that was supposed to eliminate redundancy and I think it eventually killed Vega.

I think that the story was that NASA was "unaware" of Agena, but I find this really hard to believe. There was nothing secret about the Agena's existence.

In fact, I recently found documents at NARA in Laguna Niguel where a NASA rep was briefed on the USAF satellite plans. I'll have to check the dates, but I'm thinking it was 1958 and might even have been 1956 or 1957 (the rep was then working for NACA, NASA's predecessor).

The interesting thing is that he got two briefings and the first one was about an upper stage that bears no resemblance to anything they built. This briefing was by Truax and I think he was blowing a lot of smoke and telling them about his own personal hobby-horse (to mix some metaphors). Later the rep got another briefing and it was much more like what USAF was actually doing at the time.

I think Joel Powell has written about Vega for Spaceflight.

posted 07-13-2007 05:35 PM               

Whether or not NASA knew of the Agena's existence or not, I believe that the space agency may have saved some development money in the short run, but in hindsight (always 20/20!) the Vega cancellation was a mistake in that it would have provided a much-needed insurance policy for NASA in the event that Centaur was delayed (which it was, from 1962 until 1966!) to launch large lunar or planetary spacecraft. Agena may have been quite adequate for the lunar missions eventually assigned to it (Ranger and Lunar Orbiter) but it was clearly lacking in performance for the early Venus and Mars probes (think of what a more capable Vega-boosted Mars probe would have discovered during the Mariner 4 mission...)

posted 07-15-2007 11:32 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by atlas5guy:
...but there are several reasons that Vega would have been a good idea (Centaur back-up and a larger payload capacity available on an upper stage developed by NASA, not borrowed from the Air Force).

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All of these decisions are interlinked. If Vega had been pursued, NASA would have had less money to pursue the Centaur, which could have delayed it even further. So rather than an insurance policy for Centaur, it could have actually hurt that program.

posted 07-20-2007 08:36 AM               

The two relevant documents are a trip report to the ARDC Ballistic Missile Division in Inglewood on Feb 6, 1958, and a visit to Lockheed Missile Systems Division in Sunnyvale, on Feb 18, 1958.

The first document is rather amazing in how wrong everything is. Hartman and Max Faget (remember him?) visited ARDC and met with Commander Bob Truax (remember him too?).

Essentially this is a report about all the technology that Truax told them about. Because so little of this ever progressed at ARDC I am now starting to suspect that Truax only told the men about projects that ARDC had already abandoned and was not pursuing. In other words, he lied to them. He didn't tell them about the WS-117L reconnaissance satellite program and everything that was associated with it.

The second memo is more relevant to the question asked here. The Lockheed people were very open to the NACA representatives and told them a lot, including information on the design of the Hustler upper stage, its rocket engine, etc.

Note that this is in March 1958--even before NASA was created. So it is clear that NASA, when it was created, knew that the Agena existed. After all, Hartman's reports to the director of NACA became the property of NASA.

However, I believe that the real issue concerning Agena vs. Vega was the Agena B and its restart capability. I don't see this topic listed in the index for my book on Corona, but it is mentioned in part 2 of my article on Corona that ran in Quest in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, there are no citations for that article (I believe they were deleted due to space concerns), so I don't know where I got the data from.

posted 07-20-2007 01:45 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by art540:
Did the Hartman documents have any kind of received and/or reviewed stamps or paperwork attached? Just curious about transferred documents...

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posted 07-20-2007 02:36 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by art540:
My question was do government documents ger a similar process as a matter of record keeping? Could be a stamp or just initials with date. For transfers anyway...

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It depends. Sometimes they do. But this is rare. And in the case of the documents that I am looking at, they are clearly copies of the documents that were _sent_ to the NACA director in Washington, so they are not proof that the documents were _received_ in Washington. That said, these are official records and it's pretty much certain that they all went to DC. I imagine that if you dug deeply in NACA document collections in DC, you would find at least some of these documents, proving that Hartman's reports to the NACA director were regularly received in Washington. Naturally, there would be more careful handling procedures for classified documents.

posted 07-22-2007 02:32 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by art540:
I assumed that the Hartman collection was original documents but then if they were original from Washington they would no longer be the Hartman collection.

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As for the issue of a receiving stamp, that's a good way to confirm that something was indeed received, but it's also not always present. There's no guarantee that a document would have been stamped like that when it was received.