There’s an excellent documentary called “The Corona Story – A Point in Time,” on the CIA’s Corona satellite reconnaissance program. It was was a truly remarkable government program that broke new ground in a number of areas: the first recovered objects from orbit; first to deliver intelligence information from a satellite; first mapping from space; first satellite to employ multiple re-entry vehicles; and first photography from a satellite.
President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying the government spent $30-$40 billion on the space program, and the intelligence received by the Corona program alone made it worth 10-times that investment. That includes pinpointing the location, numbers, and capabilities of Russian nuclear forces, as well as movement of conventional forces such as before the Czechoslovakian incident in 1968.
Here’s the assessment of Corona from Mark Morton, General Electric Program Manager:
I think one of the important points we can observe from the program is the tremendous dedication, resolve, tenacity of purpose that the entire team had — the government agencies, the industry, all the way up and down the line to get the thing accomplished. I don’t think it could have been done in today’s climate. We probably wouldn’t have been allowed to go beyond the sixth failure before the program would have been canceled, rather than go 12 flights before we had a successful one on the 13th.
That isn’t to say we didn’t have our discouraging moments and frustrations. I remember sometime along midstream, I guess it was about the eighth or ninth flight where we didn’t get it back, one of the members of the team opined at one of our meetings that perhaps there was some fundamental reason why something couldn’t come back from orbit. Maybe there was a fundamental technical point that was missed, and you could never get anything back from orbit. This goes to show you the direction of thought at the point of time. We went right along to the accomplishment.
The interview with Morton took place between 1966 and 1972. Even at that time, the acquisition bureaucracy had grown so burdensome that innovative efforts from a few years earlier would not have been possible. I wonder what Morton would say if he saw the acquisition culture today. While Corona was a CIA program in coordination with the Air Force, I think the thought-exercise is still useful.
Here is more from Corona’s Program Manager at Lockheed, James Plummer:
Many people referring to the program remember the large number of failures that preceded the final success in Discoverer 14. In fact, there were a large number of failures. We had a launch attempt that was aborted on the pad. We had a capsule that was impacted into the Earth in the wrong area. We had an unsuccessful launch where the vehicle did not achieve the proper velocity. We had a capsule which was ejected from the vehicle, but went off into a new orbit instead of going into the Earth’s atmosphere. We had power failures. We had thermal problems. We had procedural problems and so forth.
While these were a lot of failures, they were also the necessary development to get us to the successes that we eventually needed. For example we did prove the booster. We did prove the ground control system. We did prove the orbital operations. We proved the camera. We proved the reentry body. We proved the overall system. Of course for all of us who worked so closely with the program, government and contractor alike, we did not consider the program a real success until we returned the exposed film to Washington DC.
In some ways, acquisition reform are really a rejuvenation of the culture the United States used to have in government programs prior to the rise of PPBE in the 1960s, which is a Soviet-style system of resource control. While DoD can usefully look to major tech enterprises on how they manage large technology developments, DoD also has a lot to learn from its own history.
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