Hundreds of top secret missions were launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the 1960s, but very few photos of the vehicles and launches were released. This February 1963 photo shows a CORONA reconnaissance satellite being prepared for launch atop a Thrust-Augmented Thor-Agena rocket. Pad workers are working on the three solid rocket boosters that were added to the Thor to increase performance. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
The little rocket that could: Thor in the early days at Vandenberg (part 3)
by Dwayne A. Day Monday, July 8, 2024
In the late 1990s, Qantas captain Peter Hunter regularly flew a 747 from Sydney to Los Angeles and back. Regulations required that he have several days of rest after landing in the United States before making the return flight in what Hunter called his “office.” But he had a hobby. He drove down to San Diego where he had been given access to a vast corporate trove of photographs of Atlas, Thor, and Delta rockets. The photographs were not public or archived, but Hunter obtained permission to scan them to create collections with the goal of obtaining a photo of every Thor, Delta, and Atlas rocket launched.
During the 1960s and even into the 1970s, there were very few photos released by the Air Force of rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The ones that were released were often poor quality. Partly as the result of this secrecy, as well as its relative isolation compared to Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg did not achieve much public recognition and was overlooked by historians. When Peter Hunter put together his collections, he helped to rectify that. The photos also revealed some of the payload differences for the launches, possibly one of the reasons the Air Force never released them.
Due to Peter Hunter’s efforts, many images of Thor and Atlas operations at Vandenberg are available to historians at several aerospace archives. (See: “The little rocket that could: Thor in the early days at Vandenberg,” part 1 and part 2, The Space Review, June 24 and July 1, 2024. The photos in those articles are not from Hunter’s collections.) What follows is a small sample of Thor’s many launches at Vandenberg during the 1960s, thanks to Peter Hunter.
The Thor pads in Florida were designed to provide extensive access to the missiles. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
The first attempt at orbiting a satellite from Vandenberg was the Discoverer 1 launch in February 1958. This followed the unsuccessful “Discoverer Zero” pad accident involving another launch vehicle in January. The Air Force announced that Discoverer 1 was in orbit, but it was not detected in orbit and probably impacted in Antarctica. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
Launch preparations for the second Discoverer launch. Discoverer was a cover story for the CORONA reconnaissance satellite. The Thor pads at Vandenberg were simpler than the ones in Florida. Payload preparation was done vertically, inside a retractable shed. The spacecraft on this launch fell in the Arctic and inspired the book and later movie “Ice Station Zebra.” (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
The Royal Air Force operated Thor missiles with nuclear warheads on British soil. They conducted training and operational test firing of the missiles at Vandenberg. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
Vandenberg can be beautiful when the weather cooperates. Unlike Florida, there are no sandy beaches or swamps or alligators. But Vandenberg can also be cold and windy and often foggy. Many—perhaps most—launches take place in fog and are not visible until they rise above the marine layer. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
Several of the early Discoverer/CORONA launches were technically under the authority of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). However, due to the highly classified and high priority nature of the missions, ARPA exerted no control over them. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
Discoverer/CORONA failed 12 times (13, if you count the Discoverer Zero pad accident) before achieving success. Here the launch crew is seen celebrating after Discoverer 13 was successfully recovered from space. Smiling was apparently not allowed that day. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
The Agena served as the second stage for many Thor launches and also served as the satellite bus for hundreds of payloads. On orbit it provided stabilization and pointing, power, and communications. Batteries in the Agena powered the CORONA reconnaissance cameras. Agenas were first prepared on the base, then taken to the pad where they were horizontally integrated with the Thor. Then the payload would be brought to the pad and attached to the Agena. Later in the 1960s, the Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office adopted a “factory-to-pad” approach to reduce the amount of integration and test done at the launch site. The reasoning was that a cold, foggy, remote site with sand blowing around was not the best place to be integrating complex hardware. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
Thor rockets with classified payloads were launching from Vandenberg on a monthly basis throughout most of the 1960s. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
The CORONA payloads atop Thor rockets were covered with an inflatable bag that piped in air conditioning to keep them cool in the sun. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
The lack of launch towers at several of the early Thor launch sites meant that last minute payload preparation, like enabling some of the pyrotechnic devices on the Agena upper stage, had to be done atop cherry pickers. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
This is the launch of the first of three LANYARD reconnaissance satellites designed to be more powerful than the CORONA. LANYARD used a camera adapted from the canceled Samos E-5 program. This launch was unsuccessful. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
As the payloads became more sophisticated, more equipment was added to the Vandenberg Thor pads. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
In addition to the many CORONA reconnaissance satellites launched from Vandenberg, Thors also launched signals intelligence satellites (colloquially called “ferrets”) into polar orbits. These satellites gathered data on radar systems inside the Soviet Union. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
By 1964, some Thors began using a converted Atlas launch pad known as Space Launch Complex-3 West. SLC-3W had more extensive infrastructure to support launches. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
Even after Thors started using SLC-3, there were still launches from the original SLC-1 and SLC-2 sites. This is one of the best closeup photos of a CORONA payload concealed by a protective shroud and the Agena that served both as second stage and supported the payload in orbit. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
Here a Thor with a CORONA satellite is lifting off from SLC-3W. Note that the original inflatable protective payload covering has now been replaced by a breakaway covering. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
One of the last CORONA satellites to launch. This was a KH-4B model that had improved resolution and other capabilities. CORONA photographed large amounts of territory within the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the 1960s, the United States had very little information about Soviet weapons production and facilities. By the end of the decade, it had photographed the entire Soviet landmass multiple times and detected and precisely located every missile site in the country. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
The last CORONA satellite launched in May 1972. By this time, CORONA had been replaced by the much more capable HEXAGON satellite. CORONA had been enormously successful. (credit: Peter Hunter Collection)
