Draft History of the Air Force Capsule Return Program. Sanitized Version.

摘要

The mission of the 6594th Test Group--to recover capsules ejected from orbiting satellites--was first needed to support the Discoverer program in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Discoverer was a research and development program designed to develop and prove the hardware, procedures and techniques necessary for a series of military satellite systems and to train the Air Force officers and airmen necessary to operate them. The specific objectives of this program were defined as follows: (1) to consistently launch an earth satellite having an on-orbit weight of 1300 to 1800 pounds; (2) to consistently place such a satellite in a low altitude, near circular, polar orbit; (3) to stabilize this satellite on orbit, to re-position it at will, and to re-stabilize it in any desired attitude with respect to the earth; (4) to develop a tracking and communications network capable of precisely determining the orbital characteristics of the satellite, acquiring data from it, and issuing such commands as might be necessary to control fit; and (5) to separate a part of the vehicle--the recovery capsule--which could successfully re-enter the earth's atmosphere.