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13 @ AFP-731 or The Other Night Sky An Allegory trevor paglen On February 28, 1990, the Berlin Wall was crumbling, and the Cold War was thawing. In the weeks before, Germany had agreed on a plan for reunification , the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party pledged to give up its monopoly on power, and the first McDonald’s had just opened in Moscow. In Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Space Shuttle Atlantis sat on a movable launchpad with its bone-white delta wings lit with floodlights from below.1 STS-36 was going to be an odd mission. There were no high-minded press releases about the wonders of space travel or the scientific instruments aboard Atlantis that evening, no media kits for the journalists assigned to the launch, and no talk of the payload. One of the few reports about the upcoming launch came from the pages of Aviation Week and Space Technology: “A secret Pentagon shuttle mission set for Feb. 16 will carry a 37,300-pound advanced reconnaissance satellite to be used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Designated AFP-731, it is a ‘combination ’ spacecraft carrying both digital imaging reconnaissance cameras and signal intelligence receivers.”2 After the shuttle Columbia’s first few missions in the early 1980s, the spacecraft’s activities had become rather ho-hum affairs, virtually unnoticed outside specialized aerospace journals such as Aviation Week and Space Technology and Florida Today, Cape Canaveral’s hometown newspaper. The Space Shuttle program’s low profile had, of course, been rocked by the January 28, 1986, Challenger explosion carrying teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard. It took the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) almost three years to launch the Discovery on the first post-Challenger mission, STS-26, which launched on September 29, 1988. By 1990, shuttle missions had once again receded into the dim corners of the public imagination. It was supposed to be that way. These missions were supposed to be reliable and routine—and to a great extent, they were supposed to be secret. The Space Shuttle was, in a sense, designed as a secret spacecraft. It conjoined two Cold War space races. On one hand was the public race to demonstrate state virility and generate nationalistic zeal by putting men in orbit, landing on the moon, and all the rest. But there was another space race, a “black” space race conducted in secret but with similar vigor. The “black” space race took place among the Cold War’s shadows and secrets. It was a race to launch ever-more-powerful reconnaissance satellites, develop antisatellite weapons, and control the strategic “high ground” that space represented . Where John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and Neil Armstrong became national icons, stories from the “black” space race remain largely untold. If NASA was the iconic organization behind the “white” space race, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spearheaded the secret race to the stars. The very existence of the NRO, the nation’s “other” space administration , was classified. Although it enjoyed the largest budget of any agency in the intelligence community, the NRO was a “black” agency.3 The relationship between NASA and the NRO, which had been forced to cooperate in the program, was shaky at best. To be sure, the Space Shuttle had some strong supporters within the U.S. Air Force (which, on paper, oversaw the Space Shuttle’s “military requirements,” as the words “National Reconnaissance Office” were at the time top secret), who imagined a space plane emblazoned with the letters “USAF” on its fuselage. But within the intelligence community, the Space Shuttle also had strong critics. To its detractors, the shuttle was known as the “turkey”; at classified briefings, its critics circulated cartoons underlining the point.4 First conceived in the 1960s, the Space Shuttle was meant to serve as a cost-efficient, reliable way to achieve low Earth orbits. But the Space Shuttle had a catch. To make up for the shuttle’s development, maintenance, and operational costs, the spacecraft only made economic sense if it put rockets out of business. It was only affordable if it had a monopoly on American spaceflight. In turn, this meant that the shuttle would have two varieties of missions: in addition to the public displays of American space exploration, the shuttle would be tasked with launching all of the United States’ “black” spacecraft. The Space Shuttle would have to be a joint effort between NASA and the NRO. NRO requirements meant significant design...

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