
My years working on black programs - pinewurst
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3833/1
======
gnat
"My supervisor observed that I was anxious to learn new things. He assigned me
to the Discoverer project to develop system schematics, interconnection
diagrams, and wire harness definition. I was working for the Electrical
Systems engineer. His was a very responsible and highly visible position. And
like most engineers working in this new field, he was in his early 20’s, just
three years older than me. There were senior engineers in management
positions, but there were no senior spacecraft engineers. Everyone was
learning on the job."

Parallels to Silicon Valley are easy to find. It's a valid career path: if you
want to progress fast, find a hot young area where there are no senior experts
and work hard to keep up.

~~~
markus_zhang
I'd assume nowadays it could be Cloud, AI? But thinking through, they do have
some history.

~~~
gen220
From where I’m sitting, it seems like most of the money to be made in the next
10 years won’t come from high tech, but rather from applying bang average tech
(Python, React, Go, and standard AWS infra) to industries where the most
experienced specialists have no concept of what those words mean (e.g.
healthcare, agriculture, finance). There are huge opportunities to make these
industries more efficient, and make money along the way.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Please do expand - I agree with you but as usual am missing the extra
connection?

~~~
gen220
I work at a company that intersects finance and healthcare.

Our competitors to dominance through smart acquisitions, but this came at a
fixed linear or super-linear operating cost per unit of growth. We are growing
by identifying abstractions, and incorporating the new markets into existing
ones.

Their method was the best way to quickly grow a company to a national scale in
the 60s, but it comes at the monotonically-increasing costs of internal
coordination and duplicate work. Software allows you to grow gracefully, while
avoiding those problems as they appear.

As an example, we analyze inbound calls by volume every quarter to identify
how we can anticipate user needs, and solve them ahead of time, without
requiring a phone call (thereby improving the client's UX and saving operating
cost). Every year, we reduce our call volume while simultaneously increasing
our client headcount and improving the tools that are at our team's disposal.
That kind of iterative optimization isn't possible at the big conglomerates.

Look for industries that haven't figured this out yet, those are the ones
where the money will be made; Stripe is a good example of this playing out in
finance.

~~~
wuschel
Hello,

thank you for your explanation! I would love to hear more about your approach.
I am looking what to do next in my professional life, and these kind of
concepts sound very exciting!

Would you perhaps be willing to have a short conference call, or perhaps, an
email exchange?

My email address can be found in my profile.

Cheers!

------
atlgator
During the Iraq War, everyone marveled at the great new technology behind the
Predator drone to conduct surveillance and deliver ordnance during strike
operations. Then it leaked that the Predator had been developed 15 years
earlier and used successfully in Desert Storm. Cut to 2011 when we learned
that the SEAL team that killed Osama Bin Laden used a stealth helicopter,
something that no one in the world had any public success toward achieving,
and we not only achieved it but were running classified missions with it.

Based on those two examples alone, I estimate that the most secretive programs
are 15 years more technologically advanced than we are in the public domain.

AI and Quantum Computing come to mind as likely focus areas in addition to
those already mentioned.

~~~
wjnc
The most interesting thing for me is: how do you keep all those bright minds
with enough knowledge and experience from striking out on their own either in
academia or in business? At the end of the day creating new tech is hard,
replicating 'easy'. Or is it that the "15 yr ahead" simultaneously suggests
it's about 15 yrs of work on your own to replicate? Perhaps they work with
great compartmentalization? But compartmentalization suggests you don't need
great minds, but just very good minds with good structure. That goes against
what I think I know about innovation. It's quite fun fantasizing about a world
within a world with better technology.

~~~
gambiting
You are ignoring a very important part of it - some people genuienly want to
"help their country" and are willing to sacrifice personal success for this.
For example it's not exactly a secret that 3-letter agencies don't pay
software engineers anywhere near as well as other IT companies would, but the
promise of doing something "for your country" is worth more than money(just
like game developers sacrifice money to work on something they really like).

~~~
sizzzzlerz
Since graduating from college with a EE degree, I've worked for 3 employers,
all of which had or have very deep roots in the intel community. At my current
firm, we've always had success by a large investment in new technology under
IRaD. As one of our founders has said, we provide solutions to problems that
our customers don't yet know they have. Payscales for engineers is consistent
with commercial companies here in Silicon Valley. In my 40+ year career, I can
honestly say that I've never sacrificed personal success for this job and the
work that I've done has contributed, in a hugely important way, with our
ability to collect and analyze data from the "bad guys". I have absolutely no
regrets for my career path.

------
walrus01
Considering that some individual NRO launches have had budgetary costs of
$900m to $1.1bn for a single satellite and launch vehicle, it would be
fascinating to know what kind of technology they're dealing with today. Lots
of rumors about KH-11s and Misty, not much concrete info, for obvious reasons
(it's all TS and codeword and higher).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen)

A few years back an unused mirror assembly that was near identical to Hubble
was declassified.

[https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-
kh-11-spy...](https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spysat-
design-revealed-by-nros-twin-telescope-gift-to-nasa/)

~~~
throwaway2048
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA)

Consider that the NRO very likely has at least a dozen superior to Hubble spy
satellites orbiting as we speak.

~~~
2rsf
What capabilities will those (supposedly) satellites have ? read the small
handwriting on the shopping list I have made through the apartment window at
night ?

~~~
habnds
I saw something once that explained how the powerful magnification seems silly
until you account for the angles that things are at.

The example they used was that license plates are vertical so to read them the
satellite can't be directly above the car so it's actually a much further
distance and greater magnification is necessary because of the atmosphere and
the distortion of reading something at an angle.

~~~
hwillis
More that the satellites are in fixed orbits that are relatively low (250 km)
and moving at thousands of km per second. Even if the target is directly below
them, they need to rotate quite a lot to see it for more than a few seconds at
a time. If the target _isn 't_ directly below, they need to look much farther
sideways than down.

~~~
habnds
most spy satellites aren't geostationary?

~~~
kragen
No.

------
Animats
That was one of the more interesting black programs. Some of them are really
boring.

There are times when you get through all the security checks and see the
thing, and see "they still have one of those running?" The famous Blue Cube in
Sunnyvale, the USAF's satellite control center, was running 1960s technology
well into the late 1980s.

Now it's a parking lot for Google buses.

~~~
DrScump

      The famous Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, the USAF's satellite control center
    

I just got off westbound 237 at Mathilda an hour ago for the first time in
years. It's so strange to see that entire side of the road _leveled_ in the
background.

Blue Cube: gone. Lockheed building 101: gone. Lockheed building 102: gone.
Five years of my career without a single physical artifact left.

------
leroy_masochist
> "One of my early assignments was to lay out a printed circuit board. My
> electrical engineer gave me a schematic and identified each part type, be it
> a TO5 transistor, carbon resistor, tantalum foil capacitor, et cetera. My
> task was to fit all the components on a fixed size board and connect them
> according to the schematic with copper circuit runs on the back of the
> board."

This sounds like it would be an incredibly satisfying job, especially given
that there was constant variation in what he had to build

~~~
pinewurst
It’s interesting that things weren’t so siloed then, that a draftsman could be
an ad hoc PCB designer.

~~~
knolax
TBF a lot of what he did sounds like work that would be done by the autorouter
on most electronics CAD today.

~~~
rcxdude
Autorouting is still not generally used very much in PCB design. I suspect it
could be used more than it currently is, but generally you spend a lot more
time specifying design rules and the results are often quite poor.

------
lifeisstillgood
>>> But what about those people in the monkey lab? They believed this
spacecraft was for their payloads. And they will never find out they are just
a cover for the CORONA program.

That as much as anything here seemed ... wasteful? cruel? Unlikely to fool
anyone?

------
chrisweekly
Context: secret US aerospace programs in the late 1950's and early 60's

------
pugworthy
I got in a conversation with my brother in law's uncle a few years back, and
found out he spent a lot of time "back when" working out how to de-orbit the
old Skylab station. Calculating drag based on how it was oriented (and how to
orient it) to encourage de-orbiting just so. Still kind of amazing to think
about how he did that. It's like trying to line up just the right bowling ball
shot on a 1000' long lane. Remotely.

------
vincentmarle
> He told me that what I was about to learn, I could not discuss with anyone
> who was not also cleared for this information. I could not talk about this
> with family, friends, or other GE employees forever.

I wonder if _forever_ still applies...

~~~
bluGill
Yes. If you haven't been debriefed on the topic you haven't been told what
parts of what you know are still public. I know a few ex-top secret people who
will admit they worked with projects that we now know a lot of information on
- but they refuse to say more than they worked on the project. They haven't
been debriefed, so they won't even read a newpaper out loud if it touches
their old project because they legally cannot talk about it even public
information lest they leak something that hasn't been made public yet.

------
ThinkBeat
As a person who has held various clearances through my career I wonder about
this guy telling his story.

It is interesting to read for sure,but he does say in that he promised not to
talk about "forever".

I have been given similar talks.

Even if part of what you work on is declassified, it does not release you from
the "forever" clause.

I assume he has requested and been given permisson to talk freely about it.

~~~
varjag
2019 in late 1950s was approximately "forever". Remember, Space Odyssey filmed
10 years later was taking place in 2001, already 18 years ago. We are _that_
far in the future.

~~~
0xffff2
That is absolutely not how the United States government thinks or operates.

~~~
varjag
The programs he worked on are declassified, so it absolutely does.

~~~
0xffff2
That has nothing to do with your comment, but regardless it absolutely
doesn't. Just because other people may be allowed to talk about it doesn't
mean that you are.

------
IvyMike
A while back, I watched and enjoyed a documentary about the Corona program
mentioned in the article.

I believe this is it: [https://www.c-span.org/video/?321255-1/discussion-cias-
coron...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?321255-1/discussion-cias-corona-
satellite-program)

------
rburhum
I love stories like this and have read several books around these topics, but
always love to ask for recommendations when something like this gets posted in
HNs. What is your favorite book around this topic?

------
audiometry
"After my clearance was granted, I moved into the main drafting room with
about sixty other draftsmen, designers, and lofts men. (A loftsman develops
full scale patterns, or drawings, of complex shapes.)"

What does "develop full scale patterns, or drawings, of complex shapes" mean
in the context that this is different from drawing blueprints like the
draftsmen?

~~~
inetsee
I believe loftsmen prepare full size drawings or patterns at 1 to 1 scale,
whereas a blueprint may be at a reduced scale. I.e. a blueprint fits on a
drafting table; the pattern created by a loftsman would go on a factory floor.

~~~
NegativeLatency
Comes from the ship building industry
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofting)

~~~
rwmurrayVT
Now it is common to use a laser tracker to take measurements and create full-
size drawings. Spacial Analyzer really changed the game. NNSY has over 90 API
laser trackers that they use.

------
StringyBob
If you liked this, here’s a talk by an engineer who worked on the camera
systems of the next generation black program, after corona, hexagon:
[https://youtu.be/GtmtYlcPYYA](https://youtu.be/GtmtYlcPYYA)

------
knob
That was an awesome read. Thanks for sharing!

------
inetsee
For more recent information on a similar topic:
[https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-
kh-11-spy...](https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spysat-
design-revealed-by-nros-twin-telescope-gift-to-nasa/)

------
madengr
This is a good, lite technical read for those interested in stealth.

[https://www.amazon.com/Radar-Man-Personal-History-
Stealth/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Radar-Man-Personal-History-
Stealth/dp/1450248020/ref=nodl_)

------
throw0101a
The photograph: dat sliderule tho.

Good tutorial on using one from a channel that focuses on the subject:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAGCDTtIahY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAGCDTtIahY)

