GoKawiilLeft: The Lunar Orbiter camera system sitting in the bottom half of the pressurized shell. Project Manager Cliff Nelson (left) stands with NASA/Langley team members Calvin Broome, Israel Taback, and Joe Mooreman. From NASA. Right: Lunar Orbiter frame 5017-M, showing artifacts from Kodak’s camera system. From NASA/LOIRP.
In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five robotic spacecraft into orbit around the Moon. Constructed for the primary purpose of finding landing sites for Apollo, the Lunar Orbiters also enabled nearly comprehensive mapping of the Moon in stunning detail. The quantity and resolution of the photographs returned by Lunar Orbiter was unprecedented, thanks to a camera system built by the Eastman Kodak company of Rochester, New York. Their imaging system involved elaborate mechanisms to expose photographic film in orbit, develop the film onboard the spacecraft, and remotely transmit images back to Earth.
In February of 1967, the Rochester Times-Union published a story about how Kodak had “pre-invented” the Lunar Orbiter camera. Kodak director of R&D Arthur Simmons told the Times-Union that “no one walked in and asked us to develop a camera and film system to take closeup photos of the moon…Kodak has, for want of a better word, a ‘library,’ of hundreds of ‘conceptual ideas’ which we don’t advertise.” But the story of the camera’s “pre-invention” was more interesting than Simmons let on. When Kodak joined Boeing’s bid for the Lunar Orbiter in 1963, the camera system already existed. The company had originally developed it for the Air Force in the 1950s as a part of the highly classified satellite surveillance program called Weapons System 117L (WS-117L).
The nature of WS-117L and the clandestine origins of the Lunar Orbiter camera system were vaguely known by some at the time, but the full details were only revealed to the public through declassification decades later. This article won’t linger on the detailed technical specifications of the Lunar Orbiter cameras, but will instead focus on tracing the system’s development from conception to its adoption by NASA. It is the story of some of the first attempts by the United States to remotely transmit images from space, and how those same systems were adapted for lunar exploration.
WS-117L had roots in RAND studies of satellite surveillance concepts going back to 1946, and was the first major attempt to put those ideas into practice. The United States was hoping that satellites could be used to monitor the buildup of nuclear weapons and launch sites in the Soviet Union. In 1953, RAND Report 262 laid out in full the feasibility and utility of such systems, and by 1955 the Air Force began soliciting contractors for WS-117L. Eastman Kodak created camera systems for Lockheed’s bid, and the the Air Force awarded their contract in October of 1956.
Timeline of the Advanced Reconnaissance System, or WS-117L, from a 1958 summary. From NRO (PDF).
Originally, RAND had primarily considered using television systems. “Near real time” imaging was considered by some to be the ideal form of satellite surveillance, so television was a logical choice. But in a declassified history of the program, Robert Perry explains that the goal of real time imaging quickly became contested within the Air Force–it was unclear whether the technology was ready to satisfy requirements, and the alternative film recovery systems showed clear feasibility and reliability early on. Some of these efforts were spun off from WS-117L into the Discoverer-CORONA program, which sent Kodak camera systems into orbit, and returned capsules of exposed film for aerial retrieval and processing back on Earth. Early on, however, a near real time system was very much a part of the plan. In their bid for WS-117L, Kodak created a remote transmission system that would fly in what became known as the SAMOS program.
Television systems were still in consideration early on, but there were clear technological limitations at the time, especially when it came to resolution. Kodak’s newly formed Apparatus and Optical Division settled on a system to develop film onboard the spacecraft and “readout” the images to receiving stations on Earth. Planners envisaged five cameras for SAMOS, the first three dedicated to testing Kodak’s readout system (the others testing advanced recovery stems). The E-1 camera would primarily be a technology demonstrator, while the E-2 and E-3 would test the ability for their system to take images at more functional resolutions. All used the same basic architecture.
A diagram showing the various SAMOS camera systems and their proposed capabilities. From NRO (PDF).
In a way, this camera system was in fact “pre-invented,” as it was mostly a clever assembly of existing technologies, many created by Kodak. The company had decades of experience in aerial photography going back to World War I. By the end of World War II, they had created advanced aerial films, compact film storage systems, and image motion compensation techniques. They had also worked on IR bomb sights and proximity sensing for the Navy, which would become useful for developing thermal control materials for the spacecraft.
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