Air Force Satellite Control Facility

This hand-painted sign hung at the Air Force Satellite Control Facility (AFSCF), a unit of the Air Force Systems Command’s Space Division (AFSD). While the AFSD was headquartered at Sunnyvale Air Force Station, California, it had units worldwide serving as satellite tracking stations. The Space Division controlled on-orbit space vehicles for the Department of Defense through the coordination of a worldwide network of these stations in New Hampshire (where this sign originates), California, Hawaii, Guam, Greenland, and in the Indian Ocean.

Notably, some of these stations were responsible for tracking satellites as early as 1959. This historic range and breadth of operations meant that the AFSCF played a key role in CORONA, the world’s first satellite reconnaissance program.

The CIA launched the CORONA program with support of the Air Force in 1959 to develop photographic satellites. These satellites would replace U2 spy planes in gathering reconnaissance of Soviet long-range bomber and missile capabilities and monitor areas of interest in the Sino-Soviet Bloc.

The technology at work in the CORONA program was initially developed by Air Force contractors to support an Air Force mission with film-return satellites in 1957. In 1957, after the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) and the launch of Sputnik, the American intelligence community was eager for an answer to the Soviet threat. Approved by President Eisenhower in 1958 and meant to be a interim program monitoring Soviet strategic capabilities between the waning use of U2 spy planes and the readiness of the Air Force's next generation of satellites, the CORONA program was highly successful and ran for 14 years before its end in 1972. AFSCF remained in operation until 1993, only one year after CORONA information was declassified.

"I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this but we’ve spent 35 or 40 billion dollars on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge we’ve gained from space photography, it would be worth 10 times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn’t need to do. We were building things we didn’t need to build. We were harboring fears we didn’t need to harbor. Because of satellites, I know how many missiles the enemy has."

President Lyndon B. Johnson, March 16, 1967 (Day et al, Eye in the Sky)

A unique artifact of intelligence history in the Cold War, this vintage sign exemplifies the mission and operations of the AFSCF through the depiction of an eagle orbiting the Earth. 

REFERENCES:

Day, Dwayne et al. Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites (Smithsonian History of Aviation and Spaceflight). 1999.