CHEON-10
411673
/
September 1961:
Following the Russian test resumption as well as our own underground test resumption, many of the programs have new direction either given or being considered.
As for Vele
Hotel, "at the request of ARPA, the LASL and Sandia groups have been
considering two problems:
(1) whether a crash program is feasible to get Vele
Hotel
type instrumentation up in satallites within less than nine months for the purpose of
obtaining information about possible Russian tests in space; after discussions with
representatives from AFSSD and Areospace it is thought that a crash program has severe
technical limitations in attaining adequate coverage of the regions of space the
Russians might employ for testing.
Adequate coverage means either large numbers of
low-altitude satallites or 2 or 3 high altitude satallites.
Neither of these systems
appears possible within nine months in the light of the availability and launch require-
ments of adequate rocket boosters.
As for the Vele
Hotel development program, a LASL-Sandia instrumentation package
with x-ray detectors was flown aboard Ranger RA-1 launched from the Cape on 23 August.
The data recovered was severely degraded due to the wrong tragectory and lack of orien
tation and TM coverage.
Another package launched on a blue scout junior 0 1 was only
a partial success due to a rocket failure on 17 August.
Under the title of Explosion
containment, scale model tests have continued and the present full scale container has
contained a 75 1b. cube of composition B with the next shot to be Phthon HE system.
Note that one of the programs that has gone on in the area of specific weapons
development has involved various kinds of environmental tests such as drop tests.
Or particular interest is that the Phython has been undergoing such air drop tests at
Tonopah.
There might be some relationship here to the selection of devices for the
Everyready Program.
Also in the area of specific weapons development,
certain performance tests of
the Rattler and Boa were performed by J-Division in the latter half of August.
Under
the test planning and evaluation heading there are several pages covering the first LASL
underground event,
the radio chemical sampling systems,
the yield determination problems
with underground tests, and some of the ligestics of getting the appropriate equipment
tested and delivered to NTS as well as certain device components needed for cesting
fabricated.
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