Soviet military doctrine at the time viewed the U.S. fleet of submarines and surface ships equipped with nuclear weapons as a major threat to the Soviet Union.
To track multiple targets scattered over the ocean, in 1960, the Soviet navy started the development of the system encoded "US." It would include "US-P" spacecraft, which would intercept the radio signals from the battleships, and the radar-carrying "US-A" spacecraft.
The radar signal transmitted from the satellite would reflect from the flat decks of aircraft carriers and other ships and registered by the spacecraft flying overhead. The system would reportedly be used to aim Soviet cruise missiles at the NATO battleships.
The super-secret enterprise NPO Kometa, led by A.I. Savin within the Soviet Ministry of the Radio Industry, was made responsible for the development of the overall system. Soviet rocketry pioneer Vladimir Chelomei's design bureau in Reutov, now NPO Mashinstroeniya, designed the spacecraft itself, while NPO Vega, also known as Vega M, developed the radar.
In 1965, ICBM R 36, converted into the launcher now known as Tsiklon 2, lifted the first "US-A" spacecraft from Baikonur. The sea-watching radar required so much electricity to operate that generators powered by radioactive fuel were introduced in the operational "US-A" spacecraft. One of these nuclear-powered satellites, known as Cosmos 954, crashed in northern Canada, triggering an international outcry and eventually prompting the U.S.S.R. to suspend the use of nuclear reactors in the low orbits.
Project Obzor
"US-A" and its derivatives continued flying with the last mission launched in December of last year. At the end of the 1960s, the serial production of the spacecraft had been transferred to St Petersburg's KB Arsenal design bureau.
Since the 1980s, the KB Arsenal has also been responsible for the development of a follow-on generation of the radar-carrying spacecraft. It is known that new project, encoded Ideogramma-Pirs, envisioned the development of the Pirs 1 and Pirs 2 sea-watching satellites.
With the end of the Cold War, KB Arsenal has tried to commercialize the super-secret hardware developed for their radar-carrying spacecraft.
For the proposed project Obzor (Survey), KB Arsenal announced the availability of the four-frequency radar with multiple signal polarization. It would have a resolution of 328 feet (100 meters) in the survey mode and 65 feet (20 meters) in the detailed mode, covering the area of 155 miles (250 kilometers) in one pass.
KB Arsenal claimed that the spacecraft could be launched within three or four years after the project was initiated. However, due to luck of funds, the program has been frozen since the early 1990s.
Diamond in the sky
An even more ambitious program employing space-based radar was conducted in the midst of the Cold War by the design bureau led by charismatic leader Vladimir Chelomei, the pioneer of cruise missile development in the U.S.S.R. and the early rival of the founder of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev.
In the Almaz ("diamond") project, high-resolution radar would be installed on a piloted space station. It would be part of the complex of instruments for military surveillance.
While several scaled-down versions of the Almaz space station flew in the first half of the 1970, the program fell victim of the political struggle within the Soviet space industry. Chelomei's enemies in the Kremlin succeeded in the termination of the program by 1981. Chelomei's team in Baikonur literally hid the follow-on version of Almaz spacecraft in one of the processing buildings.
After Vladimir Chelomei's death, NPO Mash was able to revive Almaz as an un-piloted program.
This time the large S-Band synthetic aperture radar EKOR-A developed by the Vega-M design bureau was the centerpiece of the 18.5-ton (16.783-kilogram) satellite, Almaz T, which was based on the short-lived space station. The spacecraft would rival the U.S.' Indigo Lacrosse satellite.
However, the spacecraft, which had been mothballed for a half a decade, ultimately failed to reach orbit when its Proton launch vehicle exploded on October 29, 1986.
On July 25, 1987, a second launch attempt of a robotic Almaz T on board a Proton rocket was successful. Under its code name, Cosmos-1870, the satellite operated until July 10, 1989, reportedly providing radar images with 82-foot (25-meter) resolution. According to various sources, the spacecraft could provide 33- to 82-foot (10- to 25-meter) resolution radar images.
On March 31, 1991, one more radar spacecraft, now officially named Almaz 1, successfully reached orbit. After launch, the solar panels of the spacecraft failed to deploy properly, preventing its main radar antenna from opening. Yet, to the surprise of the ground control, even in the folded position the radar antenna was able to operate.
When the Russian research ship "Mikhail Somov" was stranded in ice-covered Antarctic waters, the Almaz's radar turned out to be the only tool able to penetrate the clouds and darkness of the polar night and eventually to locate the lost ship.
The Almaz 1 spacecraft operated until October 17, 1992.
With the end of the Cold War, NPO Mash hoped to commercialize Almaz technology, launching another spacecraft in the mid-1990s and marketing its images worldwide. NPO Mash even applied for a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
When this effort proved fruitless, the company tried a "cheaper, smaller" approach, developing a light-weight platform equipped with a deployable radar that could be launched by a converted ballistic missile known as UR 100-NU.
According to the latest information from NPO Mash representatives, the company hopes to launch the platform from a silo facility in Svobodny, in the Russian Far East, during the first half of 2001.
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