In 1966, Perry and his students noticed the unusual orbit of a satellite launched from the Soviet Union. Like many other Soviet launches, it was shrouded in secrecy. The spacecraft was officially announced as the faceless Cosmos 112, with no real details of its mission being available.
However, Perry and his students, by studying how the spacecraft achieved orbit, quickly realized that it was not launched from Baikonur, the Soviet Union's (and present-day Russia's) premiere spaceport.
Perry notified Flight International, England’s principal aerospace publication, that the Soviet Union had introduced a new space center somewhere in Northern Russia. His enthusiasm, however, received scant response from the publication.
Not to be deterred, Perry contacted Charles S. Sheldon II, the expert on the Soviet space program at the Congressional Research Service of the U.S. Library of Congress. Sheldon surprised Perry by having the information marked classified by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Nevertheless, Sheldon eventually notified the press and shortly before the Christmas holiday in 1966, the New York Times published Perry’s discovery.
At the end of the Cold War it was revealed that as early as the late 1950s, the CIA had suspected that Plesetsk was an ICBM test site. The agency had attempted to take pictures of the region with U-2 spy planes. If it had confirmed the existence of the Soviet launch site, the CIA would also have acknowledged the existence of its vast spy satellite network, as well as its surveillance capabilities -- something unthinkable at the height of the Cold War.
It wouldn't be until 1983 that the Soviet Union would officially acknowledge the existence of the Plesetsk launch complex.
Perry's diligence never waivered. In the fall of 1967, following the Plesetsk discovery, Perry concluded that the U.S.S.R. was testing a spacecraft by listening to the unusual signals coming from an "anonymous" Soviet satellite. It turned out to be the Soviet Union's Soyuz spacecraft. Though un-piloted on this test flight, it could carry cosmonauts. His announcement produced the headline, "Schoolboys Tune In to a Space Secret" in the London Evening Standard.
In the following years, Perry and his group became a worldwide authority on monitoring the world’s spacecraft and inspired numerous followers around the globe.
One of the first "foreign" members of the Kettering group was Sven Grahn who met Perry in 1966. At the time Grahn was a student in Sweden.
Today, Grahn -- who considered Perry his mentor for 34 years -- is the General Manager at the Science Systems Division of the Swedish Space Corporation, as well as the publisher of numerous research publications devoted to the world’s space programs.
"If there ever was a role model that I wanted to follow -- it was his: scientific rigor, a minimalist approach, a no-nonsense attitude to life and a warm personality," Grahn said.
Allen Thomson, a former Soviet military research and development program analyst for the CIA agreed that Perry produced enormous results using extremely limited resources.
"He was a great source of inspiration, for me and all space enthusiasts," Thomson said.
According to Perry’s own recollections, his interest in space was a result of Germany's V-2 ballistic missile bombings of his hometown of Braintree during World War II.
"I realized that `space travel' was no longer a wild dream," Perry later wrote.
In later years, the publication of Arthur C Clarke's The Exploration of Space and the launch of Sputnik solidified his fascination with space travel and space exploration.
When the first Soviet satellites started routinely flying overhead, Perry and his colleague at Kettering established a simple radio lab to intercept signals from orbit. Soon numerous secret space missions flown by the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. provided Perry with unlimited material for analysis.
As Perry’s discoveries became known around the world, he turned into a frequent source of information for such mass media organizations as Reuters and Britain's Independent Television News network.
Perry’s group has been quoted and credited in numerous books and publications around the world.
(Ironically, the author of this obituary -- a citizen of the former Soviet Union -- learned about the Plesetsk Cosmodrome from Perry’s publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in the early 1980s, prior to the Soviet acknowledgment of its existence. Thanks to the staff's carelessness, the journal became available in Moscow’s science and technology library in the early 1980s.)
Perry was appointed an Ordinary Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 1973 New Year Honors List for "founding and leading the Satellite Tracking Group, Kettering Grammar School".
In 1974, Perry received the Royal Astronomical Society's Jackson-Gwilt Medal and Gift -- £50 -- which he spent on an antenna and pre-amplifier.
The Universities of Loughborough, Reading and Leicester and the Open University conferred Honorary Masters Degrees to Perry.
Perry officially retired from the Kettering school in the 1980s, but remained a space enthusiast until the very end.
A memorial service is scheduled for January 26 at Glynn Valley Crematorium in Bodmin, England.
advertisement
