Ehricke, who had worked with Wernher von Braun at Peenemünde and later at Red Stone Arsenal, concluded that Atlas, based on the data, was capable of boosting itself into orbit, which it later did with the Project SCORE satellite. (Piction ID: 48063106 - Catalog: 14_025440)īack in 1954, Convair hired an ex-German V-2 rocket engineer named Krafft Arnold Ehricke (1917-1984) to perform conceptual studies of Atlas performance. Like Wernher von Braun, Ehricke was an alumnus of Hitler’s V-2 program but today is remembered as the father of the Atlas Centaur, a second-stage vehicle so versatile, reliable and efficient that variants are still in use 55 years later. This carefully staged publicity shot was probably conceived as PR “damage control” in the wake of Russia’s shocking success with Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, less than one week before this photo was taken. “See, we’re doing it, too!” Poker-faced rocketeer Krafft Ehricke with futuristic GD Astronautics satellite models on 10 October 1957. After Agena’s retirement in the summer of 1978, all Atlases were subsequently flown with the Centaur upper stage. It addition to the first five Mariner unmanned probes to Venus and Mars, the first interplanetary fly-bys, and the Ranger and Lunar Orbiter unmanned moon probes, Atlas Agena was used even more extensively for launching classified DoD payloads. Atlas Agena was launched 109 times during its 18-year career, with an 85 percent success rate. Agena sat atop an Atlas D lower “stage and a half” configuration and, combined, provided two and a half stages of rocket power. Launches were conducted from Launch Complexes 12, 13 and 14 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and Launch Complexes 1 and 2 at Point Arguello (now SLC-3 and 4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base).First launched in 1960, Agena was an expendable upper-stage launch system (ELS) developed by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. The last Atlas-Agena was flown in 1978 to launch SEASAT, but on a repurposed Atlas F missile rather than the SLV-3. Dozens of Atlas SLV-3/Agena D boosters were flown over the following years, mostly for the KH-7 Gambit program, also for a few NASA missions. The Atlas SLV-3 meanwhile first flew in August 1964. The Agena D first flew in July 1963 for DoD launches, but NASA continued using Agena Bs for the remaining Ranger missions. The end result was the Atlas SLV-3 and Agena D, standardized versions of the Atlas D core and Agena B which would be the same on every launch (at least as far as the Atlas was concerned, Agena Ds often still had customized setups, especially for DoD payloads). The board recommended improved quality control, better hardware, and also establishing one standardized launch vehicle for all space programs. The board found that quality control and checkout procedures were poor, and that this situation was exacerbated by the several dozen configurations of the booster, as each individual DoD and NASA program necessitated custom modifications to the Atlas and Agena, and the latter also differed in its Atlas and Thor variants. In late 1962, after Ranger 5 suffered another booster malfunction, albeit a minor one that ground controllers were able to work around, NASA convened a review board which undertook a wholesale reevaluation of the Atlas-Agena as a launch vehicle. Atlas-Agenas were then used for DoD and NASA programs, but proved a reliability nightmare as one failure after another happened. It first flew on the Thor and did not make its maiden voyage on an Atlas for months, when Midas 3 launched on July 12, 1961. Late in 1960, Lockheed introduced the uprated Agena B stage which was restartable and had longer propellant tanks for more burn time.

Most of these were flown on Thor-Agena boosters for the Discoverer program and only four used Atlases ( Midas 1, Midas 2, Samos 1, and Samos 2), two of which failed.

The earliest Agena variant was the Agena A in 1959–60, which did not have restart capability. The final Atlas-Agena launch used an Atlas E/F. These were later replaced by the standardized Atlas SLV-3, and its derivatives, the SLV-3A and B. Initially, Atlas D missiles, redesignated as the LV-3, were used as the first stage. The Atlas-Agena was a two-and-a-half-stage rocket, with a stage-and-a-half Atlas missile as the first stage, and an RM-81 Agena second stage.

Atlas agena ranger