Secrecy Lifted for Shuttle Discovery’s Military Polar Flight From Vandenberg

The Air Force on Thursday lifted the secrecy cloak from the military cargo for the first space shuttle flight from California next March, citing mounting public interest in the unique polar-orbiting mission.

The action was seen as a major step toward opening the entire flight to the public, including what are expected to be spectacular television views of the frozen poles as seen by the first men to fly over the polar regions in a spaceship.

Maj. Ronald Rand, Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon, said that the payload for the military mission of Discovery was declassified because it is experimental in nature, rather than designed to carry out an operational mission.

He said that it includes an assembly of six space physics experiments that will remain in the shuttle’s open cargo bay, and an airplane detection experiment.

He said that the cargo had been classified only because it was assigned to a military shuttle mission. Defense Department policy has been to classify all details of military flights of NASA’s shuttles.

The shuttle Discovery is scheduled to blast off March 20 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Los Angeles on the California coast.

From Vandenberg, shuttles can be fired south into orbits that track north-south around the Earth, rather than the standard west-east orbits into which shuttles are launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Polar orbits are valuable to the military because reconnaissance satellites can view the entire globe as it rotates below.