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22
NSA and the Zircon Project
Thatcher said 'we will strain every sinew' to have Zircon.
Peter Marychurch, Director of GCHQ, 1 May 1987 1
On 24 January 1985 the American space shuttle Discovery was
launched from Cape Canaveral. So far there had been fifteen
shuttle launches, but this particular flight was unique. It was
the first shuttle to be deployed on an intelligence mission, and
it carried a highly secret new sigint satellite code-named 'Orion'.
Weighing almost six thousand pounds, the satellite was guided
from the cargo bay by two military astronauts before being
powered into its final orbit by rocket boosters. Once there, it
unfurled two massive parabolic antennae that looked like huge
umbrellas, each stretching out more than a hundred yards. One
of these collected signals, including low-power radio transmissions
that no sigint satellite had hitherto been able to hear. The
other beamed the 'take' back to earth. The United States had
been operating sigint satellites for more than twenty years, but
this was by far the most powerful and impressive example,
confirming the status of the USA as the world's premier intelligence
collector. 2
Sigint satellites, rather like fibre-optic cables and then personal
computers, were part of an unstoppable world communications
revolution. 3 These technical breakthroughs had profound implications
for sigint, and on both sides of the Atlantic intelligence
chiefs recognised that this was changing the UKUSA alliance
relationship. As a result of the growth of satellite collection,