Philatelic Timeline & I'm a Historian Not A Terrorist

I went home over the weekend and took the opportunity to comb my own stamp collection, to potentially use to enhance PARI's collection...if anyone seems to think that's actually a good idea. I still have my doubt, frankly.

I can cobble together a nearly complete timeline of the space history of the United States. Between the two collections--mostly using the PARI collection to provide a more complete version of something I already have, or to provide a key moment in history (I don't have a "First Man on the Moon" stamp)--we have a crude timeline complete until about 1979. We have no record of the space shuttle, ISS, or Hubble (was there a hubble stamp?), and incomplete references for anything Soviet/Russian that isn't Apollo-Soyuz.

So that's kind of cool. I guess.

Out of sequence, we start with Copernicus. This stamp is from the 1970s as well, but you get the idea.

We have what appears to be a V-2 taking off from Fort Bliss

Project Mercury

Echo, the first communications satellite...yes, I know the image is upside down. Blogger is being evil and won't accept CSS, only HTML. HTML will not allow me to adjust this image. What I get for using a possibly antiquated blogging platform, I guess. Turn your head upside down?

Project Gemini...ditto for the upside down image. Curse you, Blogger. Curse you.

Why do I have stamps from the NY World Fair? Not sure, actually. Is it related? I'm not sure.

And we reach Apollo! Apollo 8, specifically. Gorgeous stamp, in my opinion.

Celebrating a decade in space! However old this stamp is specifically-I haven't checked--it's about ten years older than the Mercury one and, judging by the fact that it's an 8-cent stamp not a 10-cent stamp, is 1968 or so. Turn your head sideways.

We reach the first stamp not from my collection, with the moon landing. Is your head still sideways? Good. 

Kind of fun--this is my half of the bottom two rows of a sheet of Pioneer stamps. PARI has the left half of the bottom two rows of a sheet of Pioneer stamps. They're both similarly faded. 

PARI actually has one of these, with commemorative first-day-issue envelope, on display. This is from my collection. 

HOLY VIBRANT SKYLAB STAMP BATMAN! Only the 1970s would conclude that this shade of purple, coupled with those yellows and blues and golds, are acceptable graphic design. It does catch your attention, I'll grant...the camera dulled it down.

Viking. It's from 1992. 

Amusingly, this 1992 Apollo-Soyuz commemorative stamp (presumably released because the end of the cold war and so on) is the only record I have of the Space Shuttle program in the stamp series. I have a bigger stamp of the Concord (a big ol'stamp from Yemen, and it has to share with Apollo 13 for some reason) than I do of the space shuttle, who has a tiny little corner with a Cosmonaut. I have that stamp in my collection, canceled, which I received on the envelope when I ordered my Apollo-Soyuz stamp. Ebay sellers have a sense of humour. 

The PARI collection has this series and two other copies of it, in their original 1992 book. I think we need to get this year's re-release that includes New Horizons to go with them. But that's just me. 

Also: When I say "We have a satellite!" I don't want anyone to think of CubeSats (those 1'x1' student projects?) or Sputnik or Explorer 1 or anything.

So I drew it to scale against a 5'4" (average height) woman. There are more wires, as you'll see from the photo after the drawing, but I think I drew enough to get the scope of the things across...

It's easily 6' tall, if another drawing I was using as a reference was right. 

I can't be bothered to draw ALL the wires, my hand is starting to hurt as is. The big tank in the middle is for the hydrazine fuel and the funnel looking thing is part of the communications system.

See? Lots more wires.

Thurburn also kindly gave me everything he had on some of its later projects--it was only initially used for Apollo-Soyuz. The reading is a little dense, all NASA papers on experiment results and the like, but there you go. He also mentioned he did telemetry for the Gemini program. I don't know whether or not he was here; he definitely said he was at White Sands and sure seems to know a lot about Rosman. Of course, that could be because he was at a related facility and did quite a lot of research. I'm incredibly grateful he's sharing that with me, so I can hopefully pass it on to visitors here. I think everyone agrees we need a better way of telling it to people, although it's odd to market something as a space history museum...even IF that's what we are, as well as an active science centre and terrestrial/extraterrestrial geology centre. 

Unfortunately, I still can't sort anything definite out from the NSA days. Because, um, the stuff declared Top Secret by the government is a pretty well kept secret. That's probably a good thing: If I can't find tiddly plum squat on a facility that was decommissioned over twenty years ago, the odds of any layman finding anything else more secure are pretty slim. Could some kind of crazy russian hacker figure out what happened at Rosman...these days? I don't know. Since the facility was designed against exactly that kind of person, though, I'd be a bit surprised.

I did find an article from mountainx.com that seems relatively reliable, although I'd like to pay the Charlotte public library a visit to check the microfiche on an article they apparently ran about Rosman in 1985... and no, I don't have more specific information, so it wouldn't be an easy task. Rosman was also filmed from the air in an NBC segment in 1986, called "The Eavesdropping War"...which, being from 1986, isn't online anywhere. I would need to call NBC and request parts 1 and 2 to even look at the footage. Would it be worth it? ...I'm not sure, actually. It's *possible* we have a copy onsite here, but I don't know who I'd ask. Or, for that matter, if anyone would even know if we did. This place just sort of happened, and any organisational system is more by accident than design...something of an example of "order from chaos".

The Mountainx.com article does include this tidbit, however--SOMETHING ACTUALLY CONCRETE about what happened here! Soviet satellite names!!

Despite the official stonewalling and attempted suppression of the news, the NBC series spelled out the essentials of the NSA’s activities. “We determined that Rosman had several missions,” Windrem recalled in 2001. “One was intercepting communications from Soviet geosynchronous satellites, the Gorizont and Raduga.” These were used to relay messages to and from both Russian troops in Cuba and Soviet missile sites in Europe. “The other mission was intercepting signals from the agent satellite network the Soviet Union maintained to communicate with its agents worldwide.” (The operation to intercept Soviet signals was code-named Project LADYLOVE, according to historian Jeffrey Richelson‘s 1989 book, The U.S. Intelligence Community.)

Thank you, MountainX.com--I was pretty sure that's what happened here, but it's really nice to be able to confirm.

My other option is, I guess, to look into how to file a freedom of information act...except, the last time somebody tried that, they got basically zip, because whatever happened here was still super classified.  They found out Rosman was notorious for...something. And that it was used by the NSA. For...something. Tracking satellites? Yes. Anything else? Well, that is the question of the hour. I haven't heard a thing that would suggest we did anything besides satellites. It's not entirely impossible.

...geez. I hope I'm not flagging myself as a terrorist or Russian spy or something. Not that I intend to do anything terrorist-y, and it's pretty obvious from my other searches (which involve the Sims, engineering drafting textbooks, BBC comedy shows, and YouTube videos about tasty looking desserts) that I'm a kid on a somewhat bizarre mission. I have needed to translate Russian, but I can only barely read half the cyrillic alphabet and have been identifying stamps. 

Dear NSA: I'm researching the history of your former site. Please don't arrest me.

Breakfast Club Headdesk