Missile Defense Alarm System
Three of the system's 12 launches ended in failure, and the remaining nine satellites provided crude infrared early-warning coverage of the Soviet Union until the project was replaced by the Defense Support Program.
MiDAS represented one element of the United States's first generation of reconnaissance satellites that also included the Corona and SAMOS series.
On October 4, 1957, from the Tyuratam range in the Kazakh SSR, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite.
The event, while a scientific triumph, also signified that the Soviet Union now had the capability to attack the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
To give an early warning of any Soviet sneak ICBM attack, the governments of the United States, Canada, and Denmark (with the authority over Greenland, where the main radar station was built at Thule Air Base) agreed to build the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS).
Accurate calculations had already shown that the BMEWS system would give just ten to 25 minutes of warning in the case of an ICBM attack.
As defined in the initial proposal, MIDAS would use infrared sensors from high above the Soviet Union to detect ICBM launches and give early warning of a thermonuclear attack.
In that system, the cameras aboard the satellites used photographic film capsules that physically re-entered the atmosphere before being retrieved mid-air by a military airplane.
A booster rocket capable of sending a satellite into geostationary orbit had not yet been developed, and one or a few of these might not be able to cover all the possible ICBM launch sites within Russia, especially in the far north near the Arctic Circle.
The next launch in the series did not take place for over a year and the program now moved to the West Coast, with Point Arguello's SLC-3 1-2 being its base of operations.
The MIDAS program was temporarily suspended at this point when a committee headed by ARPA director Jack Ruina recommended that no attempt at an operational missile early warning system be made until the Air Force demonstrated that it was a feasible concept at all; in addition, Midas's sensors were designed to detect liquid-fueled rocket exhaust, not solid-fueled exhaust, which was now widely seen as the future of ballistic missiles (as things would have it, the Soviet Union was far behind the United States in development of solid-fueled rockets).
The committee found that program management of MIDAS was "awful" and at the current rate of success, "it would take ten years to develop an operational system".
An extensive investigation into the Atlas autopilot malfunction found that the gyroscopes had transmitted low signal gain in all three axes, but failed to determine a specific cause.
Investigation into the cause of the malfunction was hampered by limited flight data--the Atlas's telemetry transmitter antenna had failed during the prelaunch countdown.
The cause of the failure was not substantiated until study of liftoff film found that a heat shield designed to protect the booster hydraulic rise-off disconnect had broken off at launch.
Had the flight continued to sustainer phase, it would be impossible to transmit guidance commands to the booster and likely result in an improper orbit and failure of the mission.
Once again, the rise-off heat shield failed at liftoff, the Atlas's booster engine hydraulic fluid escaped, and the launch vehicle became unstable and self-destructed at T+93 seconds.
Even with this success, the MiDAS system was hampered by unsuccessful launches that destroyed satellites and killed any hope of round-the-clock coverage of the Soviet Union.
In addition, the lack of a continuous power source such as a nuclear reactor or solar panels meant that the satellites' batteries were exhausted after a few short weeks in orbit.
