Truth for all but not for one.

Some people never got the chance to speak the truth about the Corona project. John Valentine Breakwell took the secret to his grave. A man of wit and vision who kept a secret for his country until his demise in 1991. Given the other aspects of his life I feel terrible that it seemed to be the false Discoverer mission that he was proud of.

The project was declassified in 2002. How many others have passed without knowing the truth?

Here are some excerpts from his "“Memorial Resolution"” with mentions of his involvement with the Discoverer program and a rather embarrassing fact that they thought their own spy satellite was a Russian spy satellite.


John Valentine Breakwell, Emeritus Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
died of cancer at his home in Palo Alto on April 16, 1991.
A brilliant applied mathematician, he made important contributions to celestial
mechanics, the calculus of variations, trajectory optimization and guidance,
differential games, and statistics.
Born in Switzerland of British and American parents, he attended Eton and
received a degree in mathematics with first class honors at Oxford University in
1938. He was a pacifist and came to the United States in 1938 to avoid military
service in Great Britain. He studied music composition and mathematics at
Harvard, and, after making the difficult choice between these two creative loves of
his life, he chose mathematics, receiving his Ph.D. in 1941.
He taught mathematics at Tufts University from 1941 to 1949, then worked as a
research scientist for North American Aviation in Los Angeles until 1957, when he
joined the Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. in Sunnyvale. He became a professor at
Stanford in 1964.
While at Tufts he married Lilyan Wiley, an early English friend, who died in
1984. He is survived by their son, John Alexander Breakwell of Los Altos,
California, and three grandsons. He spent much of his last few years with his
devoted friend and fellow musician, Barbara Nygren.
While at North American, he wrote one of the key papers on the modern calculus
of variations, “Optimization of Trajectories.” His presentation was crystal clear, and
his application to the numerical optimization of booster ascent trajectories for
injecting satellites into orbit was remarkable. The problem he solved was finding
the direction of the booster rocket thrust as a function of time so that the satellite
arrived in minimum time at the desired orbital altitude with the correct orbital
velocity. This paper was not published until 1959, two years after Sputnik, but the
work was clearly done before Sputnik. In this paper, he gave an interpretation of
the Lagrange multiplier functions (adjoint variables) as sensitivities, which
connected them to the gradient of the cost function in Richard Bellman’s new
concept of “dynamic programming” (1957). That interpretation is the key to
understanding the calculus of variations for most engineers.
He and Rufus Isaacs (independently) created the modern theory of differential
games which treats minimax strategies, or how to determine optimal strategies in a
competitive game. His paper on the “homicidal chauffeur” (1969) is considered a
classic in the field. It describes the strategies that a driver and a pedestrian should
use when the driver wishes to run down the pedestrian on a big field as quickly as
possible, and the pedestrian wishes to survive as long as possible. The driver has a
speed advantage but a minimum radius of turn, while the pedestrian can turn
abruptly; the optimal strategies are amazingly intricate. He later applied the theory
in an amusing paper about football, considering the strategies that the ball carrier
should use to elude two downfield tacklers and their strategies in trying to catch
him. The theory has applications to war games (much to his sorrow as a pacifist),
economic competition, and feedback control where one is interested in the worst
disturbance history that the controlled object might encounter (e.g., wind in
controlling an aircraft).
His work at Lockheed and Stanford with colleagues and students on
astrodynamics, the modern version of celestial mechanics, dealt with predicting
spacecraft orbits in the presence of perturbations, a complicated but important
subject for space exploration. He invented “halo orbits” which are fascinating orbits
about a point in space where the gravitational forces of two celestial bodies are in
equilibrium with the centrifugal force. One of these was flown by NASA in a halo
orbit about the sun, thanks to one of John’s students, Bob Farquhar.
He was an important contributor to the NASA-Stanford Gravity Probe B project
which will make a new test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity using a satellite
probe launched from the space shuttle in the 1990s.
He was a remarkable teacher-consultant, since his quick mind enabled him to
rapidly understand almost any problem and to suggest solutions or approaches that
almost always worked. An example of his tremendous insight into dynamics and
mathematics occurred when his student John Edwards was trying to calculate an
example of stabilizing a simple low-speed aeroelastic system using the unsteady
aerodynamic theory developed by Theodorsen and Garrick in the 1930s; their results
were expressed as integrals along the imaginary axis and around the complex right
half plane; this is useful for describing the open-loop unstable behavior but not very
useful for describing a stabilized system with feedback. R.T. Jones had shown a
simple approximation to Theordorsen’s theory about 1940, but Edwards wanted to
get the exact solution. Breakwell looked at this dilemma and said that he thought
the integrals could be continued analytically into the left half plane; in a few hours
he had done so, and, in addition, he determined the jump in the function across a
branch cut along the negative real axis. Edwards then calculated, for the first time,
the exact behavior of an aeroelastic system stabilized with feedback to a trailing
edge flap. This was a very significant breakthrough in the understanding of how to
stabilize aeroelastic systems.
He also had a remarkable memory and he loved surprises. At Lockheed in the
1960s he worked on planning the orbits of the Discoverer satellites. If you happened
to be traveling with him just after sunset, he might suddenly point and say, “Look
over there.” A few seconds later, a brilliant star would come into view and speed
across the heavens; it would be a Discoverer satellite whose ephemeris he had
calculated and kept in his head.
Once, during a Messiah rehearsal, he stepped outside at a break to watch a
Discoverer pass, then rejoined the rehearsal in full voice as he re-entered the
auditorium.
On another occasion a mystery satellite was detected by the Air Force;
apparently, the USSR, for the first time, had not told us of a satellite they had
launched. John thought about a picture-taking Discoverer we had recently failed to
recover, and calculated its orbit assuming it had been mis-oriented 180 degrees
when the de-orbit retrorockets were fired; this orbit matched the orbit of the mystery
satellite exactly, much to the relief of the State Department.
To celebrate that feat we asked John to speak, on a topic of his choice, at a new
seminar series on Guidance and Control. To our surprise, he presented a new and
fascinating analysis of the dynamics of a bicycle!