Bombers Guided By Space Photos

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31345, 15 April 1967, Page 13

Bombers Guided By Space Photos

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

SAIGON, April 14.

American bombers are being guided to targets in North Vietnam by daily photographs received from space satellites, reports the Associated Press.

The sweeping photographs of all South-east Asia have become one of the most valuable guides to United States bombing.

An Air Force statement that satellite weather photographs were being used in Vietnam revealed for the first time the use of space vehicles in a war.

It is also iikely that Soviet weather stations are providing the same satellite information to the North Vietnamese to use for air defence planning. The weather photographs from the Essa and Nimbus satellites—both orbiting more than 600 miles up—are monitored by Air Force weather stations in Saigon and Udorn, Thailand. So vital are the pictures that wet prints are frequently rushed to the United States air commander, LieutenantGeneral William Momyer, while planes are already heading north. The two satellites now

orbiting generally furnish two photographs daily of Southeast Asia. “Sometimes they cjme in with the planes already in the air and when the General has already made his tentative decisions,” Colonel Edwin Carmell, who runs the Saigon weather post said.