POLARIS SUBS Navigation By Satellite Plan

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31758, 15 August 1968, Page 15

POLARIS SUBS Navigation By Satellite Plan

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, August 14. Britain’s four Polaris submarines will be equipped to enable them to navigate, communicate and fire their H-bomb missiles by means of satellites in orbit, according to Chapman Pincher, of the “Daily Express.”

Writing from Vienna, Pincher says this was disclosed by scientists arriving for the United Nations conference on space exploration which opened today in what was formerly the palace of the Hapsburg Emperor. Resolution, the Royal Navy’s first Polaris submarine, now on operational patrol with 16 atomic missiles at the ready, will be fitted with a new computer and secret devices when she returns to her base in Scotland within the next two months, Pincher says. The three other submarines, not yet operational, will be fitted with satellite equipment before their first patrols.

Pincher says all four will use a communications satellite due to be placed in orbit 23,000 miles up, next May, a

height which will make it seem stationary over the Equator. It will enable the positions of the submarines to be fixed within 150 yards while submerged, and instant communications will give the Government firmer control over the missiles.

The satellite, to be launched by an American rocket at British expense, will be exclusively for British use. A further satellite will be placed in orbit later. With ground stations at Christchurch (Hampshire), Cyprus and Singapore, the system will cost s2om but it will also be used by the British Army and the Royal Air Force and possibly by civil air-sea rescue operations. The missile-equipped Resolution at the beginning of a dive.