Documents / FOIA release
This is a July 27, 2021 FOIA response from NASA's Office of Communications to John Greenewald, Jr. It covers records from Leslie Kean's lawsuit against NASA seeking Kecksburg documents. NASA released 207 pages in full, 7 in part and withheld 31, noting that most of the lawsuit case files had been destroyed under records retention rules. The enclosures include court declarations, a 2003 appeal decision ordering a broader search, a 2019 FOIA response, and Stan Gordon's account of the missing NASA fragology files.
“Headquarters”17 pages
• \ JSC PUBLIC f:FFm~ Fax ; 713-483-4876 l P.02 ~ Statement R.ga~in.g COsmos 96 I':On 26 August 2003 , I was contacted via 'phone by a Ms. leslie Kean with an inquiry 'regarding the reentry of the CosrOos 96 satellite on 9 December 1965. She wanted to know if the time and loca~on bf reentry of Cosmos 96 on that date were known and jf any other satellite was known to have reentered on that date. . l " .' , A quick search of the U.S. Satellite Catalog revealed that Cosmos 96 was the only cata loged object to have reentered on 9 December 1e65, I so informed Ms. Kean . I did provide Ms. Kean copies of it few pages on Cl,smos 96 and related spacecraft from a book I authored in the'197 .0 ~ 5, before coming to~ork at NASA. The book is titled Handbook of Sovjet Lyh~r 'and ,Planeta...oc.fxPlorMioQ , pub lishecJ as Volume 47 of the Science and Technology Series , American Astronautical Society, 1979. In response to a request by Ms. Kean, I les~arched the NASA Orbital DebriS Program Office data files for tracking da(a (aka two-line element sets from the \ U,S, Space Surveillance Network) on Cosmos 96' (U.S. Catalog Number 01742); however, no data fo r that object were found . I later contacted Air Force Space Command and received historical tracking data for Cosmos 96 (Attachment 1). USing these data and an Air Force Space Command software package , I was able to reconstruct the possible flight path (grou nd traCk) of Cosmos 96 on 9 December 1965, I sent to Ms. Kean on , 0 October an ~mail (Attachm~' nt 2) containing two graphics depicting the only possible southbound pass 0 Cosmos 96 on 9 December' 965, if it had not already reentered the atrrt>spher . No pan of Cosmos 96 could have landed in Pennsylvania in the local afternoon of 9 December 1965. ' . Ms. Kean informed me that she had subsequently acquired information from 000 that Cosmos 96 had actually reentered earlier in the day. I received .'lletter from Ms. Kean, dated 6 November 2003, which included a copy of t~e Doqletter. Ms. Kean's letter also included a copy of a NASA Form 135, datedl26 January 1968 1 which referred to NASA Frag ology Fi les .:: I in,formed Ms. Kean that I was unaware o f ::\ny files or program by that nam9. The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office did no!'exist in the 19Gb,s, and it contains no other information related to the FOIA request. RIP I b6
FOIA release, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 223 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.