Star Tracker/INS navigation wasn’t exclusive to the SR-71. B-52s, KC-135s, and ICBMs all incorporated Star Trackers to supplement their drift-prone gyro INS systems.
—” their drift-prone gyro INS systems.”
And all this time I always thought it was the Air Force guys giving the Grunts in the back a ‘thrill ride’.
On one ancient beast, we were rocking about 45 degrees each way!
It had an observation port in the roof(?) for a sextant and the monsoon was POURING in! The crew was taking turns attempting to seal the hatch.
I don’t know if taking on enough water would sink us, but didn’t want to find out.
Finally, they were able to slow the leak, and they were totally wet.
Beat me to it. The MD-1 system was an astro tracker system there.
Early ICBMs used astro trackers and the Hound Dog did too. For the record, current ICBMs use inertial guidance systems, no more stars per se in flight.
When I was doing Minuteman II and III, the primary guidance reference point for the missile, to tell it where it is geographically before launch, was to align the guidance gyro stabilized platform (GSP) to a collimator beam indexed off of Polaris.