Of course NASA knew about Agena then, because Discoverer 1 launched on February 28, 1959. This was part of a plan to develop Atlas-Vega and Atlas-Centaur as NASA's workhorse launch vehicles, along with Saturn. Its first months were a bit chaotic as Glennan began to get his arms around the disparate organizations that combined to form the Agency.Įarly NASA initiated the Atlas-Vega program in March 1959. So it was probably the case that NASA officials were aware of Agena, then found out about the restart capability, and that convinced them that they could just use the restartable Agena instead. It did not initially have it, but when it was added that duplicated Vega's capability. I also vaguely remember that the real issue was the incorporation of the restart capability in the Agena.
I think that most likely what really happened is that eventually somebody in charge figured that their capabilities were similar enough that Vega was unnecessary. I doubt that this is what happened because the development of Atlas Agena was public. What I have occasionally seen reported is that Vega was canceled when NASA "found out" about the existence of the Atlas Agena, which had the same capabilities. I'm too lazy to go dig through my print articles at the moment, but I think that Quest did an article back in the 1990s about the Vega development. They depict the mockup for the Atlas Vega upper stage that was under development for NASA and then canceled in 1959. Michael Van on the Secret Projects forum found these images on the San Diego Air and Space Museum website.
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