Apogee staff
The more than 300 military satellites orbiting Earth keep tabs on missile tests, enable battlefield communication and provide ground images so clear that in some cases their image resolution is measured in centimeters. They typically send their data by radio waves or laser.
But in one way or another, each traces back to a Pentagon program that was born out of a national panic after the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the first manmade object into orbit in 1957. It took a dozen tries over three years after Sputnik 1 for the Corona surveillance program to supply the first images from space — along with relief to U.S. leaders who were worried that the Soviets had leaped ahead in space and in development of the powerful, nuclear-capable missiles required to reach it.
The technology seems primitive today, but it was cutting edge in 1960. And just like modern military satellites, much of it was shrouded in secrecy. The world knew that U.S. Air Force pilots flying propeller-driven cargo planes out of Hawaii were grabbing objects in midair that had been ejected from a satellite then eased down through the atmosphere by parachute. It was a technique so amazing for its time that the pilots’ leader, Capt. Harold E. Mitchell, was brought onto national television stages — the “Today” show and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The project, promoted to the public as “Discoverer,” was described as scientific research involving biomedical experiments with mice and primates. But that was just a cover. It would be more than three decades before Corona was declassified and the full story came out: Those parachutes were bringing back capsules containing photographic film that, when processed, showed wide swaths of Soviet landscape. The first successful mission photographed some 1.65 million square miles of ground.
“I didn’t know there was film onboard of Discoverer 14 until I came back to the United States,” Mitchell said in the 2012 book, “Corona Star Catchers,” published by a division of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He recalled crew members at the back of his C-119J Flying Boxcar trying to haul in the first capsule using a specially made trapeze-like device. One of the crew was “chief pole handler” Algaene Harmon. “When Harmon touched the capsule, he jerked his hand back because it was hot,” Mitchell said. “Harmon was the first person on Earth to feel the heat of re-entry.” Corona provided the first photos from space, but the U.S. Navy had orbited the first operational surveillance satellite two months earlier. In June 1960, the Navy’s Tattletale started detecting radar signals from its orbit about 800 kilometers above the Earth using technology developed for submarine periscopes. After it was declassified in 1998, this program was known as GRAB, for galactic radiation and background.
Corona marked an evolution beyond earlier post-Sputnik photography schemes from high in the Earth’s atmosphere — balloons whose film also was recovered in midair and the U-2 reconnaissance plane. That first Discoverer 14 mission provided more coverage than all 24 U-2 overflights combined, Mitchell said. President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced to the world that the U.S. would stop sending U-2 flights over Russia after one was shot down in May 1960 in what seemed an embarrassing Cold War stumble. But Eisenhower had an ace in the hole. “The reason he could make that concession when he did was that he knew we were almost in position to do the job with Corona,” said John L. McLucas, former Air Force secretary, writing in the 1998 book, “The Air Force in Space, 1945 to the 21st Century.” Discoverer 14, or Corona 14, started bringing home those first images from space four months after Eisenhower’s announcement. Corona was supposed to operate for two years. It turned into 12. Through a series of 145 launches aboard Air Force Thor Agena launch vehicles, into a low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 200 kilometers, the program enabled the U.S. and its allies to track missile site construction, arms sales and cooperation between the Soviets and the People’s Republic of China, and to make “more informed national security decisions based on accurate information rather than guesswork,” according to an NRO paper published when Corona was declassified in 1995. All told, some 2.1 million feet of film was sent back to Earth in 39,000 capsules or cans.
Corona was developed by the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, with later involvement by the new Department of Defense agencies NRO and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), soon renamed DARPA with the addition of “Defense.” Leading contractors on the project included panoramic camera designer the Itek Corp.; integrator and upper-stage developer Lockheed Missile and Space Corp.; and Eastman Kodak, which provided new film designed to work in space. Engineers from the nonprofit Rand Corp. first sold the concept of a film-recovery satellite to the Air Force in 1957, but for years satellite development took a back seat to more conventional surveillance techniques. That changed with the U-2 incident. “After 1960, reconnaissance satellites quickly became indispensable to the nation’s security, and Eisenhower’s successors sought to protect these space assets at all costs,” Air Force Gen. Thomas S. Moorman Jr. said in “The Air Force in Space” book. Said former secretary McLure, “When the Russians got into space before us, they suddenly loomed 10 feet tall and received credit for having created a missile gap — never mind whether it really existed.”
The sweeping surveillance of the Soviet land mass afforded by Corona, he said, “brought the Russians down in stature from 10 to only 8 feet tall.” As the introduction to “Corona Star Catchers” said, “The Corona program would, in short order, put to rest concerns that the Soviets were outpacing the United States in (intercontinental ballistic missile) production.” The CIA described the Corona contribution to U.S. intelligence as “virtually immeasurable.” In a 1995 post-declassification ceremony, the NRO lauded the Corona team as pioneers, iconoclasts and risk-takers. The declassification order from President Bill Clinton noted that the benefits of their work extend beyond its military usefulness: “Experts believe the declassified imagery will contribute significantly to the analysis and understanding of global environmental processes,” Jeffrey K. Harris, former NRO director, said at the time.