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America Spying with the Corona Satellites
After Gary Powers’s U-2 was downed on May 1, 1960, it became impossible for the United States to continue photographing the Soviet Union. But the need for Soviet intelligence didn’t change — it remained paramount to American national security to know what was happening beyond the Iron Curtain. Luckily for the United States, there was a new technology ready to take over the job of aerial reconnaissance within months of the Powers’ Incident: the Corona spy satellites.
This is part of my Cold War aerial espionage series. Part 1 about the U-2 plane’s genesis is here. Part 2 about the political challenge of deciding to fly it is here. Part 3 focussing on the Gary Powers Incident is here.
Eyes in the Sky
The Second World War saw rocketry mature as a technology, namely with the V-2 program in Germany. In the immediate post-war years, both the United States and the Soviet Union imported V-2 scientists to harness the new knowledge. The United States managed to import some of the German program’s foremost minds, including Wernher von Braun, who brought literal train cars full of V-2 parts and plans stateside with him. American engineers were thus able to rebuild the V-2 while learning about the technology, and in 1946, a team at the White Sands Proving Ground launched one carrying a camera. That V-2 captured the first image of the Earth from space. Photography from above the atmosphere was somewhat literally on the horizon. That same year, the RAND corporation undertook a feasibility study of orbiting satellites for data collection.
Rocketry became a primary technological focus in the United States in the late 40s and into the 1950s, and most of the funding came in developing this technology for national defence. The emphasis was on developing Intermediate-Range and Intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to points around the globe, essentially building up an arsenal against potential aggression from the Soviet Union. This work led to three notable programs: the Redstone IRBM being developed by Wernher von Braun’s team now at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, the US Air Force’s Atlas ICBM, and the Navy’s Vanguard sounding rocket.
While the military branches pursued various missile programs, RAND continued to study and…
