American reconnaissance satellites provide images of the Earth and monitor electronic emissions of terrestrial and airborne communications and radar systems. These automated spacecraft normally are positioned about the Earth in circular, low‐altitude polar orbits; in highly eccentric orbits (with a low perigee and extremely high apogee); or in geosynchronous equatorial orbits, in which a satellite remains fixed over a given spot above the equator.
In the years after World War II, America's political leaders sought to prevent the recurrence of an intelligence failure like the attack on Pearl Harbor and to obtain advance knowledge of any attempt at an atomic surprise attack on the United States. The U.S. Navy and Air Force first examined Earth satellites between 1946 and 1949. In 1950, the Research and Development Board of the Department of Defense (DoD) assigned jurisdiction for military satellites to the air force. Study participants agreed that the most valuable use of satellites was as a platform from which to observe and record activity on Earth.
By late 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower embraced “strategic reconnaissance” as a national policy: the United States would acquire reliable intelligence about the economic and military activities and resources of a potential foreign adversary through periodic, high‐altitude overflight in peacetime. Eisenhower and his advisers crafted the legal rationale for this policy in the spring of 1955. Because international law denied airplanes of one state the right to enter the airspace of another without authorization, Eisenhower first sought agreement to permit aerial reconnaissance at a four‐power summit conference in July. After Soviet leaders rejected this approach to reducing Cold War tensions, the president, on his return to the United States, announced that America would launch scientific Earth satellites as part of the nation's contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) planned by the international scientific community in 1957–58. Because international law did not yet apply in outer space, the administration determined to keep that region open to all, where the spacecraft of any state might overfly all states. It intended to use scientific satellites to establish the precedent of “freedom of space,” with all that that implied for the eventual overflight of reconnaissance satellites.
Meanwhile, the RAND Corporation had completed studies of a potential reconnaissance satellite for the air force in 1954. In 1956, the air force contracted with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to build these satellites. Lockheed already held a secret contract for Project AQUATONE that produced an aerial precursor, U‐2 spy planes. The air force satellite project, eventually termed SAMOS, was an open secret. As reported in the press, this satellite's camera would view the Earth from a circular polar orbit and produce images of surface features of about 20 feet resolution. The exposed film would be scanned electronically and the pictures transmitted to ground stations as the satellite passed overhead. The DoD, however, restricted funding of this “follow‐on” satellite system, and little more than design studies had been completed by the time the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, into Earth orbit on 4 October 1957.
In response, early in February 1958, President Eisenhower approved a secret, high‐priority reconnaissance satellite effort known as Project CORONA. Similar in many respects to its SAMOS cousin, CORONA employed the same spacecraft, but was designed to return exposed film to Earth in a special atmospheric reentry capsule that could be recovered in midair or on the ocean's surface. Organized like Project AQUATONE in a partnership between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. Air Force, the first Project CORONA satellite was launched in 1959. President Eisenhower received the first CORONA pictures of the Soviet Union in August 1960, four months after the U‐2 incident in which an American spy plane was shot down. Late in August, Eisenhower approved formation of a new civilian‐led organization in the DoD to control and direct the air force SAMOS Project. This organization reported to the secretary of defense and soon became a partnership between the CIA and the military services, acquiring responsibility for all of America's strategic reconnaissance assets; in 1961, it was formally named the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Finally, just before leaving office in 1961, Eisenhower established the civilian‐led National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) to receive, process, and distribute reconnaissance film. NPIC reported to the director of Central Intelligence (DCI).
More than 100 CORONA missions were flown over the next 12 years until the project terminated in 1972. Equipped with Itek cameras that produced an image with a resolution at the Earth's surface of about 25 feet on average and, pointed at nadir, eventually about 6 feet at best, CORONA was employed for wide area searches. These satellites proved so successful that the struggling SAMOS project was canceled in the early 1960s after several SAMOS satellites failed to transmit to Earth even one usable picture of the Soviet Union. Other reconnaissance satellites augmented CORONA in the early 1960s, all of them featuring film capsule recovery systems. Project ARGON launched seven successful camera‐equipped satellites to support U.S. Army mapping and charting. Collectively, in the years that followed, reconnaissance satellites provided the United States with an overhead “inspection system” that warned of imminent hostilities and permitted international agreement on arms reduction treaties with verification. They continue today to provide America's leaders with information vital to national security.
[See also Intelligence, Military and Political; Space Program, Military Involvement in the.]
Bibliography
- James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, 1977.
- John Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Russian Military Strength, 1982.
- Merton E. Davies and William R. Harris, RAND's Role in the Evolution of Balloon and Satellite Observation Systems and Related U.S. Space Technology, 1988.
- Cynthia M. Grabo, The Watch Committee and the National Indications Center: The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Warning, 1950–1975,
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence ,3 (Fall 1989). - Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, 1993.
- R. Cargill Hall, The Eisenhower Administration and the Cold War: Framing American Astronautics to Serve National Security,
Prologue ,1 (Spring 1995). - R. Cargill Hall,
Postwar Strategic Reconnaissance and the Genesis of CORONA , in Dwayne A. Day, et al., eds., Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites, 1998
