Code name: Corona. (first US spy satellite)
The weekend before Thanksgiving in 1959, Walter Levison, project manager on
a top-secret U.S. spy-satellite program, drove to meet renowned inventor
Edwin Land at his summer home in Peterborough, N.H., to deliver the bad
news. Levison, who remembers it as the blackest moment of his life, didn't
mince words. The highly classified government program was on the ropes,
beset by seemingly insurmountable technical problems. Land, developer of
instant photography and the head of an intelligence advisory committee that
was secretly guiding the project, would have to relay word to President
Eisenhower that the program would need to "stand down."
"It's hard to imagine the pressure we felt," says Levison, now 77, furrowing
his thick gray eyebrows. In that brief exchange on that bleak New Hampshire
day, he felt like he was letting the country down, much to his humiliation
and frustration. So with Land's approval Levison decided that the team would
redouble its efforts for three months in one last push to launch the nation's
first spy satellite into space.
In those next months Levison and his chief engineer Frank Madden would often
sleep in the milk factory in Needham, Mass., that, under the innocuous sign
of the optical firm Itek, concealed the secret project. "During that period
we hardly ever left the laboratory," Madden recalls. "People were working
around the clock." Neither man could ever explain to his family why he spent
so many nights and weekends away.
The program was forging ahead amid an air of near desperation over the Soviet
Union's perceived lead in space after the launching of Sputnik, the world's
first satellite, in 1957. "As it beeped in the sky," Eisenhower's science
adviser James R. Killian would write later in his memoirs, "Sputnik created a
crisis of confidence that swept the country like a windblown forest fire."
Bellicose as ever, Edward Teller, father of the recently developed hydrogen
bomb, maintained on television that, by falling behind the Soviets in space,
the United States had "lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl
Harbor."
(The Unites States hadn't lost the battle. We had project Corona.) Kodiak
Tracking station played a major part in the command control and tracking of
the corona satellites. The Station title was:
Air Force
Satellite Control Facility
Kodiak Tracking Station
"Faith in American technological superiority has been shaken," Newsweek's
cover story announced as it trumpeted a new age of vulnerability. Indeed,
while many people were preoccupied with Sputnik, Eisenhower and his advisers
worried more about the powerful SS-6 launcher that had flung the satellite
into orbit. The Soviets could clearly use the same launchers to send a
ballistic missile hurtling thousands of miles. And, sure enough, the
Soviets soon demonstrated this very capability months later in August of
1957, testing an intercontinental ballistic missile believed to rival U.S.
missiles.
To reduce fears on both sides, Eisenhower had proposed a sweeping Open Skies
plan in 1955 that would allow overflights of military installations inside
the superpowers' borders, but Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev had curtly
rebuffed him. Now, two years later, as fear of Soviet intentions grew,
Eisenhower made gathering information a top priority. "The country was
starved for intelligence on the Soviet Union at that time," Levison says.
"Very little information was coming out." The government's vaunted U-2
high-altitude spy plane could provide only narrow "spot" reconnaissance of
known targets, and President Eisenhower saw it as a risky tool even before
the Soviets shot down Gary Powers's mission over USSR territory in 1960.
At this pivotal moment, Land's high-level advisory panel had thus persuaded
Eisenhower of the need for more photographic surveillance. "We must find
ways to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence
estimates are based, to provide better strategic warning, to minimize
surprise in the kind of attack, and to reduce the danger of gross
overestimation of the threat," the panel urged the president. "If we are
successful," Land reportedly assured Eisenhower, "it can be the greatest
intelligence coup in history."
Taking the advice to heart, the administration dispatched Levison and Madden
as part of a highly skilled network of teams to tackle the top-secret
project code-named Corona. The teams' mission was unprecedented: to build
and launch a series of orbiting satellites equipped with high-resolution
earth undetected cameras designed to photograph Soviet Territory and eject
film canisters. And the mission's results endure: the supposedly temporary
Corona would become the backbone of the government's intelligence-collection
system for more than a decade, and evolve into the secret satellite
reconnaissance program that exists to this day.
Feverish Origins
Looking back, Madden still finds the challenges daunting. The cameras that
formed the heart of the project had to be rugged enough to survive the shock
of a launch and steady enough to provide sharp images while traveling at
17,000 miles per hour. Radio control from earth would advance the camera's
film, which then would eject from the spacecraft and parachute into the
earth's atmosphere for retrieval. And - Madden savors it like a punch line
- the teams had to develop such an audacious system at a time when no one in
the United States had yet succeeded in launching anything into orbit.
While Levison, Madden, and their team forged ahead on developing the camera,
parallel teams across the country tackled other challenges. In California,
for example, Lockheed's Missiles and Space Division was attempting to build
the actual orbiting vehicle, code-named Agena. Douglas Aircraft was
responsible for modifying Thor rockets, developed initially as
intermediate-range ballistic missiles, for the job of thrusting the Corona
satellites into polar orbit - selected to provide maximum photographic
coverage as the earth turned on its axis. A secret group at General
Electric provided the recovery vehicle, gold plated as a shield against
radiation and insulated against the heat of reentry into the atmosphere.
Eastman Kodak supplied a novel form of film and performed the processing.
Each group faced unique challenges. The film-retrieval plan called for
dispatching a squadron of six cargo planes, each equipped with a
trapeze-like loop hanging beneath it, to the vicinity of the ejected capsule
as it parachuted to earth. Detecting the capsule's radio beacon and
sighting its descending orange canopy, the pilots would fly the cargo planes
across the top of the parachute and hook onto it while crew inside the
plane's bay yanked the capsule aboard with a winch. If the airborne feat
failed, Corona's recovery vehicle was designed to float long enough for
recovery from the ocean by helicopter launched from a nearby ship.
At the time of Levison's visit to Land, the project had met with seemingly
unending frustrations during a year of breakneck work. Despite numerous
unsolved problems, the program had recently attempted eight launches, as
though engineers were trying to will the complex new technology into orbit.
All eight attempts to launch a functioning spy satellite had failed. Four
did not even achieve orbit. One craft that did blew up as it tried to eject
the film capsule, and all the other capsules were either destroyed or lost
through major mishaps. And, as on-board instrumentation revealed, none of
the Levison team's cameras functioned for more than a few brief moments
before the embrittled film cracked - as team members would curse it - "like
autumn leaves" in the low- temperature vacuum of space. Indeed, although no
one, least of all Levison, wanted to admit defeat, the cracking film problem
was so vexing that it threatened to derail the whole venture.
Back from the Brink
In fact, driving back from New Hampshire to the secret lab in Needham,
Levison could scarcely dream that just nine months later, on the fourteenth
attempt, a satellite would finally pierce the Iron Curtain. Successfully
ejecting film containing images of some 1.5 million square miles of Soviet
and Eastern European territory, the first satellite would offer more
coverage than four years of flights by the nation's high-flying U-2 spy
planes, thus providing vital intelligence information about the USSR's
nuclear arsenal. The Corona program would, in fact, turn out to be not just
the first but also the longest and arguably the most successful space
program in the nation's history.
Ultimately 121 Corona satellites would orbit the earth between 1960 and
1972, taking some 800,000 pictures on 2.1 million feet of film. And image
resolution became acute: prints could clearly depict a 5-foot object on the
ground. Only the advent of satellites relying on digital video technology
that could beam high-resolution visual data to earth in real time would
displace Corona's photographic system.
List of Corona launches (use BACK to return to here)