>The Corona program was America's first operating reconnaissance satellite program, running from the early 1960s until 1972. It provided much valuable intelligence information on Soviet and Chinese activities and proved the viability of orbiting military reconnaissance, and even nonmilitary photos of interest in Earth resources and archaeological sites. The photo imagery from Corona was declassified in 1995 and the satellite itself in the early 2000s. Exempted from declassification were around 100 photos of the State of Israel.[2]Hey wait a second...
>You can spy on any foreign power you want, hermano, as long as it's not Israel - salud, mi familia, salud
Jjjj
>Prior to satellite capabilities, much of what was going on in the USSR was a virtual blank despite attempts at breaking the fog of war like the U-2 flights that ended in the 1960 shootdown of Gary Powers and the US military was more than happy to significantly exaggerate Soviet military power to justify their annual budget. President Johnson once remarked "Those satellites saved us from building a lot of things we didn't need to build."[3]
>>18108322When the space program first started, the generals had megalomaniacal plans for stuff like orbiting battlestations but Eisenhower rejected the idea of using space for anything other than intelligence gathering activities.
>Eisenhower had unorthodox ideas about military secrecy, believing a free country shouldn't have state secrets like the communist bloc did. As such, the early military satellite programs were semi-open. Their existence was publicly acknowledged although the Defense Department was evasive as to their exact purpose and did not release photos or diagrams of them. This deception continued into the early months of the Kennedy Administration, which disliked Eisenhower's belief in transparency and anyway, it was increasingly hard to explain why these "test" or "scientific" satellites didn't seem to be returning data. A Defense Department directive in November 1961 made most military space programs top secret and they were no longer publicly admitted to.[9] Corona flights, which used the cover name Discoverer until the spring of 1962, were now described as nothing but "a classified Air Force payload."
>>18108361>When the space program first started, the generals had megalomaniacal plans for stuff like orbiting battlestationsThat sounds absolutely badass though.
>>18108304probably stuff taken during the Six Day War
>Discoverer 13's film capsule was successfully deorbited and retrieved August 13, 1960, the first manmade object recovered from space however overshadowed in a week when a Soviet spacecraft with two dogs became the first recovery of living organisms from space.[3]
ok
