Transcription
It’s hard to imagine a world without GPS or satellite imagery, but in the 1950s when the CIA created its first photo reconnaissance satellite, codenamed Corona, the technology simply didn’t exist.
Corona was America’s first successful photo reconnaissance satellite and it captured imagery from 1968 up until 1972. The requirement for gathering intelligence over the Soviet Union increased dramatically after the Soviet Union shot down one of our U2 aircrafts and captured CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers. Two and a half months later on its first mission, Corona captured more imagery than all previous U2 flights.
Photo reconnaissance imagery is used for a variety of things, everything from assessing military forces to finding out the production of grain in the country. In this case Corona was really important because it helped us better understand the buildup of Soviet military power in-country.
Corona depended on the successful physical recovery of the film, like the film here and this canister from Corona, but it also needed to obtain the images safely from the air and get them back to the ground to be developed and that’s where this parachute bag comes into play. What would happen is, we would take the images they would get rolled onto the film and they would end up in a capsule or a bucket. They would descend down to Earth with a parachute slowing it, once it was in a specific zone a plane would come with a trapeze-type hook and it would actually hook the parachute, reel it into the plane, bring it back to the ground, and CIA officers would develop the film.
Running for 12 years, Corona recorded over eight hundred thousand images covering seventy two million square miles of ground, which historians and environmentalists are still using today. Most importantly, Corona showed that the Soviet Union’s bomber and missile buildup was not outpacing the Americans as some had feared, which allowed our President the opportunity to make better strategic and budgetary decisions. The Corona program was incredibly successful, giving the United States the confidence to pursue arms control agreements, but it did so much more than record the landscape of the cold war. It was able to provide environmentalists a look at the Earth 10 years before any other country launched resource satellites.