The Spy Satellites That Dropped Top-Secret Films From Space

At the height of the Cold War, the United States faced a terrifying problem: it had no reliable way of knowing how many bombers, nuclear missiles, or launch sites the Soviet Union actually possessed. After the 1960 shootdown of Francis Gary Powers ended U-2 reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory, America turned to one of the most ambitious intelligence projects ever attempted Project CORONA, a secret spy satellite program hidden behind the public-facing Discoverer space missions. Instead of transmitting photographs electronically, CORONA captured Soviet territory on physical film, packed it inside a gold-plated recovery capsule, fired it back through the atmosphere at roughly 18,000 miles per hour, and deployed a parachute over the Pacific, where specially modified C-119 Flying Boxcars had to literally catch it in midair before it hit the ocean and destroyed itself. After 13 troubled missions, Discoverer 14 finally succeeded on August 18, 1960, giving American intelligence unprecedented photographs from behind the Iron Curtain and revealing that the feared Soviet “bomber gap” and “missile gap” were dramatically overstated. Over the next 12 years, CORONA would fly 145 missions and return more than 800,000 images, mapping vast portions of the communist world and eventually helping make nuclear arms-control verification possible. This is the incredible story of Project CORONA, the Cold War spy satellites designed to destroy themselves, the aircrews who caught secrets falling from space, and the photographs that fundamentally changed what America knew about its greatest enemy. --- Dark Space features the mysterious and little told stories of US, Soviet, and global space exploration from the dawn of the space race to today... all in the cinematic short documentary format we love to create. Subscribe today, and feel free to reach out with your own suggestions for new stories that you want us to bring to life. Thanks as always for your support. Source: