Dawn of Reconnaissance Satellites
How spaceflight transformed espionage: from beeps to recovery capsules
The rivalry between nations fuels the appearance of power. Parades, aircraft fly-overs, nuclear bomb detonations, sausage factories… anything can instill the notion of a mighty nation. Sometimes, the secrecy, the unknown can further inflate this appearance. But what if this secrecy disappears?
In war, knowledge of enemy positions, armament, and plans crucially define the strategy. In the early beginnings of human flight, ballooning soon caught the attention of the military. Hot-air balloon first lifted man aloft in 1782 — yet, only a decade later balloons served in military reconnaissance by observing enemy positions from the air. Likewise, the airplane has soon found its role in aerial observation behind enemy lines. However, aerial observation becomes increasingly difficult if the aircraft has to fly deep into the enemy territory. Moreover, the success depends on many variables, such as weather, availability of aircraft and pilots, which all contribute to limited observation capabilities. Yet, at the end of World War II, this was the only way to obtain photos of enemy positions.
As World War II neared its end, the tensions between the East and West started to become increasingly apparent. Even before World War II, the rising communist movements over Europe were clashing with other ideologies. When the Russian revolution removed the Eastern pressure on Central forces by a peace treaty, it further instilled a grudge of the West towards the East. This led to further isolation of the Soviet Union — only a common enemy had temporarily made the East and West join forces to crush the “Centre” again.
Already during the rush towards Berlin, it was becoming clear that even after the thunder of open conflicts in European and Pacific theaters ceases, the ideological tensions would remain. Indeed, the haze of distrust overlaid the world for the next couple of decades. And as such, besides several proxy wars, the East and West fought battles of a different kind: ones of economic prowess, scientific achievements, espionage, and space exploration.
Space exploration underwent rampant development, spawning numerous achievements. Great minds on both sides worked tirelessly towards successful missions and never since have the nations so generously allotted vast amounts of resources towards space programs. It was not solely out of the intrinsic drive for exploration, but rather for political gains on a global scale as well. Space capabilities also greatly aided expanding military programs, especially through the development of powerful rockets and espionage from space.
Beeps of joy, beeps of fear
Chief Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev always aimed his rockets towards space. Yet, as the authorities called him out of the forced labor in a Siberian gulag, he was appointed to make sense out of confiscated bits and pieces of German rocketry. Under the oversight of the military, his objective was the development of rockets capable of delivering deadly payload well behind the enemy lines — well into America.
The development of a heavy-lift rocket is difficult. It was even harder for Korolev’s team in the war-devastated Soviet Union. The majority of top German rocket scientists have surrendered to the West. Yet, after the successful reconstruction of German V2, engineers focused on the development of a rocket with an intercontinental range. After Glushko’s bureau constructed the powerful RD-107 engines, the Soviets developed a new type of rocket: R-7 Semyorka (“the seven”).
Semyorka could deliver the thermonuclear warhead to the target over 8,000 km away. It became the first intercontinental ballistic missile. Korolev, with his focus on space, convinced Soviet leadership that launching a satellite would give the Soviet Union the edge over the US. The United States pushed for the launch of a scientific satellite — this would establish the principle for the “freedom of space,” rendering space the same legal status as of the high seas.
Soviets initially planned the launch of a full-blown scientific satellite — the Object-D. It soon proved too complicated for the tight schedule. As such, Soviets resorted to a simple, bare-bone design: a polished sphere with a radio transmitter and four antennas. Sputnik 1 flew on top of the modified R-7 in October 1957 and started the era of satellites.
Soviets scored a significant scientific achievement. The technical simplicity of the satellite cemented its political impact. As it circled the Earth in its elliptical orbit, it emitted a series of beeps that any amateur radio receiver could pick up. In the United States, anxiety followed the awe of this breakthrough. As Blaine Baggett put it:
For the people in the know, it really wasn’t a shock, but for the general populace, it was in the United States particularly, it was our technological Pearl Harbor.
Soviets did not pause there. In November 1957, Sputnik 2 brought dog Laika into the Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Although Laika perished soon after entering space, Soviets bagged another feat: first living-being in outer space.
The United States rushed to deploy its satellite, only to result in an unsuccessful launch of the Navy’s Vanguard satellite; the rocket exploded seconds after launch. Army — and its Werner von Braun — prepared and launched Explorer I soon after. Interestingly, booster rocket Jupiter-C had been ready well before Sputnik launch — von Braun’s rocket could have given the US the trophy for the first satellite.
The race has begun. In July 1958, the act of US president Eisenhower established NASA, formalizing the nation’s commitment to space flight. Soviet space program continued to dominate the tempo of the space race. Troubled satellite Object-D made it to orbit as Sputnik 3, which functioned as a fully-automatic space laboratory. Importantly, refinement of the R-7 rocket gave a more powerful Vostok rocket series. These rockets were to bring the Soviet dominance: in the space race and the espionage.
Dogs, guinea pigs, Yuri, and the camera
Baykonur was trembling with activity and thunder of rockets. Soviets were concentrating their efforts towards putting a human into outer space. Further missions sent different probes with living beings into space — this time with the intension of safe return. Spacecrafts of the Korabl-Sputnik program contained mice, dogs, guinea pigs, and even a human mannequin. After the successful return of animals to the Earth, it was time for the Vostok program.
New Vostok rockets and accompanying Vostok spacecraft were leading to launching a man into outer space. Vostok program outlined a general spacecraft design: a biconical module of the upper-most stage contained propellant and an engine, and a spherical capsule housed an astronaut. Yuri Gagarin was boosted to orbit on April 12, 1961, and became the first human in space. However, the inconspicuous sphere that sheltered the “cosmonaut” had another intended use as well: the observation of the enemy’s strategic points deeply behind the Iron curtain. For this purpose, cameras were installed into the spherical capsule, giving rise to the Soviet spy satellite — Zenit-2.
The satellite orbited the Earth at an altitude of 200–350 kilometers. Zenit-2 typically had three high-resolution and one low-resolution cameras. The hi-res camera system allowed a resolution between 10–15 meters — enough to distinguish strategic objects. Each camera photographed an area of 60x60 km. For a typical mission, each camera had a film with 1,500 frames. This means that more than ten million square kilometers — more than the area of the US — could be photographed in a single mission!
While the Soviets had the technology to send video or photos from space. The first six Zenit-2 test satellites had a photo-television system, which could read-out the film and transmit the frames to the ground — similar to the one installed on Luna 3, which photographed the dark side of the Moon. However, this proved to be unsatisfactory for the reconnaissance. How were the films recovered? Since the spacecraft was co-developed with the ones for manned-flight, it could reenter the atmosphere and landed. Typically, after a week of observation, the satellite de-orbited and the ground crew recovered the films and refurbished the cameras for the next flight.
American eye in the sky
The United States had a strong motivator: before satellite reconnaissance, most information from the other side of the Iron curtain came from high-altitude aircraft. Yet, even though high-performance U-2 could fly at extreme heights — presumably out of range of anti-aircraft rockets — it was limited in its operations. Even worse, the assumption of invincibility soon proved wrong: in May 1960, F.G. Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. This led to the worsening of already bad relations between nations. In 1962, during the Cuban crises, another U-2 was shot down, further straining the tension. A satellite would remove this danger altogether.
Even though America might have appeared as lagging behind the Soviet space program, the US launched the first reconnaissance satellite: Corona. Already in early 1959 the carrier rocket Thor-Agena was tested with a Discoverer satellite as a prelude for Corona satellite. In June, Discoverer 4 carried the reconnaissance payload, which has not managed to reach orbit. After successful recovery of Discoverer 13, the next mission was the first successful reconnaissance mission: it photographed Soviet Mys Schmidta military airbase in August 1960. Space reconnaissance has started.
In contrast to Soviet Zenit with its reusable camera, Corona satellites were meant to burn up after deorbiting. The exposed film was stored in a small reentry capsule. The method of capsule recovery was particularly interesting: an airplane caught the “film bucket” during its parachuted descent. Interestingly, this led to one of the “firsts” that the American space program scored: the successful return of an object from space. Along the lines of firsts: Corona was the first program that flew more than a hundred missions!
Corona removed the fictional “missile gap” — a belief that the Soviet Union had an unparalleled number of ballistic missiles. Corona’s photographs of the Soviet Union revealed that this was not the case; on the contrary —the US had more missiles than the Soviet Union! During the Corona program around 120 successful missions were flown and 800,000 photographs were taken, resulting in around 1.4 billion km² of photographed land area (more than sixty-times the area of Soviet Union).
The mode of film recovery was kept for next-generation US spy satellites: Lanyard, Gambit-1, Gambit-3, and Hexagon. Only with KH-11 in the late 1970s, direct electronic transmission of data began and with it, reconnaissance took a different, more dynamic shape.
Military satellites that followed Zenit-2 and Corona were increasingly sophisticated and with more specific roles. Some satellites were on watch for launches of ballistic missiles, detonations of nuclear weapons, and electronic surveillance. Nonetheless, Corona and Zenit-2 have tiled the way and shaped the Cold War in an unprecedented way.
In 2008, more than 150 Earth-observation satellites were in orbit, continuously collecting data. While the vast majority of these satellites steer away from military applications, it shows how vastly different the space above us is compared to the early 1960s. New, improved satellites are launched often and stay in orbit for extended periods throughout which they send high-resolution images of our planet. Importantly, we have accepted that any portion of Earth can be photographed from space. However, in the tense Cold War, this capability carried a very different notion:
In the Cold War atmosphere of deep mutual fear and distrust, space reconnaissance remained one of the few channels of objective information which was in high demand for keeping the world away from a nuclear catastrophe.
— Eye in the sky
The world has fortunately avoided all-out nuclear war. Space programs and space technologies developed during the Cold War provided capabilities to learn more about the Earth. Thousands of pictures reveal details about our planet: we can learn about most remote places, track changes in the environment, and discover historic remains. Race for space started as an extended military parade; today, space infrastructure is crucial for the everyday life of a vast majority of people all around the globe.
Additional sources:
Hall, R.C., Origins of U.S. Space Policy: Eisenhower, Open Skies, and Freedom of Space. (1992)
D.A. Day, J.M. Logsdon, & B. Latell, Eye in the sky: the story of the Corona spy satellites [Smithsonian history of aviation series (1998)]
