As a machinist, i built the frame that the camera's were mounted to on these spy satellite's! That was on a tape controlled machining center back then! One broken tap would junk the entire 6 ft piece!
My first real machine shop job was at a place called "Tapemation." There were still, no longer used, tape reels close to some of the old HSK 5 axis machines.
Back then Bridgeport made tape driven machines using controls from Moog for milling, drilling, peck drilling, boring, and tapping. These machines were capable of making great parts, or serious carnage. Everything had to be right.
There is a wide spread with such estimates, if looking at the world as a whole. Like estimates ranging from 250,000 to 500,000 deaths for particular years, or 291,000 to 646,000 deaths by other studies. Personally when I hear corona, I first think of the cerveza ...
Dad worked on this program for years, first from Sunnyvale, then from Vandenberg AFB. Love hearing outside accounts of what he was FINALLY able to talk about with us (his family) just a few years ago following declassification... just to work on the program, he had to have his wife/my mom vetted for a Top Secret clearance (even though he still wasn't supposed to talk about it, lol)! Thanks, Amy!
Great video Amy! FYI my father designed the Elint package for that GRAB satellite! A replica and his notes from it's first transmission is on display at the Air and Space Museum in D.C.!
I once spent over an hour talking to a vintage old dude in isle 9 at the Andrews AFB Commissary. He was a JC-130A pilot that first wanted to know if I was on C-130s today. No, I said I was C-17s, but upon asking what he did, I lost all track of time listening to his story. My crew abandoned me to meet up at a bar later, but he recommended to read the book, To Catch A Falling Star. Great read of a fascinating USAF operation.
My late ex-father-in-law (late father of my ex-wife) flew air rescue in the South Pacific during WW-II, Korea, and Vietnam. He also flew Corona air-snatch missions in the early 1960s. The stories he had...! And the stories he couldn't tell must have been even more amazing.
My father was a major part of the photo section on these projects. As an engineer on this thing, they were all swarn to total secrecy. This was a monumental effort commissioned by the CIA. We lived in Rochester NY at the time, most people don't know that Kodak, founded in Rochester, was a major defense contractor dating back to WW1. Great vid Amy.
I found some still sealed rolls of Kodak reconnaissance film at a surplus sale once in the '80s. From memory one roll was about 8" wide and the other close to a foot. Both were several hundred feet long.
At the time this was going on a designer at Estes Rockets developed a model rocket to carry a 8mm movie camera. It was called Cineroc. There is a video on RUclips about the history of Estes Rockets.
I have honestly no clue why RUclips algorithm didn’t understand the gem that is this video. There is no channel like vintage space, the amount of research and information is insane. ❤
@@Animalwon I'm Canadian. Thats the first time I've heard it pronounced that way. But I like her videos. Not crazy about The in front of Vintage Space. I assume there's a copyright thing over it?
Would love to see a series like this from the Soviet angle. I've heard about the Corona sats and their recovery, but I have no idea what early USSR spyware was like.
Well USA was not behind iron curtain for one, and not a homogeneous nation racial wise, so it was much easier to spy on USA using just ordinary espionage infiltration. Also capitalism is prone to sell all of its tech eventually. So you dont need to spy , after 5-10 years IBM will just sell it to you. Also spy military tech is usually about only 30% better than top of the line ordinary tech, soviets could have just purchase it thru agents and so on. USA did not have such luxury.
Man , those guys should really dig through their archives, hard stuff for a previously closed society , so many in the know are gone , or even let go with a bang from behind , yes , it would be interesting
Wait... You KNOW about those? You're brave to mention it. Right now, Goog/ABC is using the magicks of the Interweb to track your packets! Although everybody knows that Corona is Bill Gates' baby, to get everybody injected with his meshed networked nano bots, after which, we all get switched into The Network, and become widely-distributed, low-capacity, wet compute nodes. On the plus side, we all get the Home Use Program licenses for Microsoft O365, to run spreadsheets in our dreams.
@@colfaxschuyler3675 The main use of Bill Gates chip is also to help us all network freely on the interwebs and to block the mind controlling chips and apps used by Apple in their bid to further the "Cult of the Fruit" which coerces their user base to force their over priced tech on others knowing full well they will be made to upgrade in months or face "bricking". Many are fearful of leaving the cult due to their now embedded tech being forced into obsolescence and labelled as a "Brick". The Network on the other hand hopes to ease users off this so they can actually game as well as continue their spreadsheet fantasies. All hail Gates! Down with the Fruit!
About that Southern Pacific rail line. The SP had a Train Order Station located near the base. In the days before radio, train orders were how railroads gave special instructions to train crews, like if one train was running late, or an extra unscheduled train was running. It was in the down range zone, and if a rocket were to fail, the debris and flaming fuel could fall onto the office. So the air force build a bomb shelter behind the office and a hot line to base operations. The procedure was they would call and warn the operator and dispatcher 15 minutes before a launch, the operator would head for the shelter, and wait until another phone there would ring giving the operator a all clear.
Great Job Amy!!! Concise, to the point, but packed with interesting historical information. I lived through that wild time, so knew a lot but not all of the story details. Thanks for the very well done video.
From 1954 until 1999 in the UK, packets of Brooke Bond tea included illustrated cards, usually 50 in a series, which were collected by many children, including myself. The subject of the 1971 series was 'The Race into Space' which included a card on the American 'Discoverer' series of 'scientific' satellites. Yet another part of the 'hiding in plain sight' cover story for the Corona program. In fact, I may still have that old card set packed away somewhere.
Brilliant series, Amy, thanks. So much detail and background context in these videos we'll be able to re-watch them several times and still enjoy them.
Very interesting video and history of the Corona Satellites program. Good job Amy, looking forward to the next video about the "black birds". I did not know how long we had to catch the capsules in mid-air by passing airplanes . Thank You, please keep the great videos coming.
@@Animalwon No, what you are hearing is the correct(-ish) pronunciation of a french word. Not a french accent, but rather a canadian accent of actual french. [language police over and out] 🤗
Thank you for a great overview of Carona. My dad worked on the optical design and testing-and later the image interpretation of Corona/Hexagon - both at Itek and Perkin Elmer. We of course had no idea of what he was working on at the time. When the initial de-classification of the project happened in the early 1990's, dad took great joy in bringing out the imagery from his files, and explaining the photo-telemetry and ground-truth checking that he and his colleges used to assess the Soviet threat. I love that I can go and view a light table that he actually helped design and sat at to inspect Carona imagery at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institute Air and Space Museum.
New to your channel but I really enjoyed your Video on the early spy satellite programs. I love space and discussions of how we got to where we are are badly needed now. Btw I saw your series on why you might not cover the Space shuttle on your vlog; know you do have supporters out there. "You do you" and what drives your love of space is your business your vlog is cool and your really fans will stay for the content you love and they style they love. There are so many over looked stories from the early years that need to be told you'll never run out of content. Look forward to more Vintage Space.
Excellent presentation. However, it left me wanting more. A topic worthy of an entire episode: The Hubble Space Telescope and its origins with the KH-11 and KH-13 NRO _Keyhole_ Birds (good luck getting declassified reports).
Love it, as usual! Great to recall many of the details and learn more-- I was a space wonky kid but not as diligent as I wished. Fortunately, you came along to help. My only observation is that while corona, indeed refers to emissions from an outer layer of the Sun-- "corona" effects on film are internal to the camera and static electricity discharges related to plastic sliding over metal (pet cat (Pete!) and touch doorknob). So the Sun's corona does not affect the film, but corona discharge does.
My dad worked as a manager on the Atlas-Agena program. When that was shut down, the company asked for suggestions to keep things going. He suggested selling space in capsules for the ashes of the cremated. He soon lost his job. He had worked for Northrup in th '50s and hated it. My mother encouraged him to try to getting a job with them. He wouldn't budge. So she sent his resumé to Northrup where he spent the rest of his life (another 10 years), there, designing/inventing flight test instrumentation. Earlier, in the '40s, because he was studying physics, he wasn't drafted into the war. But right after he got his degree in '46... off he went to Los Alamos to work on ballistics for the atom bomb.
13:03 C-119 Fairchild Flying Boxcar, I remember seeing them flying in the Philadelphia area when I was growing up. A very distinctive airplane. I remember seeing very coarse resolution weather pictures in the local newspapers at the time. I never made the connection how important these weather pictures were to successful operation of the spy satellites.
I've only watched the first minute/intro to this episode and I'm in love. Not every day you find a gal who's passionate about Cold War-era military history and technology. Cool, cute and smart as Oppenheimer... Marry me? Side note: I've never before heard 'reconissance' pronounced like 'renaissance' but I like it. Might even love it. Fer realzz tho, keep up the awesome episodes and I --we-- will continue watching. Thanks and hugs from San Francisco 🤗
Thanks for this video. This is one of my favorite spy satellite programs. The "Rube Goldberg" nature of it, with so many moving parts that have to work correctly in sequence, is fascinating to me. There is a KH9 Hexagon satellite on display at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio. Really interesting to see it up close.
Since 2005-2010 CCD has largely been replaced in cameras by another vintage space space technology; APS sensors (later APS CMOS). APS was invented for among other things higher resolving images under low light, which is beneficial in space telescopes (and I would guess, satellite images of areas in dusk/dawn). They are kind of the same thing but at the same time very different. CCD is a simpler construction that requires crazy accuracy, while APS is a complex construction which is easier to get accurate. APS samples one or a few pixels by a sampler, so a ton of samplers are needed on the chip. Compared to CCD that just have a few samplers and does a complex “move the pixels one by one towards the sampler”, which requires great accuracy in each move in order to not loose precision in the pixels far from the sampler.
Whoa!!! Packed with sooooo much info.....I thought I had been listening for hours. I remember being blown away as a kid when visiting the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago and they had a display of photo's taken from space. The photo sequence gradually focused on NYC to a bee on a woman's leg sitting on a park bench in Central Park. I went back to that display about 5 time's throughout the day spent there. Never forget that......utterly amazing. Sorry.......still can't get over.....recona....."sance". It just makes you even more endearing than you are naturally. Thanks for the waaaaay excellent work .......love it all. 💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖
A Fun Fact: Did anybody here know that Richard Bissell named his "Corona" program after his Smith-Corona typewriter? This is true. The largest CIA spy program of the time was named after a typewriter. BTW, dear Amy, I've been a fan of your channel ever since you began. You have matured over the years but you have not aged. As a New Jersey resident, I love your Canadian accent and the way you say "missile" and "reconnaissance". I've learned so much over the years from your videos due to my interest in things about outer space. Thank you for all of your years of dedication in educating us in the field of Space Technology. You have a master's degree in your field of study. MIT should give you a doctorate degree for all of the good work you have done to educate us over the years.
That was really interesting. Question: what happened to the Corona satellites after the film was ejected? Were they forced to re-enter the atmosphere, or were their orbits allowed to decay naturally? I don't expect there was much worry about the Soviet Union hijacking a Corona satellite back then, but maybe from a "better safe than sorry" standpoint forcing them down was preferable. And you might also want some control over *where* they came down.
In Wikipedia under KH-5 Argon they have the launch and decay dates of 9 satellites. The sprfead seems to be typically 2-4 weeks. Maybe related to when pictures are taken? In any case low orbit usually means short orbit.
I imagine it was deorbited over the ocean ..a satellite coming down over Russia ...yikes I dont think their military leadership in charge of defense would be impressed!
Super good info and program! I try never to miss you as you expand my knowledge so greatly. I was a boy during that time frame and always interested in space/science fiction/anything to do with aircraft. I remember vividly lying on top of the barn on our farm/ranch, smoking cigarette and see Sputnik tumbling in it's low-Earth orbit....then Telstar....etc. What an exciting time to be alive! We didn't know much about the "eye in the sky" because our government was playing it 'close to the vest' in the days of Cold War intrigue. I was planning to join the Air Force as soon as I graduated so to be part of the excitement of space and aircraft.......alas, it was not to be. Shortly before graduation, I was found to have eyesight changes that forced me to wear glasses and would keep me out of fighter aircraft. It was so disappointing but, in the end, it allowed me to have a better job than being a "grunt" in Viet Nam.....so.....what the heck. Thanks for you uploads; I try never to miss one! Tom
Wow. Every subscriber should refer to this lady as Dr. Amy as each episode is fully researched, written and presented in PhD dissertation quality. It makes me feel a bit old to realize Dr. Amy's historical research interest is within my lifetime and often, as in this episode, remember reading of some of the space attempts in my old Weekly Reader of my junior high school years, particularly the parachute snagging. I appreciate the accent and wonder why Richard "Bissel" doesn't rhyme with "missile" in Amy's delightful "Canadian." Nice to see the word corona not followed by "virus", too.
I came across your series while currently collecting Soviet watches from the 70s and 80s... I’m newly subbed, to say the least. Your videos are incredibly well-researched and the dialogue is thoroughly engrossing! Excellent stuff.
I’ve found myself drawn to Cold War history over the last year because I find the absolute insanity of this time comforting. The Cold War was an existential crisis humanity survived using reason, accomplishing fantastic things in the process. Science was the tip of the spear. Something I find disheartening is that modern American society would have burned the world 1,000 times over if the Cold War was happening now. We’ve abandoned reason and science. The stories of how much we (humanity) was able to do with archaic technology is amazing... but now? Vaccines are a personal choice instead of a societal courtesy. It’s absurd. Your videos have become a major comfort during the pandemic. It’s fitting that some of the best content in this genre comes from a Canadian given the best documentary on the moon landing’s 50th anniversary came from the BBC. Thank you. There may be hope for us yet.
An F15 did shoot down a satellite in the 1980's with a centreline mounted missle... Which bodes well for the new F15 eventually carrying hypersonic missles similar to the the MIG31...
Excellent documentary! Well done. Great history!! Especially the film and env tech required to make it work, but also the recovery methods in the beginning. Crazy tough.
Nice piece on a very important program in space history that interestingly enough has been kind of underappreciated. In 30+ minutes, the video covered much ground (I was checking out the Haynes edition on US Spy Satellites as the video progressed; and found the clip distilled some complex topics and series of events really well) ...
Good video. Two comments: 1) I would not call the U.S. "lucky" that an alternative was available when it had created that alternative and supporting programs with specifically as an augment or alternative; and 2) the perceived value of the U2 was not only the belief (based on older intel) that it was effectively visible to Soviet radar, but that the Soviets had would not have the combination of expertise and technology necessary to reach the plan for a few years, after which point other options would be available to the U.S.
Good work. Would it be too technical to talk about what was learned regarding FMEA and process, and how Space X kind of threw a lot of that out the window to do things their own way? In may ways the development of checks and counter checks made space happen, but made it crazy expensive. My neighbor was an engineer for one of the significant US satellite companies. When Space X started he would roll his eyes and say "they will never get the paperwork right".
In order to get higher photo resolution, the precision mirrors used in these satellites got larger over time. In the 1970's, when one of my college professors was part of a project to build a massive (for the time) telescope, he contacted the manufacturer to get an idea of lead time for what he considered an unusually large mirror. He was stunned to discover that one was in stock, as it turned out to be left over from an earlier spy satellite project.
Outstanding content as usual, thank you for putting this series together :) But I bet all the trolls are finding fault with how you say "reconnaissance"? Because of course they have to find something.
Am I wrong or wasn’t there a commercial train line running through Vandenberg AFB around the time of the program starting out as Discoverer? EDIT: At 14:40, I remembered correctly.
Not only was there a Southern Pacific Rail line running near Vandenberg but on one particular day in September of 1959 there was a Soviet diplomat name of Nikita Krushchev riding on that train while enroute from LA to SF. That was 10 days after we launched/tested our first ICBM at Vandenburg.
I did not realize they had a film camera camera , and then recover to develop and of the printed pictures. Like the amount of engineering to build this in an automated setup to work in space is really amazing to me.
Interesting point , more than 60 year later , retired former U2 pilots are still not permitted to discuss or comment on the Powers incident as the details are still highly classified .
Although he never talked about it (it being classified and all), my family was able to piece together from various info, locations, and eventual declassifications, that he was very likely the sea-going part (probably in radar) of trying to recover Corona film canisters and once success was in hand, he moved on to other space projects. Although he (and his colleagues) are no long around to confirm anything, it's neat to think him part of our early satellite story (as well as various probes later on). No wonder I've had a life-long love and connection with spaceflight.
Great video. I’ve always wondered what happened after these programs closed. Especially manned spy stations. Russia had them and I can’t imagine we didn’t have them too. Whenever these programs publicly close, many of them quietly continue under classified programs (like Sealab continuing as saturation diving for project Ivy Bells and more). Wonder if there are any manned reconnaissance satellites up there right now!!??
USAF Manned Program was MOL and it was canned before a manned mission was flown as K-8 could do the job just as well. If a manned overflight was required the USA had the A-12 / SR-71 which could be mission programmed much faster than any Satellite.
@@richardvernon317 you sound like you know what you’re talking about more than me but I have it on good authority that the US did have a spy station program and that’s bolstered by those secretive USAF non-NASA space missions as well as a few Shuttle missions that they won’t talk about, even now in 2021. My guess is and will always be that we built TWO Hubble telescopes, one looking at the heavens and one looking at us. On Earth. I have much reason to believe this but I’ll never be able to prove or disprove it.
@@towedarray7217 The DOD Shuttle missions most likely lofted Elint / Sigint, DPS and Com sats for transfer into GEO. They may have done some form of Photo Recce research during some of those missions. The Orbital mechanics of a Shuttle Launch from KSC don't allow any other types of mission to be flown that require very high inclination orbits. That was why the Shuttle Launch site at Vandenburg was built to do the KH lofting. The USAF Manned Recce Station Program was canned in the late 1960's as it couldn't do anything that the state of the art Recce systems on the unmanned platforms couldn't at much lower cost. A Boilerplate MOL did fly on a Titan III, but it didn't reach orbit and was mainly a test of Launcher / Spacecraft configuration and a test of the Gemini B hatch in a Heatshield during re-entry. The USA had massive advantages over the USSR when it came to the amount of electronics that they could stuff into a spacecraft, plus the fact that they had lots of Allies dotted around the globe that would allow them to position ground terminals on their territory. Thus the USAF could maintain close control of their recce birds for most of the time. Soviets couldn't so they built manned platforms. The information telling the truth is all around but like most people talking bullshit, your too lazy to go looking for it.
@@richardvernon317 YIKES. What an amazing reply. That was a very interesting read and you sure as hell sound like you know what you’re talking about. You’re quite right that US/NATO had far better microelectronics to stuff into a recon satellite and that likely means it didn’t need a crew on board. The crewed spysats Russia built are fascinating though. I’ve always speculated that there were 2 “Hubble” optical telescopes up there, one looking at space and one looking at Earth. Great read, thank you for writing that.
As a machinist, i built the frame that the camera's were mounted to on these spy satellite's! That was on a tape controlled machining center back then! One broken tap would junk the entire 6 ft piece!
My first real machine shop job was at a place called "Tapemation." There were still, no longer used, tape reels close to some of the old HSK 5 axis machines.
Cool. In a parallel life Science, Innovation and Technology would have been my chosen path.....tell me more details ;0
Back then Bridgeport made tape driven machines using controls from Moog for milling, drilling, peck drilling, boring, and tapping. These machines were capable of making great parts, or serious carnage. Everything had to be right.
I am loving this series; puts 'commercial TV' to shame. Just amazing. Thanks so much.
TV is dead.
To be honest: American TV is impressively sh*tty.
@@deadhamster7570 most assuredly.
I gave up T.V. in April 2013 and I do not miss it!
@@qetoun live broadcast tv=half dead, TELEVISION=healthy alive😉😉😉
Fun fact: every time Amy says "Corona," RUclips's algorithm goes haywire.
:(
Haha, good.
@@cernowaingreenman Don't be afraid. The common flu kills some 500000 every year...
@@flexairz and worldwide mortality from Covid is 2.2 million in one year, even after lockdowns and controls to minimise impact. So your point is what?
There is a wide spread with such estimates, if looking at the world as a whole. Like estimates ranging from 250,000 to 500,000 deaths for particular years, or 291,000 to 646,000 deaths by other studies. Personally when I hear corona, I first think of the cerveza ...
Dad worked on this program for years, first from Sunnyvale, then from Vandenberg AFB.
Love hearing outside accounts of what he was FINALLY able to talk about with us (his family) just a few years ago following declassification... just to work on the program, he had to have his wife/my mom vetted for a Top Secret clearance (even though he still wasn't supposed to talk about it, lol)!
Thanks, Amy!
Great video Amy! FYI my father designed the Elint package for that GRAB satellite! A replica and his notes from it's first transmission is on display at the Air and Space Museum in D.C.!
I once spent over an hour talking to a vintage old dude in isle 9 at the Andrews AFB Commissary. He was a JC-130A pilot that first wanted to know if I was on C-130s today. No, I said I was C-17s, but upon asking what he did, I lost all track of time listening to his story. My crew abandoned me to meet up at a bar later, but he recommended to read the book, To Catch A Falling Star. Great read of a fascinating USAF operation.
My late ex-father-in-law (late father of my ex-wife) flew air rescue in the South Pacific during WW-II, Korea, and Vietnam. He also flew Corona air-snatch missions in the early 1960s. The stories he had...! And the stories he couldn't tell must have been even more amazing.
My father was a major part of the photo section on these projects. As an engineer on this thing, they were all swarn to total secrecy. This was a monumental effort commissioned by the CIA.
We lived in Rochester NY at the time, most people don't know that Kodak, founded in Rochester, was a major defense contractor dating back to WW1.
Great vid Amy.
I found some still sealed rolls of Kodak reconnaissance film at a surplus sale once in the '80s. From memory one roll was about 8" wide and the other close to a foot. Both were several hundred feet long.
At the time this was going on a designer at Estes Rockets developed a model rocket to carry a 8mm movie camera. It was called Cineroc. There is a video on RUclips about the history of Estes Rockets.
My friend and I launched the camroc and cineroc . Had to wait weeks to get the film developed.
Mr. Estes took the time to write back to me when I wrote him. That’s how much he cared.
I have honestly no clue why RUclips algorithm didn’t understand the gem that is this video. There is no channel like vintage space, the amount of research and information is insane. ❤
Reconnaissance. Now we need to hear you say, “sabotage!”
Also, the way she pronounces "projects" is pretty cool.
@@RCAvhstape prohgeyts
She can, but she's needs Beastie Boys music in the background.....
you are hearing a French accent when she pronounces "Reconnaissance".
@@Animalwon I'm Canadian. Thats the first time I've heard it pronounced that way. But I like her videos. Not crazy about The in front of Vintage Space. I assume there's a copyright thing over it?
Would love to see a series like this from the Soviet angle. I've heard about the Corona sats and their recovery, but I have no idea what early USSR spyware was like.
Sounds like they were better at it!
Well, the Russians essentially used a variant of the Vostok spacecraft for reconnaissance work, launched from Plesetsk in northern Russia.
Usually Soviet spycraft involved sending field agents to get moose and squirrel.
Well USA was not behind iron curtain for one, and not a homogeneous nation racial wise, so it was much easier to spy on USA using just ordinary espionage infiltration. Also capitalism is prone to sell all of its tech eventually. So you dont need to spy , after 5-10 years IBM will just sell it to you. Also spy military tech is usually about only 30% better than top of the line ordinary tech, soviets could have just purchase it thru agents and so on. USA did not have such luxury.
Man , those guys should really dig through their archives, hard stuff for a previously closed society , so many in the know are gone , or even let go with a bang from behind , yes , it would be interesting
Amy: **says corona**
RUclips: I now diagnose you with hidden
In a contemporary context, "Corona Spy Satellites" sounds like a conspiracy meme right alongside "Jewish Space Lasers"
You should let your GOP lawmakers know about that they have expanded from releasing the virus via "ChemTrails" to using satellites.
That's called "Iron Dome". They don't work...but don't ell anyone.
Wait... You KNOW about those? You're brave to mention it. Right now, Goog/ABC is using the magicks of the Interweb to track your packets!
Although everybody knows that Corona is Bill Gates' baby, to get everybody injected with his meshed networked nano bots, after which, we all get switched into The Network, and become widely-distributed, low-capacity, wet compute nodes.
On the plus side, we all get the Home Use Program licenses for Microsoft O365, to run spreadsheets in our dreams.
@@colfaxschuyler3675 The main use of Bill Gates chip is also to help us all network freely on the interwebs and to block the mind controlling chips and apps used by Apple in their bid to further the "Cult of the Fruit" which coerces their user base to force their over priced tech on others knowing full well they will be made to upgrade in months or face "bricking". Many are fearful of leaving the cult due to their now embedded tech being forced into obsolescence and labelled as a "Brick". The Network on the other hand hopes to ease users off this so they can actually game as well as continue their spreadsheet fantasies. All hail Gates! Down with the Fruit!
@@anarchyantz1564 "Face bricking...". Hmm. Either as punishment, or as an attempt to defeat facial recognition!
Love your attention to detail. Keep 'em coming!
I worked with a couple engineers who worked on corona and Hubble at Perkin Elmer. They were amazingly talented and collaborative.
I've taken that Amtrak train through Vandenburg, you can see the SpaceX and ULA launch complexes not too far away.
About that Southern Pacific rail line. The SP had a Train Order Station located near the base. In the days before radio, train orders were how railroads gave special instructions to train crews, like if one train was running late, or an extra unscheduled train was running.
It was in the down range zone, and if a rocket were to fail, the debris and flaming fuel could fall onto the office.
So the air force build a bomb shelter behind the office and a hot line to base operations.
The procedure was they would call and warn the operator and dispatcher 15 minutes before a launch, the operator would head for the shelter, and wait until another phone there would ring giving the operator a all clear.
Great Job Amy!!! Concise, to the point, but packed with interesting historical information. I lived through that wild time, so knew a lot but not all of the story details. Thanks for the very well done video.
Anyone else binging on all things Vintage Space channel? So much good stuff here.
From 1954 until 1999 in the UK, packets of Brooke Bond tea included illustrated cards, usually 50 in a series, which were collected by many children, including myself. The subject of the 1971 series was 'The Race into Space' which included a card on the American 'Discoverer' series of 'scientific' satellites. Yet another part of the 'hiding in plain sight' cover story for the Corona program. In fact, I may still have that old card set packed away somewhere.
I had tons of those little cards out of the teabags when I was a kid. My nanna practically lived on tea 😂
No idea what happened them, shame...
Really enjoying this series. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Brilliant series, Amy, thanks. So much detail and background context in these videos we'll be able to re-watch them several times and still enjoy them.
Very interesting video and history of the Corona Satellites program. Good job Amy, looking forward to the next video about the "black birds". I did not know how long we had to catch the capsules in mid-air by passing airplanes . Thank You, please keep the great videos coming.
Yey ! Can we get a "Reconasanse" ..GO Canada 🇨🇦🥰
You sir are a conoissior.
Yeah, but still feet and pounds.. booh!
aooot and abaaooot
What you are hearing is a French accent in how she pronounces "Reconnaissance".
@@Animalwon No, what you are hearing is the correct(-ish) pronunciation of a french word. Not a french accent, but rather a canadian accent of actual french. [language police over and out] 🤗
As always, incredibly well researched and presented. Again I learn something new, always. Thank you Amy, truly.
Thank you for a great overview of Carona. My dad worked on the optical design and testing-and later the image interpretation of Corona/Hexagon - both at Itek and Perkin Elmer.
We of course had no idea of what he was working on at the time. When the initial de-classification of the project happened in the early 1990's, dad took great joy in bringing out the imagery from his files, and explaining the photo-telemetry and ground-truth checking that he and his colleges used to assess the Soviet threat.
I love that I can go and view a light table that he actually helped design and sat at to inspect Carona imagery at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institute Air and Space Museum.
I lived in Switzerland until 1964. Any technical news quite simply never came my way. Thanks for filling the gap.
New to your channel but I really enjoyed your Video on the early spy satellite programs. I love space and discussions of how we got to where we are are badly needed now. Btw I saw your series on why you might not cover the Space shuttle on your vlog; know you do have supporters out there. "You do you" and what drives your love of space is your business your vlog is cool and your really fans will stay for the content you love and they style they love. There are so many over looked stories from the early years that need to be told you'll never run out of content. Look forward to more Vintage Space.
RUclips algorithm will love this vid. Hope you don't get flagged for being fake news.
Or for "Terrorism Against the West" or some BS.
The title looks like a headline we would've seen at the start of the pandemic 🤣🦠
Yeah, just trace all those sick people with a satellite and lock em up. Or use them to see if we are social distancing.
PLANdemic...
Research "Event 201"...
Research "Georgia Guide Stones"...
@@MacDaddyRico yep, control grid.
Why don't you have over 1mil subscribers yet? You're amazing. Love the content and you're nostalgic style
Excellent presentation. However, it left me wanting more. A topic worthy of an entire episode: The Hubble Space Telescope and its origins with the KH-11 and KH-13 NRO _Keyhole_ Birds (good luck getting declassified reports).
"Pork Chops & Re-conn-ai-ssance" (smile takes me back).
Your ability to weave a story through these programs is incredible!
1:05 My Canadian alert sense is tingling
Love it, as usual! Great to recall many of the details and learn more-- I was a space wonky kid but not as diligent as I wished. Fortunately, you came along to help. My only observation is that while corona, indeed refers to emissions from an outer layer of the Sun-- "corona" effects on film are internal to the camera and static electricity discharges related to plastic sliding over metal (pet cat (Pete!) and touch doorknob). So the Sun's corona does not affect the film, but corona discharge does.
CNBC coined the moniker "MONEY HUNNY"... Amy has given us a new one... "BOOSTER BABE"! LOL
My dad worked as a manager on the Atlas-Agena program. When that was shut down, the company asked for suggestions to keep things going. He suggested selling space in capsules for the ashes of the cremated. He soon lost his job.
He had worked for Northrup in th '50s and hated it. My mother encouraged him to try to getting a job with them.
He wouldn't budge. So she sent his resumé to Northrup where he spent the rest of his life (another 10 years), there, designing/inventing flight test instrumentation.
Earlier, in the '40s, because he was studying physics, he wasn't drafted into the war. But right after he got his degree in '46... off he went to Los Alamos to work on ballistics for the atom bomb.
13:03 C-119 Fairchild Flying Boxcar, I remember seeing them flying in the Philadelphia area when I was growing up. A very distinctive airplane. I remember seeing very coarse resolution weather pictures in the local newspapers at the time. I never made the connection how important these weather pictures were to successful operation of the spy satellites.
I so love the way Amy says "reconnaissance".
I prefer it pronounced the way everybody else does. Making up your own tends not to be productive.
She might be canadian?
I've only watched the first minute/intro to this episode and I'm in love. Not every day you find a gal who's passionate about Cold War-era military history and technology. Cool, cute and smart as Oppenheimer... Marry me? Side note: I've never before heard 'reconissance' pronounced like 'renaissance' but I like it. Might even love it. Fer realzz tho, keep up the awesome episodes and I --we-- will continue watching. Thanks and hugs from San Francisco 🤗
Great series. Can't wait for the rest.
Thanks for this video. This is one of my favorite spy satellite programs. The "Rube Goldberg" nature of it, with so many moving parts that have to work correctly in sequence, is fascinating to me. There is a KH9 Hexagon satellite on display at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio. Really interesting to see it up close.
Great EP. I think this is my fourth or fifth time watching this one...and more for the US-Soviet hietory than just the space based aspect.
Thank you Amy, this series is so enjoyable!
Corona payload retrieval reminds me of the McGuffin being pursued in "Ice Station Zebra".
That is because the McGuffin is a Recce Satellite film containor and not a McGuffin.
From riding a rocket to sitting on a comfy chair moving your foot. I love the new intro. You da (wo)man.
Since 2005-2010 CCD has largely been replaced in cameras by another vintage space space technology; APS sensors (later APS CMOS). APS was invented for among other things higher resolving images under low light, which is beneficial in space telescopes (and I would guess, satellite images of areas in dusk/dawn).
They are kind of the same thing but at the same time very different. CCD is a simpler construction that requires crazy accuracy, while APS is a complex construction which is easier to get accurate. APS samples one or a few pixels by a sampler, so a ton of samplers are needed on the chip. Compared to CCD that just have a few samplers and does a complex “move the pixels one by one towards the sampler”, which requires great accuracy in each move in order to not loose precision in the pixels far from the sampler.
Very informative and interesting video young lady. Thanks for sharing.
Really enjoying this series on the u2/corona/sr71!!! Awesome content.
Whoa!!! Packed with sooooo much info.....I thought I had been listening for hours. I remember being blown away as a kid when visiting the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago and they had a display of photo's taken from space. The photo sequence gradually focused on NYC to a bee on a woman's leg sitting on a park bench in Central Park. I went back to that display about 5 time's throughout the day spent there. Never forget that......utterly amazing.
Sorry.......still can't get over.....recona....."sance". It just makes you even more endearing than you are naturally. Thanks for the waaaaay excellent work .......love it all. 💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖🚀💖
Musta been the leg that caught your attention. it would me.
Hi Amy. Thank you for the interesting videos.
You're Canadian! I just realized it when at 1:04 you say, "I'd recommend checking those oot."
A Fun Fact: Did anybody here know that Richard Bissell named his "Corona" program after his Smith-Corona typewriter? This is true. The largest CIA spy program of the time was named after a typewriter. BTW, dear Amy, I've been a fan of your channel ever since you began. You have matured over the years but you have not aged. As a New Jersey resident, I love your Canadian accent and the way you say "missile" and "reconnaissance". I've learned so much over the years from your videos due to my interest in things about outer space. Thank you for all of your years of dedication in educating us in the field of Space Technology. You have a master's degree in your field of study. MIT should give you a doctorate degree for all of the good work you have done to educate us over the years.
This is the best series on RUclips
That was really interesting. Question: what happened to the Corona satellites after the film was ejected? Were they forced to re-enter the atmosphere, or were their orbits allowed to decay naturally? I don't expect there was much worry about the Soviet Union hijacking a Corona satellite back then, but maybe from a "better safe than sorry" standpoint forcing them down was preferable. And you might also want some control over *where* they came down.
I want to know this too!
In Wikipedia under KH-5 Argon they have the launch and decay dates of 9 satellites. The sprfead seems to be typically 2-4 weeks. Maybe related to when pictures are taken? In any case low orbit usually means short orbit.
I imagine it was deorbited over the ocean
..a satellite coming down over Russia ...yikes
I dont think their military leadership in charge of defense would be impressed!
@@daviejay5326 yes, they were de-orbited.
Super good info and program! I try never to miss you as you expand my knowledge so greatly. I was a boy during that time frame and always interested in space/science fiction/anything to do with aircraft. I remember vividly lying on top of the barn on our farm/ranch, smoking cigarette and see Sputnik tumbling in it's low-Earth orbit....then Telstar....etc. What an exciting time to be alive! We didn't know much about the "eye in the sky" because our government was playing it 'close to the vest' in the days of Cold War intrigue. I was planning to join the Air Force as soon as I graduated so to be part of the excitement of space and aircraft.......alas, it was not to be. Shortly before graduation, I was found to have eyesight changes that forced me to wear glasses and would keep me out of fighter aircraft. It was so disappointing but, in the end, it allowed me to have a better job than being a "grunt" in Viet Nam.....so.....what the heck. Thanks for you uploads; I try never to miss one! Tom
Good to see you again, Amy!
Quality content as always.
Love that dress you're wearing BTW. Reminds me of those shirts you see on Curious Droid.
I'm really loving this channel
Wow. Every subscriber should refer to this lady as Dr. Amy as each episode is fully researched, written and presented in PhD dissertation quality. It makes me feel a bit old to realize Dr. Amy's historical research interest is within my lifetime and often, as in this episode, remember reading of some of the space attempts in my old Weekly Reader of my junior high school years, particularly the parachute snagging. I appreciate the accent and wonder why Richard "Bissel" doesn't rhyme with "missile" in Amy's delightful "Canadian." Nice to see the word corona not followed by "virus", too.
"Bissel" does not rhyme with "Missile" in British English either.
Superb presentation Amy. Wonderful.
I came across your series while currently collecting Soviet watches from the 70s and 80s... I’m newly subbed, to say the least. Your videos are incredibly well-researched and the dialogue is thoroughly engrossing! Excellent stuff.
Amy, CMOS is the more common digital camera sensor vice CCD.
"SAMOS," not CMOS.
Think you you do a lovely job in your presentation thank you
The interplay between this program and the arial one is fascinating. As one struggled, the other took over. It's a great story.
And the rewatch of your back catalogue begins
Excellent series great attention to detail 👍🌏
I’ve found myself drawn to Cold War history over the last year because I find the absolute insanity of this time comforting. The Cold War was an existential crisis humanity survived using reason, accomplishing fantastic things in the process. Science was the tip of the spear. Something I find disheartening is that modern American society would have burned the world 1,000 times over if the Cold War was happening now. We’ve abandoned reason and science. The stories of how much we (humanity) was able to do with archaic technology is amazing... but now? Vaccines are a personal choice instead of a societal courtesy. It’s absurd. Your videos have become a major comfort during the pandemic. It’s fitting that some of the best content in this genre comes from a Canadian given the best documentary on the moon landing’s 50th anniversary came from the BBC. Thank you. There may be hope for us yet.
Thankyou bringer of awesome
Thank you.
An F15 did shoot down a satellite in the 1980's with a centreline mounted missle...
Which bodes well for the new F15 eventually carrying hypersonic missles similar to the the MIG31...
Excellent documentary! Well done. Great history!! Especially the film and env tech required to make it work, but also the recovery methods in the beginning. Crazy tough.
I never noticed your channel was called "The" Vintage Space.
was this done to attract certain clientele?
I love how you say: "reconnaissance"!
Another excellent video, thanks Amy
Nice piece on a very important program in space history that interestingly enough has been kind of underappreciated. In 30+ minutes, the video covered much ground (I was checking out the Haynes edition on US Spy Satellites as the video progressed; and found the clip distilled some complex topics and series of events really well) ...
The cameras on that thing must have been really something. Just amazing, especially for the times.
Good video. Two comments: 1) I would not call the U.S. "lucky" that an alternative was available when it had created that alternative and supporting programs with specifically as an augment or alternative; and 2) the perceived value of the U2 was not only the belief (based on older intel) that it was effectively visible to Soviet radar, but that the Soviets had would not have the combination of expertise and technology necessary to reach the plan for a few years, after which point other options would be available to the U.S.
Good work. Would it be too technical to talk about what was learned regarding FMEA and process, and how Space X kind of threw a lot of that out the window to do things their own way? In may ways the development of checks and counter checks made space happen, but made it crazy expensive. My neighbor was an engineer for one of the significant US satellite companies. When Space X started he would roll his eyes and say "they will never get the paperwork right".
In order to get higher photo resolution, the precision mirrors used in these satellites got larger over time. In the 1970's, when one of my college professors was part of a project to build a massive (for the time) telescope, he contacted the manufacturer to get an idea of lead time for what he considered an unusually large mirror. He was stunned to discover that one was in stock, as it turned out to be left over from an earlier spy satellite project.
Love the video, great work as always!
Thank you so much for the amazing content. Very classy look.
This is such an awesome series that is helping me fill in the gaps in my knowledge of events and hardware used.
Outstanding content as usual, thank you for putting this series together :)
But I bet all the trolls are finding fault with how you say "reconnaissance"? Because of course they have to find something.
At 14:45, *and to your left you see a reconnaissance satellite launch facility.*
Am I wrong or wasn’t there a commercial train line running through Vandenberg AFB around the time of the program starting out as Discoverer?
EDIT: At 14:40, I remembered correctly.
Still there; you can ride it on Amtrak's Coast Starlight train.
Not only was there a Southern Pacific Rail line running near Vandenberg but on one particular day in September of 1959 there was a Soviet diplomat name of Nikita Krushchev riding on that train while enroute from LA to SF. That was 10 days after we launched/tested our first ICBM at Vandenburg.
Amy, have you considered doing an episode to talk about the USAF Manned Orbital Laboratory? It was being developed at roughly the same time as Corona
I did not realize they had a film camera camera , and then recover to develop and of the printed pictures. Like the amount of engineering to build this in an automated setup to work in space is really amazing to me.
I was fascinated by this project after I came across a PBS NOVA program on Eisenhower's Corona satellite series several years ago.
One minor kibble, REDSTONE is a MRBM (Medium Range Ballistics Missile) witha range of 400 km (350 miles)
correction 400 km = 250 miles
Interesting point , more than 60 year later , retired former U2 pilots are still not permitted to discuss or comment on the Powers incident as the details are still highly classified .
Although he never talked about it (it being classified and all), my family was able to piece together from various info, locations, and eventual declassifications, that he was very likely the sea-going part (probably in radar) of trying to recover Corona film canisters and once success was in hand, he moved on to other space projects. Although he (and his colleagues) are no long around to confirm anything, it's neat to think him part of our early satellite story (as well as various probes later on). No wonder I've had a life-long love and connection with spaceflight.
Interesting video on Corona...thx so much!
Totally worth watching and hearing, great job! Cheers!
Another great video Amy. Thank you.
My Father in law was involved with Corona since its inception, He picked up the film at Vandenburg AFB and return it to Kodak for further processing.
Great video. I’ve always wondered what happened after these programs closed. Especially manned spy stations. Russia had them and I can’t imagine we didn’t have them too. Whenever these programs publicly close, many of them quietly continue under classified programs (like Sealab continuing as saturation diving for project Ivy Bells and more). Wonder if there are any manned reconnaissance satellites up there right now!!??
USAF Manned Program was MOL and it was canned before a manned mission was flown as K-8 could do the job just as well. If a manned overflight was required the USA had the A-12 / SR-71 which could be mission programmed much faster than any Satellite.
@@richardvernon317 you sound like you know what you’re talking about more than me but I have it on good authority that the US did have a spy station program and that’s bolstered by those secretive USAF non-NASA space missions as well as a few Shuttle missions that they won’t talk about, even now in 2021. My guess is and will always be that we built TWO Hubble telescopes, one looking at the heavens and one looking at us. On Earth. I have much reason to believe this but I’ll never be able to prove or disprove it.
@@towedarray7217 The DOD Shuttle missions most likely lofted Elint / Sigint, DPS and Com sats for transfer into GEO. They may have done some form of Photo Recce research during some of those missions. The Orbital mechanics of a Shuttle Launch from KSC don't allow any other types of mission to be flown that require very high inclination orbits. That was why the Shuttle Launch site at Vandenburg was built to do the KH lofting. The USAF Manned Recce Station Program was canned in the late 1960's as it couldn't do anything that the state of the art Recce systems on the unmanned platforms couldn't at much lower cost. A Boilerplate MOL did fly on a Titan III, but it didn't reach orbit and was mainly a test of Launcher / Spacecraft configuration and a test of the Gemini B hatch in a Heatshield during re-entry. The USA had massive advantages over the USSR when it came to the amount of electronics that they could stuff into a spacecraft, plus the fact that they had lots of Allies dotted around the globe that would allow them to position ground terminals on their territory. Thus the USAF could maintain close control of their recce birds for most of the time. Soviets couldn't so they built manned platforms. The information telling the truth is all around but like most people talking bullshit, your too lazy to go looking for it.
@@richardvernon317 YIKES. What an amazing reply. That was a very interesting read and you sure as hell sound like you know what you’re talking about. You’re quite right that US/NATO had far better microelectronics to stuff into a recon satellite and that likely means it didn’t need a crew on board. The crewed spysats Russia built are fascinating though. I’ve always speculated that there were 2 “Hubble” optical telescopes up there, one looking at space and one looking at Earth. Great read, thank you for writing that.
A bit light on images, heavy on you. Great information as usual! I guess your pride is deserved. Keep up the good work.