Reconnaissance satellite

• 1. Introduction

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  A reconnaissance satellite, sometimes called a spy satellite, is a spacecraft built for military and intelligence use rather than science or communication. In 2019, President Donald Trump posted a classified photograph on social media. It showed the aftermath of a failed test of Iran's Safir rocket, an image that had no business being made public. The picture likely came from one of the country's own reconnaissance satellites, machines built to operate entirely in secret. How did a technology designed for secrecy get off the ground in the first place? And what happens once its work leaks, gets declassified, or turns up on the news?

• 2. Film Canisters And Parachutes

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  Corona, an early reconnaissance satellite, took photographs from orbit, then ejected canisters packed with the exposed film. Those canisters fell back toward Earth's atmosphere, drifting down on parachutes that recovery crews caught in mid-air before the capsules ever touched ground. Zenit, the Soviet satellite built for the same purpose, worked the same way, returning its film physically rather than transmitting pictures. Later spacecraft abandoned parachutes altogether, switching to digital imaging systems that beamed pictures home over encrypted radio links. Both CORONA and Zenit, though, had to be physically recovered to access their film, a limitation that set the two programs apart from everything that followed. None of this started with a camera in orbit; it started years earlier, when an order for such a satellite was put in writing.

• 3. A Race For The Sky

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  On the 16th of March 1955, the United States Air Force ordered development of an advanced reconnaissance satellite. Its purpose was continuous surveillance of what officials called preselected areas of the Earth. The goal, in the Air Force's own words, was to determine the status of a potential enemy's war-making capability. The United States soon launched the CORONA project, a series of missions that ran from 1959 until 1972. CORONA became a priority for photographing denied areas, replacing the U-2 spy plane, and easing public fears about a technological gap with the Soviet Union. The program was expedited significantly after a U-2 was shot down in 1960.

  In the Soviet Union, a decree authorizing Sputnik apparently also authorized a photo reconnaissance satellite program. That effort evolved into two designs, Vostok and an unmanned reconnaissance satellite called Zenit. Zenit flew from 1961 to 1994, though its final flight that year carried only a test payload. Which of these programs the public would ever learn about, however, depended entirely on how each nation chose to handle its own secrets.

• 4. What Stays Classified

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  In 1984, photographs from a KH-11 satellite were sent to Jane's Defence Weekly, a rare leak of real-time reconnaissance imagery. Most of what the American government has released about reconnaissance satellites covers programs active only up to 1972, declassified because of their age. Anything from before that point mostly remains classified, and only a small amount of information about later missions has ever reached the public. Whatever slipped past classification review depended entirely on the kind of satellite doing the watching, and reconnaissance satellites came in several very different kinds.

• 5. Five Kinds Of Watching

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  The Missile Defense Alarm System came first among missile early warning satellites, built to catch a ballistic missile launch as it happens. Vela came first among satellites built to detect a nuclear explosion from space. SOLRAD pioneered electronic reconnaissance, intercepting stray radio waves for signals intelligence. Corona, again, was the earliest known optical imaging satellite, a category running from wide-area surveys to close telephoto shots, now commonly paired with spectral imaging. The Soviet Union's US-A series was the earliest known radar imaging satellite, relying on synthetic-aperture radar that can see through clouds and darkness alike.

  High-resolution photography, known as IMINT, tops the list of specific missions these satellites carry out beyond their basic category. Measurement and signature intelligence, called MASINT, and communications eavesdropping, called SIGINT, round out the technical side. Covert communications, monitoring compliance with nuclear test ban treaties, and detecting missile launches complete the list of known mission types. Which of these five categories a given satellite falls into says nothing about how much attention its own launch will draw once it reaches orbit.

• 6. A Launch And A Return

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  On the 28th of August 2013, a satellite believed to cost about a billion dollars lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It reportedly carried imaging powerful enough to distinguish the make and model of a car from hundreds of miles above the Earth. The launch vehicle was a Delta IV Heavy, America's highest-payload space launch vehicle at the time.

  Just months later, on the 17th of February 2014, an aging Russian satellite came back down uninvited. Kosmos-1220 had launched in 1980 and served as a naval missile targeting satellite until 1982. More than three decades after its last useful mission, it made an uncontrolled atmospheric entry. A satellite's usefulness, though, was never only about what it could see; sometimes what mattered most was what its pictures proved wasn't there.

• 7. The Case For Spying

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  During the 1950s, a Soviet hoax convinced many Americans that the Soviet Union had far more bombers than it actually did. This fear became known as the bomber gap. By 1968, satellite photography let American intelligence agencies state with certainty, "No new ICBM complexes have been established in the USSR during the past year."

  In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering, "I wouldn't want to be quoted on this... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."

  President Jimmy Carter made a similar case during his 1980 State of the Union Address. "Photo-reconnaissance satellites, for example," he said, "are enormously important in stabilizing world affairs and thereby make a significant contribution to the security of all nations."

  Reconnaissance satellites have also served human rights causes through the Satellite Sentinel Project, which monitors atrocities in Sudan and South Sudan. Commercial companies such as GeoEye and DigitalGlobe have separately provided satellite imagery to support natural disaster response and humanitarian missions. The idea of a satellite quietly watching from orbit was too good a premise for storytellers to leave alone.

• 8. Spy Satellites In Fiction

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  Ice Station Zebra hit theaters in 1968, built around a plot involving a spy satellite. Patriot Games followed in 1987, and Enemy of the State came out in 1998, both weaving reconnaissance technology into their spy plots. Body of Lies arrived in 2008, a few years after the comic book series The OMAC Project debuted in 2005. Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran, released in 2018, turned India's own nuclear testing history into cinema. Ice Station Zebra had put a spy satellite on screen decades earlier, in 1968, and the idea never really left.