WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?
Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviets in 1957, was the first manmade object in space. It was a silver sphere a little smaller than a soccer ball. It didn’t do much other than beep once every few seconds, but it performed that task exceedingly well. The American military absolutely flipped.
While the Soviets dicked around launching dogs and excitable soccer balls into orbit, the U.S. government got to work trying to get a spy craft into space. By 1960, Lockheed had developed a multirole spacecraft named Agena. As part of the DOD’s Corona program, it was loaded with cameras and microwave interception gear. The Corona program lasted until 1972 and was declassified in 1995. Whatever program took over after Corona remains classified.
The utility of spy satellites is obvious and was recognized even before Sputnik 1 had its fifteen minutes. Up until the first successful Corona program launch, aerial reconnaissance was handled by manned aircraft—mostly converted bomber planes vulnerable to enemy fighters and antiaircraft fire. Spy flights were high-risk missions in which a pilot knowingly violated the airspace of another country for the purposes of committing espionage, which is technically an act of war.
Most spy flights at the time were run by the CIA. Hand-selected pilots were required to resign their military commissions. The planes were unarmed, slow, and certain death traps in the face of enemy resistance. In 1960, when one of the new Lockheed U2 spy planes was shot down over the Soviet Union, the resulting scandal underlined the need for a covert satellite network rather than high-risk flyovers that could trigger a nuclear war.