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 troubl

Source: The Spy Satellites That Dropped Top – Secret Films From Space