These days it's impossible to forget the wonderful story of Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet lieutenant colonel whose intelligence, perception and instinct allowed him to recognize a false alarm and save the world from a nuclear catastrophe. But on both sides there were men and women who, through a solid defense, managed to maintain the delicate balance of peace in a very complicated era. That includes a group of Eastman Kodak engineers, who collaborated in the development and operation of one of the most successful satellite espionage and photography programs.
1963: A Tumultuous Year
The year was 1963. The Beatles released their first album (Please Please Me), Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds took cinemas by storm, and of course, the Space Race was in full swing. The Russians had put Valentina Tereshkova into orbit in June (on the 16th, to be precise), and a few days later the Moscow–Washington hotline was established, in an attempt to avoid incidents similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Kodak and the Gambit Satellites
But the price of peace is eternal vigilance, and that led to an acceleration in intelligence programs, including various satellite reconnaissance projects. The Corona series had an irregular performance, and the Samos program left much to be desired; however, things changed with the activation of the Gambit satellites, and the involvement of a titan of photography at that time: Kodak.
The work of Kodak's engineers was truly impressive: Gambit's optical system could capture images at an average resolution of 0.6 to 0.9 meters, and photos with a resolution of just 30 centimeters have been reported, which incidentally remain classified.
Kodak's engineers worked under the famous 'need to know basis': they knew it was for the government, that it was highly classified (family and friends were completely unaware of what they did), and that it wasn't used for local photography.
Compensating for motion was one of the most complex challenges those engineers had to face. The solution was to move the camera or move the film, and they opted for the latter. Now the question is: How did they retrieve the content?
Remember that scene from The Dark Knight where Batman escapes with Lau attached to a plane? That's the Fulton recovery system, which works with targets on the surface.
What the satellites did was eject a capsule with the film inside, and a C-130 aircraft performed a maneuver similar to the Fulton recovery, except that it caught the capsule in the air. How many photos are we talking about? Over the entire duration of the Gambit program, nearly 160 kilometers of film, something like half a million frames.
Source: PetaPixel
