Big Bird In The Sky: Your Photos May Not Be Ready In An Hour
Until the government declassified it last month, Hexagon, a hush-hush U.S. government spy satellite, had been a secret for 46 years. Officially known as the KH-9 Hexagon, engineers called it “Big Bird” for its massive size.
Hexagon was designed to spot Soviet missile silos and troop movements. Photos sent down from the satellite enabled the U.S. to verify the Soviet Union’s claims about its weapons stockpiles.
Once a reel of film was finished, it was loaded into a re-entry pod and sent back to earth. “And then at around 50,000 feet, a parachute would slow it down, and a C-130 airplane caught it in midair over the Pacific,” says Phil Pressel, who designed cameras for the project.
After all the film was sent back to earth, the satellite was abandoned, and a new one launched. Nineteen of them went up before the program ended in 1986. (NPR)
Image: National Reconnaissance Office, Wikipedia
Blows my mind. This is real life SciFi.
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