Secret Satellite (4 of 28)

Aerial reconnaissance looked promising, but no traditional airplane could stay out of range of Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft guns.
Forward thinkers realized the ideal vantage point for spying was outer space.
Before World War Two, the idea of even breaking out of the Earth's atmosphere was laughable.
But Nazi Germany's V-2's proved that rockets were deadly serious business.
Space was now within our reach.
As early as 1946, Army scientists tested captured V-2's at White Sand, New Mexico.

At the same time, the Air Force asked the Rand Corporation, a high technology think tank, to study the feasibility of putting cameras into Earth orbit.
But at this point, breaking the bounds of Earth's gravity still seemed a long way from reality.
Working from other Rand studies, the Air force turned to a much older form of transportation.
Balloons had first been used for aerial reconnaissance during the Civil War.
Now the US hoped to turn them loose against the Soviets.
In the early 1950's, the Air Force began converting its weather balloons, seen here, into high flying reconnaissance platforms laden with cameras and listening devices.
Eventually, hundreds of recon balloons were launched into the jet stream.
Light-sensitive photoelectric cells triggered the cameras on at dawn and off at dusk, Code named Gopher and Genetrix, the balloons resulted in little solid intelligence, mostly because they could not be guided over specific targets.
Test balloons also had the unfortunate side-effect of fueling the nationwide hysteria over UFO's.