A prescient payload

When it launched, the Corona satellite programme was one of the most advanced pieces of technology on - or above - the planet. But, looking back at it now, it’s incredible just how basic it was.

Corona was a massive step change, advancing photographic and surface-to-orbit rocket technology leaps and bounds. But it faced two big problems: the limits of computers and the Earth’s atmosphere.

In the early 1960s computers were huge and not very powerful. The digital revolution hadn’t happened yet and most mainframes used physical indexing cards to store information. The atmospheric barrier also scattered or blocked even the most basic radio signals that were sent through it.

So, the only way to take surveillance photos of the planet from orbit was to use mechanical cameras that shot on film, and the only way to get those photos back to Earth was by dropping them out of a satellite, in a little canister, attached to a parachute.

As soon as I discovered this, and that the canisters were snatched out of the air by giant US Air Force planes with big hooks hanging out the back of them, I knew I had to write a story about it.

Corona feels like something out of science fiction but it was real. And it worked. In fact, it worked so well that the US used it for orbital reconnaissance until 1972, and the Soviets used their own version, the Zenit programme, right up until the 1990s.

Corona was also, I think, where the world we live in now began. It signalled the start of the era of global espionage and the use of technology to clandestinely gather vast amounts of data on civilian populations all over the world that is behind so many headlines and political crises today.