Star-Bulletin
This aerial picture of Oahu was shot during Project
Corona, a secret spy project in the 1950s to 1970s.
Hickam team
By Helen Altonn
aided spy project
Star-BulletinFormer Hickam Air Force pilots who were vital to an ultra-secret U.S. spy mission from 1958 to 1972 finally know what it was all about.
Tom Sumner, a commander of the elite Air Force test group for nearly four years, said, "Some of us knew some details. No one knew all the details. Many knew no details."
The CORONA project was America's first satellite surveillance effort, conceived during the Cold War to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union and China.
Publicly, it was called Discoverer, with a cover story that it was a series of experiments rocketing mice and frogs into orbit.
Instead, the satellites were launched 115 miles above Earth with reconnaissance cameras.
They revolutionized intelligence with more than 800,000 high-resolution photos of targeted areas and the rest of the world.
Sumner was one of about 50 pilots in a 500-member Hickam test group trained to snatch capsules of film in midair after they were ejected from the satellites.
Professor Keith Clarke and doctoral candidate John Cloud of the Geography Department at the University of California-Santa Barbara, have been studying the data, declassified in 1995.
They discussed some of their findings during the recent meeting here of the Association of American Geographers. Among others present from the former Hickam test group were Norman Ching, Dick Hamilton, John Callahan and Janet Tsutomi. Here they finally learned exactly what the project was all about.
"There wouldn't be any CORONA to talk about here if they hadn't snagged the capsules," Cloud said.
Clarke said he had no idea what CORONA was until invited to a 1995 Washington, D.C., workshop. The CIA director opened the meet and four previous CIA directors were there, said Clarke, who "sat two days with my mouth hanging open" as the spy story unfolded.
CORONA was the clandestine basis for remote sensing, U.S. access into space, new materials, substances, photography, cartography, geodesy and all earth sciences, Clarke said. The film, cameras and all else associated with CORONA were classified top secret.
But after the first successful CORONA launch in 1960, government agencies realized there were massive civilian applications for satellite images of Earth, he said.
He said he and Cloud learned that many civilian agencies, such as the U.S. Geological Survey and Environmental Protection Agency, established their own secret TALENT--KEYHOLE labs and used the data under agreements with the intelligence community.
CORONA was "deeply, deeply black until the workshop in November 1995," Cloud said. "The system wrapping CORONA was so successful, we've had to reveal it."
Rough going at the beginning
The nation's first satellite surveillance program started with one-day missions and a single camera system taking photos with limited resolution of 25 to 40 feet.Missions eventually were as long as 19 days with multiple cameras and images with a resolution to within 6 feet of the ground.
CORONA engineers were under intense pressure because of Russia's successful Sputnik satellite in October 1957, Clarke said.
But getting America into space was extremely difficult, he said, noting there were 100 explosions on the launching pad for one successful launch in 1958-59.
"A launch was successful if you could get one foot off the launch pad," he said.
The first 13 missions didn't provide any images, he said. "There were problems with everything -- heart-breaking failures. They got into orbit and film broke or capsules were not returned."
Costs were enormous, and since they got nothing back, the satellite pioneers couldn't determine what went wrong, he said.
The first successful CORONA flight on Aug. 18, 1960, covered more than 1.65 million square miles of Soviet territory and produced 3,000 feet of film.
Hickam pilots made the first air recovery of an object in space when they caught the capsule, Clarke said. "It depended on extremely skilled flying. The success rate was phenomenal."
During rare misses, a few water recoveries were made. The capsules were rigged to sink in two days to avoid discovery if they weren't found, he said.
The capsules were sealed and quickly taken from Hickam to the National Photographic Center in Washington, D.C., Clarke said.
The first CORONA photo showed a Soviet air strip and parking apron, and later systems could show a parking lot at the Kremlin or locate missile silos.
Mission shrouded in mystery
"He's telling me things I didn't know," said Sumner, now a retired colonel. He went from Hickam to Los Angeles, where he was the Air Force space program director for NASA's space shuttle program. He returned here to live in 1978.Norman Ching, a retired lieutenant colonel, said he was in the test group for seven years, starting in 1974 as chief navigator and becoming deputy commander.
Although CORONA ended in May 1972, he said the test group continued "in the same type of business, recovering stuff. All of this was 'stuff' to us."
He said conjecture about what the capsules contained "was kind of hilarious," such as one idea that they might house chimpanzees.
The CORONA workshop provided some new history for Lincoln Higa, historian for the 15th Air Base Wing: "Their history went straight to Washington, D.C."
Cloud said CORONA "reordered the planet," transforming geography worldwide and leading to the world geodesic system.
It also "reordered vast areas of technology," he said, leading to larger and more-capable computer systems and improved camera systems and image processing.
CORONA made space history from 1958 to 1972 with: Making history
The first photo taken from asatellite.
Source: The National Reconnaissance Office Catching a film capsule in midair after it was ejected from a CORONA spy satellite was like reeling in a fish, says retired Air Force Col. Tom Sumner. Film snagged like fish
"It was easy," says Sumner, one of the commanders of a clandestine Hickam task force of C-130s and helicopters assigned to catch the items in flight.
The capsules -- about the size of large garbage cans -- were ejected from surveillance satellites upon command from an Alaska tracking station, he recalls.
A capsule would free-fall with a rocket motor that slowed it as it entered the atmosphere, he said.
At about 100,000 feet, he said, a deceleration parachute would deploy and slow the capsule further.
Then a larger parachute would help the capsule "descend much like any parachutist would" into the Hickam group's area, within 1,000 miles of Oahu, Sumner said.
C-130 airplanes would fan out along the line of a capsule's expected fall, he said. "We would start taking approaches at it as high as 20,000 feet and work it all the way down to as low as 500 feet, trying to catch it."
A rig of ropes shaped like a hairnet was released from the aircraft's rear cargo door, he said. "There were hooks inside the ropes that looked like little boat anchors."
The net was connected to a steel cable that ran to a hydraulic-controlled winch in the front of the cargo department, Sumner added.
Four riggers moved big steel poles out from the back of the airplane to hold the net in place, he said. A steel cable ran from the net to the winch, "very much like a fishing reel," he said.
A winch operator let the cable go out with the rig of ropes, he said. "We would fly over the parachute and the hooks would catch it. All it took was one hook. We never caught the capsule itself.
"It was like catching a big powerful fish that's on the run. You catch the fish and it tries to swim away. If you try to stop it immediately, you break the fishing line. Due to energy in the parachute, we didn't want to stop it immediately."
The winch operator would give the cable some play until the energy was dissipated and the capsule was several hundred feet behind the airplane, Sumner said. Then, "he'd apply more hydraulic power and reel the capsule in."
Helen Altonn, Star-Bulletin
