TOP SECRET: Your Briefing on the CIA's Cold-War Spy Satellite, 'Big Bird'

The Atlantic ^ | December 29, 2011 | Alexis Madrigal

[HiTech RedNeck]

our private eyes, are watching you watching you watching you

[HiTech RedNeck]

Since these birds had to go through multiple rolls of physical film and drop them periodically in a safe way, and there wasn’t a way of restocking film to them on the fly, they lasted anywhere from 30 to 180 days, then self destructed by re-entry.

[LjubivojeRadosavljevic]

your mission, should you choose to accept it...

Careful...if no one accepts this mission, the entire Forum will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3,....

[BlueDragon]

Quick! press the red button before it all explodes!

http://www.turnofftheinternet.com/#

[wideminded]

Although some aspects of this program are being declassified, the basic details have been public knowledge for a long time. I always wondered how they could manage to time the plane flights precisely enough to catch film dropped from space.

[Smokin' Joe]

Wow. Neat article. It takes me back to the days of chain driven Honneywell chart recorders... (when you could wiggle a wire or two, ‘tap’ on this or that, and get it working again...).

[R. Scott]

Chalkboards and slide rules did wonders.

[larryjohnson]

I was on the source selection team.

[SueRae]

I long for the days when secrets of national importance were actually kept secret...instead of reading about the leaking sieves in Washington putting our soldiers and country at risk.

[Daffynition]

More background to your posting.

[McGruff]

...up to 1,000 Perkin-Elmer employees worked on the program during its peak in the 1970s...

I've met some of these guys. Some are no longer with us and never got a chance to talk about what they did for their country.

[Textide]

Did you catch that line about the AP leak in the late 70’s? Sounded like an internal KGB memo.

[Daffynition]

And cocktail napkins. :)

[HiTech RedNeck]

Reads here like they were encapsulated into dedicated re-entry vehicles, plopped into the ocean and grabbed by ship.

[Portcall24]

One of the treble hooks which the AF used to snag the parachute is on display in the lobby of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Using the parachute worked until the Navy found a Soviet sub waiting under the planned drop zone, in case the C-124 missed the snag. That’s when they realized the need to figure a way to download the images by encrypted communications.

[Alas Babylon!]

Well, by the late 70's, we had the ability to track a single bolt or nut orbiting in space, so tracking Big Bird and her "eggs" was pretty much mathematically precise:

I once watched an entire lunar eclipse from the roof of this thing, ten stories high!

[Rappini]

Thanks for the post very interesting I would still like to see them declassify Echelon.