Spy Satellite | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Spy Satellite

The Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 caused an international uproar. The satellite was harmless, but thre was significant concern in the United States that the Soviets were gaining a tremendous upper hand in space operations. The advantages of satellites for communications, weather monitoring, and navigation were obvious -- and equally obvious was their utility for spying on enemies. Spy aircraft were well-established, a famouns example being the United States's U-2. As the U-2 eventually demonstrated, however, it was not invulnerable to attack, even at the rarefied altitudes at which it cruised. Satellites, orbiting far above the atmosphere, could observe the enemy with impunity, however, and it was not long before the space-capable countries, at the time the United States and the Soviet Union, were developing ambitious spy satellite programs.

The United States delivered the first of these new contenders in the cold war, with its 1960 satellite Discovery. Not intended for an extended mission, the satellite never achieved a stable orbit in space, but it did complete three passes over the Soviet Union, photographing everything it could. Discovery had a rather ignominious end, splashing into the Pacific, where it was recovered by Navy vessels. The next round of satellites went in to bona fide orbit, and delivered their photographs either by physically dropping canisters containing them, or (in obviously a more advanced technique) by transmitting images of them back to Earth,

In the early 1960s, the United States launched the most useful orbital spies then devised, the MIDAS (Missile Defense Alarm System) satellites. These took advantage of a fact pointed out by the science fiction writer Arthur Clarke: satellites orbiting about 22,300 miles above Earth's surface would have an orbital period of 24 hours, and thus could constantly observe a single part of the Earth. By the end of the twentieth century, a host of these so-called geosynchronous satellites would be in place, performing a variety of functions including spying. Of course, the Soviet Union was kept pace with the United States, and within 10 years of the launch of little Sputnik 1, both superpowers had an never-sleeping eye on each other.

Since the 1960s, the United States and the former Soviet Union have launched thousands of spy satellites, and they tend to fall into three categories. From the start of the space age, both sides have used photoreconnaissance satellites. These are generally short-lived (typically a year or less for American satellites, and only a matter of days for Russian satellites) craft that with modern technology can provide extremely high-resolution photographs of missile sites, airports, city blocks -- whatever is deemed important to observe.

More advanced are the so-called ferrets. These are permanent satellites, some of them geosynchronous satellites, some of them closer to Earth. The MIDAS satellites were some of the earliest ferrets. Their successors were the Vela satellites, designed to detect nuclear tests. Where the MIDAS craft were equipped with infrared detectors (to detect the heat associated with missile launches), the much more advanced Vela craft carried a variety of detectors, and had much more sophisticated methods of identifying events on the Earth below as nuclear tests.

The photoreconnaissance satellites' capabilities are augmented by a third class of satellite that uses microwaves to observe enemy actions even through clouds. The latest generation of such satellites is capable of seeing individual people on a city street.

Perhaps the most ambitious spy satellite network of all was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), proposed in 1983 by President Reagan. Significant SDI research has been carried out, but it seems unlikely that the network of satellites envisaged by Reagan will ever be put in place.

After all the worry surrounding the launch of Sputnik 1, spy satellites could be argued to have significantly improved relations between the superpowers. In the early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union operated in a state of fearful ignorance, neither side knowing exactly what the other was doing, and either ready to pull the nuclear trigger at the first -- and possibly erroneous -- sign of trouble. Spy satellites made it effectively impossible for nations to hide anything from one another. It has been said that the first approach toward peace is communication, and spy satellites, albeit in a slightly unorthodox way, opened those lines, setting the stage for the easing of tensions that rode so high during the cold war.