Twenty years ago this month, the world learned about the existence of the first imaging reconnaissance satellite, codenamed CORONA.
It’s hard to imagine a world without Google maps or satellite imagery, but when CORONA was developed in the 1950s, satellite photo-reconnaissance didn’t exist.
CORONA was created by a small group of CIA, Air Force and private industry experts who were tasked with finding a way to provide broad imagery coverage of the USSR to identify missile launch sites and production facilities.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally endorsed CORONA in February 1958.
Known to the public as the U.S. Air Force’s Discoverer program, the classified CORONA project operated during the height of the Cold War to collect pictures over the denied areas of eastern Europe and Asia.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2015-featured-story-archive/corona-declassified.html