FOIAWEAR — CORONA / America’s First Imaging Satellite Poster Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 029 — CORONA: AMERICA'S FIRST IMAGING SATELLITE

The 1950s were a time of great uncertainty about Soviet strategic nuclear forces. The US knew the Soviets had ambitious programs to build intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers, but knew little about how far along they were. With no way to look comprehensively at Soviet deployments, the Intelligence Community produced wild overestimates of bomber and missile production — the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” — and forecast that the US was falling behind and in real danger of nuclear attack.

Between 1956 and 1960, imagery from 24 U-2 missions opened a crack in the Soviets' armour, but it was a small crack, and it closed before a single ICBM base could be found. President Eisenhower halted all U-2 overflights of the USSR after the Soviets shot down an American U-2 and captured its CIA pilot, Francis Gary Powers, near Sverdlovsk on 1 May 1960.

CORONA began as a joint CIA–Air Force effort in the late 1950s, cloaked in secrecy and known to the public only as a scientific research program called DISCOVERER. Its goals were daunting: launch a large camera into Earth orbit, photograph specific points and areas, parachute a capsule of exposed film to Earth, snag that capsule in midair over the Pacific Ocean, develop the film, and search the images for answers to the nation's most pressing intelligence questions. Many things could go wrong — and did. The first thirteen missions returned no usable imagery at all, plagued by failed launches, orbits never achieved, camera malfunctions, spacecraft errors and missed recoveries.

Then, on 18 August 1960, everything on CORONA Mission XIV worked. It returned more photographic coverage of the Soviet Union from a single mission than all previous U-2 missions combined. The first images were grainy and of limited use, but quality and value improved rapidly. Within a few months, CIA photointerpreters had dispelled both the missile gap and the bomber gap, finding that the Soviets were in fact significantly behind the US in developing a workable ICBM, and that while they were building up a strategic bomber force, most of their resources were going into missile production. In a matter of weeks, CORONA photography had eliminated the intelligence dilemma that had haunted the US for a decade.

Over the years CORONA became the single most important source of intelligence on Soviet strategic forces — missile launch complexes and test ranges, ballistic-missile submarine development and deployment, aircraft factories and air bases, anti-ballistic-missile activity and air defences — as well as on East Asia, the Middle East and other areas of interest. The Defense Department used CORONA imagery to produce military maps of denied areas more accurately than ever before. The program also let the US specify verifiable terms in the 1971 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, because negotiators knew photointerpreters could monitor changes in the size and characteristics of missile launchers, bombers and submarines. Satellite imagery became the mainstay of arms-control verification.

The 145th and final CORONA launch took place on 25 May 1972, with the last recovery on 31 May 1972. Over its lifetime CORONA photographed roughly 750,000,000 square miles of the Earth's surface. Without it, the US may well have been misguidedly pressured into a Third World War.

The artwork is a full-colour stylised illustration to the operation — the satellite, the film-return capsule under its parachute, the C-119 recovery aircraft and the film itself. It is not a photograph.

Because the design is a complete printed poster panel, it works on every garment colour offered — twelve of them, from Black and Navy through to Chambray and Mustard.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA Museum's exhibit on CORONA, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/corona-americas-first-imaging-satellite-program/

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The poster panel prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

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