![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theblackvault.com\/images\/pdf.gif\")
The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance [390 Pages]<\/a><\/p>\nA History of the Military Polar Orbiting Meteorological Satellite Program, September 2001<\/a>\u00a0[56 Pages, 4.41MB] –\u00a0In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, a director of the National Reconnaissance Office\u00a0(NRO) authorized the construction and launch of a small meteorological satellite to support\u00a0CORONA and other film-limited imaging satellite systems. Though undertaken as an “interim”\u00a0measure while awaiting completion and launch of a national weather satellite, in the months that\u00a0followed the NRO spacecraft would incorporate so many desirable features and perform so\u00a0admirably that it became the template adopted for all American civil and military low altitude\u00a0meteorological satellites. I researched and wrote the first installment of this history, which covered\u00a0these actions and events, using available classified records while assigned temporarily to NRO\u00a0headquarters in the mid 1980s. After returning to the NRO as its historian in the late 1990s, and\u00a0upon declassitlcation of the original work and endnotes in February 2000, I shared it with the early\u00a0program participants and completed the story through the turn of the Millennium and the\u00a0consolidation of American military and civil meteorological satellite programs into a National\u00a0Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).<\/p>\nSatellite Reconnaissance [24 Pages]<\/a><\/p>\nUtility of A Satellite Vehicle For Reconnaissance [140 Pages]<\/a><\/p>\n