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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

In the early 1960s, when the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other in a nuclear standoff, a small band of engineers, designers, and intelligence officers secretly set out to do the impossible. Armed with little more than a few ideas and drawings of the payload, they created America's first reconaissance satellite program-the Corona project-which for decades remained one of the nation's most closely guarded secrets. This is the story of their extraordinary efforts, from the first desperate requests for intelligence on the USSR, through a series of heartbreaking failures, to Corona's ultimate success.

The author, a well-known aerospace historian, draws on his interviews with people who worked on the project and on recently declassified documents, which include the CIA's official account, to produce a revealing chronicle of a fascinating episode in the Cold War. Readers witness history in the making on the launchpads at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in the recovery planes while the crews play a dangerous game of catch with the parachuting capsules, with the photointerpreters as they analyze the films, and finally at the White House as four presidents deal with the intelligence Corona provided.

This book focuses not only on the Corona project's great technical achievements but also on the remarkable human side of the story-on the engineers who built the satellites but could not divulge what they did even to their own families, and on the recovery pilots who competed to see who would be the first ace. Their stories appear for the first time in this book along with previously classified details of their recovery unit and a list of the ace pilots.

(Extracted from dust jacket)

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-Introduction.

-1. Toward a New Frontier.

-2. First Spark.

-3. The Hard Road to Space.

-4. First Voyages into the Unknown.

-5. The Kennedy Administration and Corona.

-6. Corona in the Shadows.

-7. The Definitive Corona.

-8. Magic in Their Eyes.

-9. Top Secret Ruff.

-10. Corona's Twilight.

-11. The View from 2001.

-Appendix 1. Corona Launches, 1959-1972.

-Appendix 2. Corona Camera Data.

-Appendix 3. Ace List, August 1960-May 1972.

-Notes.

-Index.

OUR REVIEW

The history of astronautics wouldn't be complete without describing the military efforts to use the outer space. Sadly, these efforts are frequently secret or little known. From time to time, fortunately, some pieces of this military space history are opened to the public and then we find how important they were.

Corona is one of these secret and fundamental programs which recently have been declassiffied. Curtis Peebles, as usual, writes a great piece of work showing us how the project evolved. A very documented book and a beautifully written text that will remain as the standard reference on this subject in the near future.