It was run by members of the CIA and Air Force who came together under the auspices of the shadowy National Reconnaissance Office, which had a larger budget than any other U.S.
The other space program was a world of code words and black projects mentioned only in whispers and rarely officially acknowledged. One was run by NASA and had public funding and astronauts who appeared on the covers of magazines. had two space programs, Pressel learned once he was cleared to work on the Hexagon program. Two decades later, the young Holocaust survivor would once again have a front-row seat to history. A Jewish native of Belgium, Pressel and his family fled to France and hid from the Nazis there for the duration of the war. At the time, the mechanical engineer who had recently graduated from New York University had no idea what he’d signed on for. Phil Pressel was hired by Perkin-Elmer in 1965. Almost by accident in many cases, they’d become math-savvy 007s in a real-world sci-fi espionage saga that was equal parts John Le Carré and Ray Bradbury. The “spies” of Perkin-Elmer were really engineers and scientists, electrical whizzes and optical experts who accomplished digital-age wonders in the age of film and the slide rule. Some would meet regularly with high-ranking CIA and Air Force officials who would be referred to in company memos and conversations only by the cryptic moniker “the customer.”
They’d recreate the harsh conditions of space and the violent rattling of a rocket launch to ensure the camera system would continue to function during space flight. They’d walk through air showers and enter clean rooms to work on machinery that required mind-bogglingly minute precision. They worked for Perkin-Elmer, an aerospace company that specialized in optical systems, including a later satellite also starting with the letter “H” which gazed at galaxies and would be far more famous.įor about two decades, they toiled inside a windowless white building on a hill overlooking the Danbury Municipal Airport and what is today the Danbury Fair mall. Light years ahead of anything else that existed, the optical system was built by the spies who met at the Danbury mall and a small army of men, and some women, like them. The heart and soul of this once top-secret satellite, also known as Big Bird, was its camera system.
On June 15, 1971, 50 years ago this month, the first Hexagon spy satellite launched into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a giant Titan IIID rocket. They weren’t really spies, not exactly, but they’d been cleared for top-secret work and long ago had crawled down a rabbit hole that led to the front lines of Cold War espionage.
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