A Brief History of the NRO at Vandenberg Air Force Base

Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) share a long history dating back to the late 1950s. Both played important roles in the nation's first photoreconnaissance satellite program, CORONA. Vandenberg was the base from which those satellites were launched between August 1959 and May 1972. The CORONA program was a collective effort by the U.S. Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency to give the nation its first eyes in space.

Vandenberg AFB dates back to 1941 when it was an armor and infantry training center. After a series of deactivations and reactivations in the late 1940s and 50s, the U.S. Air Force took control of the northern two-thirds of the installation in 1957. Then known as Cooke AFB, it was the site of the nation's first combat-ready missile base.

In 1958, it was renamed after General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, second Air Force Chief of Staff and an early advocate of aerospace preparedness. General Vandenberg had earlier served as Director of the Central Intelligence Group, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Vandenberg AFB offered fledgling missile and satellite developers access to the Pacific test range and polar orbits. The base was the logical launch site for CORONA operations.

The earliest CORONA launches were unsuccessful, but through each failure, the team of scientists and engineers would gain new insight into space operations. This information would lead to significant advancements in space launch and recovery techniques for both CORONA and manned space programs.

The first successful CORONA operation occurred with the 13th launch in the DISCOVERER series on August 12, 1960. The spacecraft achieved orbit and its capsule was deorbited, carrying an American flag but no camera or film. A recovery helicopter plucked the first object ever recovered from space out of the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

Full success followed a week later when the 14th CORONA mission, with a camera and a 20-pound canister of film aboard, took the first photograph from space of Mys Shmidta Airfield in the Soviet Arctic.

This achievement began a series of "firsts" in space history. The first:

• recovery of a vehicle from space
• photo taken from space
• mid-air recovery of a vehicle returning from space
• mapping of the earth from space
• stereo-optical data from space
• multiple reentry vehicles from space
• reconnaissance program to fly 100 missions
• use of a satellite to gather intelligence.

Each of the 145 CORONA satellites, as well as the ARGON and LANYARD variations, were launched from Vandenberg by Thor boosters using AGENA upper stages. The spacecraft flew at approximate altitudes of 100 nautical miles in polar orbit, circling the earth at speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour.

The NRO's CORONA satellites gathered more than 800,000 images of the earth's surface, approximately 1.2 million feet of film. Their principal area of focus was the former Soviet Union and China. The CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD imagery was declassified in 1995 and transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The last CORONA mission was launched from Vandenberg on May 25, 1972. Today's announcement marks the first time the NRO and USAF have acknowledged the fact of an NRO satellite launch prior to the event. Other that CORONA, all other NRO launches remain classified.