- Hey, Smart People!

Joe here.

In the late 1950s, just about every geopolitical decision on Earth revolved around one question: Would Western democracy or communism become the dominant force across the globe?

Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were getting increasingly hot.

Ideological conflict threatened to spill over onto the actual battlefield, which meant the world lived under the terrifying specter of nuclear war.

And in the late 1950s, the US wasn't exactly winning.

The Soviets had already developed their own hydrogen bomb up to 1,000 times stronger than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan during World War II.

And by 1956, the Soviets were flying long-range bombers that could reach the continental US Even worse, in 1957, the USSR launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile.

And the following year, the ICBM would change the world forever when it launched Sputnik 1, the world's first human-made satellite, into orbit around the Earth.

- The Soviet launching of Earth satellites is an achievement of the first importance.

There is real military significance to these launches.

- This scared the crap out of the US government and the American public.

I mean, after all, if the Soviets could put a satellite into orbit, then they could definitely nuke an American city.

The US was terrified of falling behind in the Cold War.

So US and NATO intelligence needed to know what the Soviets were up to behind the Iron Curtain.

The high-altitude U-2 spy plane had proven to be a powerful intelligence-gathering platform, but missions into Soviet territory had become too risky, especially after a U-2 was shot down over the USSR.

- Gromyko and his hour-long speech continued the campaign of denunciation that began with the shooting down of the American reconnaissance plane over Russia.

- So the CIA and Air Force decided to do what no one had ever done before: put cameras in space.

- Only eight weeks after Sputnik 1, the president decided to proceed with a joint CIA Air Force interim photo reconnaissance satellite program to answer the critical intelligence questions about Soviet missiles.

- That is how a first-of-its-kind spy satellite program named CORONA was born.

And the only reason we even know about this top secret program today is because it's helping us save the world in a completely different way.

Not by fighting The Red Menace, but by studying climate change.

This is a story of how former enemies became scientific allies.

How science and top-secret spycraft worked together to unlock the secrets of how our planet is changing.

This is the unbelievable but totally true tale of a Cold War and a warming planet, and how satellites that prevented nuclear war helped us spy on Earth's climate.

(pensive music) So this is one of my absolute favorite things to do on Google Earth.

There's this super cool feature that lets you see how a place changes over time.

It can be pretty shocking to watch a lake dry up before your eyes.

I mean, you can just watch a city emerge from the sea, or you can watch a glacier recede before your very eyes.

Comparing data points from the past to data from today is a really powerful way to understand how our planet is changing.

And it's something we totally take for granted, thanks to satellite technology.

As of 2023, at least 2,600 active satellites are orbiting the Earth.

They give us GPS directions, help us stream our favorite shows, and they take pictures.

Lots of pictures.

But in the late 1950s, taking photos from space was basically science fiction.

Back then, the US space program was still in its infancy.

Like, not even that.

It was basically embryonic.

- But now, we have come to a new day.

NACA is to become part of a new agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

- NASA opened in October 1958, almost one year after Sputnik's launch.

By that time, the Soviets had already sent a dog into orbit.

By every measure, the U.S was behind in the Space Race.

And to rub salt in the wound, the US had experienced some pretty catastrophic, and public, failures trying to get their own rocket into space.

For example, the Vanguard rocket, which was supposed to send the US's first satellite into orbit, it exploded.

(Vanguard rocket rumbling) Repeatedly.

- [Reporter 1] Control system breaks down and defense department cameras record a pinwheel of fire, another disaster for Project Vanguard.

- The press even called it a flopnik.

Ouch.

- There are some instances where you may be ahead of us.

- Look, there's no sugarcoating it, the US was getting totally embarrassed in the Space Race.

So they did what governments do when they're struggling, they go into full hype mode, talking up the US's currently-nonexistent-but-definitely-coming-any-day-now space capabilities.

- The Exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not.

And it is one of the great adventures of all time.

And no nation, which expects to be the leader of other nations, can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

- And that message calls for new frontiers, new visions.

It calls for us taking the steps now that will make us no longer second in space and science.

- And to turn these hopes and dreams into reality, the US government started pumping piles of money into US space programs.

Like this one: code name CORONA.

The first spy satellite.

Now, CORONA was the definition of a moonshot program.

Or, I guess the US hadn't actually put anything in space yet, so more of an orbit-shot program?

Setting aside the tiny problem that the US could barely launch satellites without blowing them up, CORONA project scientists also had to figure out how to make a camera work in space.

No one had ever done this!

High-altitude spy cameras are usually panoramic cameras.

They work by swinging side-to-side to take a larger, higher-resolution image.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so in zero-G, scientists had to figure out some way to counterbalance this rotating camera so that it wouldn't also rotate the satellite straight out of orbit.

And of course, this was before digital photography.

Kodak had to develop an entirely new, polyester film that wouldn't disintegrate in space.

And they had to figure out how to get that film back to Earth.

They couldn't just let it fall wherever Farmer Joe or Farmer Yuri could find it, right?

So obviously, they'd catch it out of midair with planes.

When a film container was used up, the CORONA satellite would shoot it back to Earth.

A parachute would deploy, and then the film would get snagged by a plane using essentially a giant fishing hook.

Shockingly, this actually worked.

In 1960, the US became the first to recover an object that had come back from orbit, beating the Soviets to that accomplishment by five days.

But, hey, a win's a win!

And all of this is being done in complete secrecy from the public.

The US government invented this whole cover story for these spy satellite rocket launches, saying that CORONA was actually a harmless scientific research program named Discoverer, that these capsules returning to Earth contained biological samples, early tests for eventually sending humans to space.

- [Reporter 2] A Thor-Able satellite vehicles soars aloft.

Sister ship and precursor of the rocket that will carry into orbit the first Earth-born life intended to return alive.

The passengers of Discoverer III, four black mice.

- But the real mission was getting cameras into space to spy on the Soviet Union.

Despite dozens of failed launches, and the time that one of the top secret film canisters was found by some farmers in Venezuela, the CORONA spy satellite program worked.

It was wildly successful in the eyes of the intelligence agencies.

- By the mid 1960s, we knew with great confidence the exact number of weapons of all types that were deployed in the Soviet Union.

- All in all during CORONA, the US recovered 167 film canisters, with photos covering 500 million square nautical miles of Earth's surface.

CORONA helped the US eventually take the lead in the space race, but after the last CORONA satellite launched on May 25th, 1972, the program became a footnote in history books, a classified one.

But fast forward to the 1990s, and something big was about to happen that would change CORONA's story forever.

- Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed from power and there are tanks now in the streets of Moscow.

- [Reporter 3] Tonight, the red flag flying over the Kremlin has been lowered for good.

- As President Gorbachev resigned and brought to an end seven decades of communist rule in the Soviet Union.

- In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

And suddenly, the Cold War was just over.

The US spy satellite fleet, and all the images they'd taken, they kind of were out of a job.

So this young senator from Tennessee wrote a letter to the CIA asking if US spy satellites could do some side work looking at environmental change.

- And that is why when I was still serving in the Senate that I began those conversations with Bob Gates to explore how these assets could be applied to the task of improving our understanding of the Earth's environment.

- Yep, that Senator was Al Gore.

- This activity really had its origin back in the late 1980s, I think, when then Senator Gore, who was obviously very much interested in climate issues, wrote a letter, Senator Gore, to the head of the CIA.

He asked the question: Is it possible that there might be a way in which we could, in fact, have studies that used classified information that would provide scientists with their understanding of the environment?

- Gore knew this satellite imagery would be a gold mine for civilian environmental scientists.

After all, while CORONA satellites were spying on the Soviet Union, they were also taking photos of areas where climate change hits the hardest, like the polar regions.

But there was one small problem, all those photos were top secret.

- And most of us thought that would go no further than just a letter from Gore to the CIA, and then there would be turned down.

And so Bob Gates, who was the CIA director at that point, had an interest in looking at new ways to do things.

Gore wrote to Gates and Gates responded, and we set up the environmental task force.

- So in October 1992, the CIA put Dr. Linda Zall, a satellite imagery expert, in charge of figuring out if the government might be able to actually share these old spy photos.

- Linda was absolutely critical to the process because she was an expert analyst on the one hand, but she really believed that it's important for the CIA to use its assets to monitor the environment.

She is what people would say a force of nature.

- Dr. Zall had to figure out what images the government had and how much could be safely shared.

She couldn't just hand over tons of national security secrets to a bunch of nerds.

- They weren't going to give us the real high-resolution stuff, so they had to degrade it.

They have very, very sharp images, let's say they can resolve better than a license plate.

And what they wanted to release was something like a one-meter resolution, so it's fuzzy up to that resolutions.

- And once the images were safe for non-spy eyes, Zall recruited scientists to create an environmental task force that would review classified satellite data and images to study Earth science and climate change.

- Vice President Gore is here today to announce the signing of an executive order declassifying imagery from our early intelligence satellite systems.

- The release of this imagery will mark the first declassification of classified satellite imagery, ever.

- Thanks to this Senator from Tennessee, who was now Vice President, the government took hundreds of thousands of formerly classified images from the CORONA satellites and turned them over to this carefully chosen team of scientists, who started digging into the CORONA archives.

- There's a thousand times as much information about the Earth's processes and the environment collected in that effort, as there is in the programs that are specifically dedicated to collecting information about the environment.

And so it obviously makes sense to figure out ways to make use of it without compromising our national security.

- It was called the MEDEA Program.

Basically, this was the "Justice League" of environmental scientists.

- There were oceanographers, geologists, energy experts, meteorologists, climate experts, all further now began to talk to each other and forming new ideas about things that you could do.

- I mean, a totally improbable team: scientists and spies analyzing photos that weren't even supposed to exist.

And this data painted a picture that scientists had never seen before.

To figure how the environment is changing, you have to compare Earth today to Earth in the past.

And suddenly, scientists had been given a literal time capsule, hundreds of thousands of pictures of what the Earth looked like all the way back to the '50s and '60s.

It expanded our window into the past so we could better understand how changes to the environment were speeding up.

MEDEA helped scientists discover all kinds of things, that the Arctic Sea became saltier as sea ice melted.

CORONA photos proved the Aral Sea had shrunk by 50% in 50 years.

And MEDEA scientists also recruited a very unlikely ally: Russia.

Russia had been sending submarines under Arctic ice for decades, so they knew just how thick the ice was at any given time.

And that mattered for climate research.

- And so the spy agency started talking to each other.

If you've got a submarine going underneath the ice, you can look upwards and it can tell you what the thickness of the ice is, because you can't do that from looking from above.

- But cooperation with the Russians ended up being a bit tricky.

- I had a scientist who was working for me at NOAA who had, earlier, gone to the Arctic and collected some Russian data, but then when he was leaving, the KGB stopped him and confiscated his laptop.

And so I asked Al Gore, "How can we arrange this since you're talking to Chernomyrdin, who's the vice premier?"

And he said, "Well, at one point, I'll make sure that I'm talking to Chernomyrdin in a quiet spot.

You come up and interrupt me and say, 'Oh, we've got this problem with a laptop.

Is there something you could do?'"

And he said, "I'm sure the Russians will say, 'Oh, we can fix that.'"

I saw Gore, he kind of maneuvered Chernomyrdin over, and I walked over quickly and I said that, and Chernomyrdin said, "Oh, yeah, we can do that.

No problem."

He waved an aide over to do it and we got the laptop back.

So we got a lot of data from the Russians.

In fact, 80% of the Arctic Ocean data at that point had been collected by the Russians, and they were willing to put that into a common database.

- These spy images, this team of top secret scientists recruited by the CIA, changed the way we understand the planet.

Like, just for the ocean, declassified CORONA imagery doubled the information in our existing databases.

And thanks to the Russian data exchange, we learned that the average ice thickness in the Arctic declined by almost half in 28 years.

The MEDEA Program continued until it was shut down in 2001.

It was briefly revived under President Barack Obama in 2010 before closing its doors once and for all in 2015.

But even though MEDEA isn't around today, the program and CORONA's declassified images continue to be used by scientists to increase our understanding of the world.

Images taken by CORONA and provided by the MEDEA Project have helped epidemiologists track cholera outbreaks, Archaeologists understand ancient civilizations, and even political scientists understand how satellite surveillance influences how we act.

And this cooperation between the intelligence community and civilian scientists has evolved into the Global Fiducials Program, where the CIA uses classified technology to provide important data for Earth scientists today.

We always hear this reminder, that we have to work together to tackle climate change.

And this is one of the craziest stories of people you'd never expect to come together, spies and scientists, East and West, cooperating for the most important mission of all, saving the planet.

- There's a tendency for science to be siloed, but I think that we need to have a broader perspective on how important problems are and how we're going to deal with them.

- This is one of the wildest chapters in the history of science that I've ever learned about.

And it shows us the incredible things that are possible when unexpected ideas come together, thanks to the work of a handful of passionate people.

These satellites that were originally designed to help prevent a nuclear apocalypse, found another life, to help us avert a totally different sort of crisis: climate change and environmental loss.

These men and women in black, and men and women in science, came together to spy on planet Earth because all of the machinations of international politics and military might, well, none of that stuff really matters without the planet itself.