The Origins of DARPA

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It is the research arm of the United States Department of Defense, and DARPA projects have led to some pretty incredible technologies like the Internet and autonomous cars spoiler alert for this week. But what about the agency itself? What is its history? So in the following episodes, I hope to give you guys an insight into one of the most secretive organizations in the

United States. This agency hides in plain site, and it essentially advertises itself with some of its larger profile projects, like the various Grand challenges that lead to things like autonomous cars and UH and and more advanced humanoid robots. So I'll be talking more about some of those in my upcoming suite of episodes about autonomous cars. When I get into that, I'll cover it a little bit in these episodes, but I'll go into more detail when we

get into the autonomous car suite. Ultimately, the purpose of DARPA is to make the United States technologically superior to other countries. Is to maintain technological superiority, and that includes making high tech weaponry and military systems. It is part of the Defense Department. So while many of the stories about DARPA have focused on the Gali g whiz that texture is amazing kind of side of things, We're gonna look at the whole picture, which sometimes gets pritty darn grim.

But I think it's important to consider both the good and the bad. We shouldn't just, you know, focus on one at the expense of the other. So to understand the climate that would create DARPA, we really need to think back to World War Two and the development of

the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project took advantage of some of the most talented physicists and engineers in America, and during the course of the development of the atomic bomb, which was based off the process of nuclear fission splitting the atom, the team also explored the possibility of a fusion bomb a k A hydrogen bomb. Now during World War Two, the Manhattan Project focused mainly on vision bombs because a lot more work was going to be needed

to make a fusion bomb possible. There was work being done on that, but it was trailing way behind. It was considered to be far more complicated and difficult to do, and therefore it was given low priority because of the necessity to build a bomb in a wartime environment. So some members of the team ended up being opposed to working on a fusion bomb, particularly once the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, Nagasaki were deployed, because they were worried well.

They said, the atomic bombs were already bad enough, the fusion bomb would be much much more destructive. There was even a fear that such a device might ignite the atmosphere, setting setting the atmosphere itself on fire, which would obviously kill everyone all over the world after a single detonation. The idea that you could have a world ending event

by detonating one of these bombs. But even without that doomsday scenario, the thought was that such a bomb would cause such widespread devastation that it would by its nature wipe out civilian populations that there'd be no dancing around it that you could argue, well, these other bombs we've created, we meant for military installations, and tragically that also meant that civilian populations were affected because of their proximity to

those military installations. With a fusion bomb, the effect would be so large that you couldn't really use that as a justification. It was going to affect millions of people, So it raised serious ethical concerns among many who were working on the Manhattan Project. After World War Two and after the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, there was still ongoing debate about whether or not any work should be done

on creating a hydrogen bomb. Then, in nineteen forty nine, the Soviet Union would conduct its first test of an atomic bomb detonation, and that changed things in the US. The General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission unanimously recommended that the United States not pursue the development of a hydrogen bomb. This was all the conscientious objector who said such a technology is too terrible to even develop,

let alone build and deploy. That group would include people like Jay Robert Oppenheimer, who was the chairman of the Manhattan Project. Also Enrico Fermi and Isadore Robbie. They argued that the hydrogen bomb would be a weapon so powerful that it would just be an evil upon the world to build it. But there were other scientists like Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence who were not on the General Advisory Committee, but they were in favor of developing a

hydrogen bomb. They argued that the Soviets would pursue developing the hydrogen bomb whether or not the United States did, and therefore there would be a gap in in capability if the US did not develop it first. There would be nothing to stop the Soviet Union from threatening to use such a bomb against the US and forced the US to surrender, because what country would allow its population to be wiped out in such a way if they

did not have that capability themselves. So President Truman agreed with Teller and Lawrence and said that the development of a hydrogen bomb should happen in In In nineteen fifty, he authorized an official program to develop such a bomb. As part of that program, a second nuclear weapons development lab would be formed. The original one was the Los Alamos Lab. That's where the Manhattan Project tests took place, where the

atomic bombs were born. The second lab was founded in Livermore, California, at the University of California's Radiation Lab, later known as the Livermore Lab and later still as the Lawrence Livermore Lab. The Los Alamos Group built a bomb based off a design that Edward Teller had worked on, and they tested this hydrogen bomb in nineteen fifty four. It was a proof of concept hydrogen bomb that had been tested two

years earlier, actually in nineteen fifty two. That was a smaller one, but that was based off an impractical design for an actual weapon. It was more of a proof of concept. This one in nineteen fifty four was a working hydrogen bomb. It was part of a test called Operation Castle, and it ended up detonating with fifteen mega tons of force, which was far far more powerful than

the group had anticipated. Uh there were stories about during the detonation the initial reaction from the observers was one of panic that the explosion, because it was so huge and the the fire cloud was growing so quickly, that there was at least a moment where people began to worry that perhaps they had in fact ignited the atmosphere and that this was the end. Ended up not being quite that bad, but it was much much stronger than

they had thought. Meanwhile, the Livermore group to which Teller belonged, had failed to deuce a working nuclear bomb. When the lab was at risk of being shut down, Teller and his team presented designs for a mega super bomb. This would be capable, according to the design, of delivering a ten thousand megaton yield. Keep in mind, the big one that was so big that the scientists were scared of it was fifteen mega tons. Teller's proposal was for a

ten thousand mega ton hydrogen bomb. A single bomb of that power would be capable of wiping out an entire continent, not just a region, an entire continent with one bomb. HERB York, who was a member of this team, would

later explain the reasoning for that design. He said that the US had to employ a really aggressive research and development practice to maintain its technological advantage against adversaries, and that this unfortunately also meant an escalation of an arms race, but that without it, the U s would be endanged

of being vulnerable to enemy attack. The Livermore Lab would continue developing bomb technology, particularly after the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb, and the nuclear arms race was picking up speed very very quickly, and the Livermore Group was relying upon computer systems based off John von Neumann's designs to speed things up. I talked about him very

recently and in tech stuff. Meanwhile, as engineers were finding new and exciting ways to potentially kill millions of people, and yes that's me being sardonic, there there was a growing concern about what the citizens of the United States could do in the event of a nuclear strike on

the US. So the US had formed a Civil Defense Agency, but it became clear early on, at least to the people running that agency, that the options open to US if a nuclear strike were to be carried out against the United States would be limited at best and completely ineffective at worst. Concern and fear about nuclear war was growing as the Cold War continued. Some people like von Neumann, felt that a nuclear confrontation was pretty much a guarantee at some point in the future. Now it was that

philosophy that would become a cornerstone of DARPA. But the historical event that would really lead to DARPA's founding happened on October fourth, nineteen fifty seven. That's when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the first man made satellite to go into orbit around Earth. Sputnik was transmitting a simple signal over radio waves, which meant the US didn't have to take the Soviets at their word about launching a

satellite into orbit. They could pick it up themselves. Ham operators, even amateur ones, could pick up the beeping transmission as the satellite passed overhead. In fact, my old co host Chris Palette would refer to spot Nick as the ball

what beeps. Spot Nik was launched from an intercontinental ballistic miss SOUL and ICBM, and while spot Nik was a primitive and limited satellite couldn't do much other than transmit this signal, it did mean the Soviets would be able to launch payloads across the world to hit a distant target such as the United States, and those payloads might include something like a hydrogen bomb, and the US population

was beginning to panic. For years, Americans were convinced that their country was well ahead of all others scientifically and technologically, and in military matters as well. But the Soviets had launched a satellite first, and now that belief in America's capabilities was shaken, and that anxiety that citizens were feeling was shared by branches of the US military. The Air Force and the Navy were both developing long range missiles that could be used for weapons or for sending payloads

to space. The American approach to developing this technology was fractured. These branches were working independently to varying greece of success, whereas in the Soviet Union it was more focused. Although changes at the top of the administration level would make setbacks happen in that country, but let's focus on the United States. So the nationwide anxiety in the in the

States grew. On December twentieth, nineteen fifty seven, President Eisenhower had previously rejected a report that had the title Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, better known as the Gaither Report after h Rowan Gaither, one of the people

who was working on the panel that produced it. This report concluded that there was no effective way to protect US civilians from a nuclear war in the case of an all out strike from the Soviets, and so the United States should produce more nuclear warheads to act as a deterrent to say, you don't want to attack us, because we'll attack you back, and we'll destroy each other.

This is that mutually assured destruction strategy. The report also warned that the Soviet Union was possibly on the verge of producing thousands of I c b ms that might deliver a nuclear payload across the world, but Eisenhower knew that wasn't the case. He knew something the expert panel didn't know because he had access to top secret spy information from You two spy planes, which were still highly

classified at that time. No one outside of a small group of people knew that they even existed, but Eisenhower didn't. He also knew that information from those You two spy planes had shown the Soviets were not ramping up for an all our assault. They were not building out an infrastructure at a furious pace the way the reports suggested. So he rejected this report. He said, this, this does

not reflect reality. But then someone leaked that report to the Washington Post, which then published parts of the report, and the subsequent articles sent the United States public into a panic that made the Spotnik event look tiny in comparison. People were freaking out. The president saw the need for action on multiple fronts, including in research and design and innovation. So he turned to an unlikely hero. He turned to

the guy who invented soap operas. I'll explain more in a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the person that we often credit as being the inventor or the father of the soap opera was Neil H. McElroy, who had been president of

the consumer goods company Proctor and Gamble. He had started off in advertising at the company before he rose to the role of president, and in his career he made several innovative changes in the way the company would market to consumers, including creating ads designed to run during daytime television.

Because his research showed that many women in the United States were watching daytime TV, so he decided that each product within Procter and Gamble would have its own marketing team creating ads aimed at women to air on daytime TV, and they would be inserted into shows that would have ongoing storylines from show to show soap operas. In other words, he directed those teams to uh do this, and they did,

and he sold a lot of soap. In his own words, in nineteen fifty seven, just two days after Sputnik went into orbit, he was sworn in as the Secretary of Defense in President Eisenhower's administration, an interesting move to go from president of Procter and Gamble to the Secretary of Defense. McIlroy proposed that the United States form a new agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. The DARPA name would come later, and go and then come back

again anyway. McIlroy's vision was for an agency that would oversee scientific and technological research and development in multiple fields and applications, all with an eye towards securing the United States as the most technologically advanced and capable country in

the world. He was advocating that the U s invest not just in the immediate crisis of answering the Soviets displays of technological capabilities and the uh space race that would soon follow, but also to constantly work toward the future of innovation, not just to focus on a single problem and once that was solved, to finish, but to be an ongoing concern. The agency's job was to future

proof weapons and defense technologies. McIlroy's proposal one support from politicians, but it won a lot of criticism from military officers. Part of what McIlroy was proposing was using area to advance the US's efforts to exploit outer space, and the various branches of the armed forces all claimed that that was their domain. They didn't want to surrender it. They all had their own projects in line, and they were worried about money being diverted from their efforts into some

other one. They were thinking it was all going to dilute the field. The Joint chiefs of Staff didn't want to see this agency form, but Eisenhower, who himself was a former five star general, was out of patients. He did not like the constant disagreements between the various military branches, or the fact that different branches were independently pursuing similar

goals but not sharing resources. He felt there was too much waste, not enough focused, enough cooperation, and so on January seven, nineteen fifty eight, Eisenhower authorized a budget to

McElroy for the founding of our PA. Now, the initial budget for the founding was about ten million dollars, but over the course of nineteen fifty nine, the first full year of our PA really running projects, it would have a budget of more than half a billion dollars, which in the late nineteen fifties was an incredible, incredibly huge amount of money. It's huge. Now, don't get me wrong.

I would not refuse half a billion dollars, but back in nineteen fifty nine that was even more of an enormous, unimaginably huge sum Eisenhower revealed the need for ARPA to the United States and his nine State of the Union address, he said, we need an organization dedicated to this pursuit of innovation. He laid out the case, and he simultaneously casted a lot of shade on the top officials of the various military branches. There was a bit of a

reprimand in that State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the U S Army was preparing to answer the U S s RS spot Nick with the launch of the first U S satellite called Explorer one. Now, unlike spot Nick, which really just orbited the Earth and beeped a lot, the Explorer one was packed with instruments meant to do

some serious research. And the Explorer one would detect the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth, making it the first space instrument to produce a major discovery, but Eisenhower felt the task of developing, building, launching, and administering space missions should not fall to the army, so that would be at least initially part of ARPA's domain. To head up the new ARPA agency, McElroy would name Roy W.

Johnson as director. Johnson had been a vice president of General Electric, and the deputy director would be Rear Admiral John Clark. McIlroy whittled down the list of candidates for chief Scientists to two people. One of those two people was Herb York, the guy who was part of Edward Teller's team. The other was Werner von Brown, the German scientist who had been a prominent figure in Germany's rocketry

program during World War Two. The United States had brought Von Brown over as part of Operation paper Clip, in which the United States would put to work many former Nazi scientists on US projects. Not all those scientists were necessarily sympathizers with the Nazis, I should add some of

them probably were, but not all of them were. But all of them ended up being put to work in the US, and or at least all the ones that the US picked up and Van Brown had a condition that if he were to be offered the role of Chief Scientists over at ARPA, he also wanted to bring over a dozen or so of his peers who had been brought over an Operation paper Clip, and ultimately McElroy decided that this was probably not a good move for

the young agency. It might look really bad to have a government agency merely completely staffed with former Nazi scientists, so he chose to put herb York in the role of chief Scientists instead. The two major areas that ARPA would initially focus on were military space activities and anti missile strategies. Essentially, how can the US rapidly match the Soviets capabilities while simultaneously counteracting any possible advantage they might

have attained over the United States? And it would be a good time to talk about how the agency worked in general. So our path is not some big, super secret laboratory with scientists and engineers pouring out various liquids into other various liquids, or running electricity through stuff and shouting it's alive. It's more like an RFP and funding operation.

So an RFP as a request for proposal. It's where an organization states a goal that it wants to achieve, maybe some general guidelines on how it it assumes this goal will be achieved, and then invites qualified organizations or individuals to apply to be part of this project, essentially to receive funding from our PA in order to pursue

these goals and to achieve them. So with our path, these were proposals to develop technologies that would contribute to the defense of the United States in some way, shape or form. These r fps can arrange from very specific to extremely broad. Our PA tends to work with research facilities, universities, and defense contractors a lot. The agency can set parameters and collaborate with these parties, but ultimately it exists to a minister those programs. And a lot of stuff was

happening all at once at this time. In fact, this episode and the next one in particular, are going to have a lot of concurrent things happening. And it's because it's very hard to jump around. If I were to go just chronologically, I would have to switch gears so frequently that it would be Oh and by the way, you remember when I was talking about twenty minutes ago about such and such, Well, here's what was happening then, and I thought that would be too confusing, so instead

I'm going to try and focus project by project. In general, so ARPA was gearing up to develop space technologies and an umbrella of programs dedicated to bringing down missiles that was called Project Defender that was starting to shape up. That would become the biggest project of ARPA at least in those early years. But while all that was going on, President Eisenhower was also exploring the possible ability of a

nuclear test ban. The fallout, both literal and figurative, of the Castle Operation tests was catastrophic, and things were bound to get worse as both the US and the Soviet Union continued to build up nuclear arsenals and test nuclear warheads. Eisenhower wanted to arrive in an agreement with the USSR and with Khrushchev to bring nuclear weapon tests to an end, but there was a big concern what if one side

stuck to the agreement while the other one didn't. How could the United States be certain that the Soviets would stay true to such an agreement. And so one of the big projects that area would launch, in addition to the Defender and military space projects, would be called VILA v E l A. Now, the purpose of VILA or VELA if you prefer, was to create systems that could detect a nuclear weapons test. VILA had three sub programs.

They were codenamed Hotel, Uniform, and Sierra. These programs sought to design and build technology that could detect a nuclear explosion through atmospheric sensing or seismic sensing, so in other words, testing for radioactive isotopes that are perhaps airborne, or looking for any tremors in the Earth that could indicate the detonation of a nuclear warhead. That way, the United States could say, hey, we picked up the evidence that you in fact did detonate nuclear war warhead despite the fact

that we've agreed to this. This test band back to space for a second. So ARPA came into being shortly before NASA. ARPA NASA both were launched figuratively speaking, the same year nineteen. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration became official on October one, nineteen fifty eight, so several months

after ARPA had begun. ARPA, therefore was the agency responsible for overseeing the development of space technologies like launch vehicles for those first several months, and ARPA began to fund programs dedicated to developing different types of rockets. One of those was designed from vor von Brown's team. Von Brown had led the development of a booster rocket technology that

his team called the Juno five. This design, which was never built as the actual design was made, would find itself it's it's design would find itself as the basis for future rockets. It was a multi stage approach and essentially it evolved into what would become the Saturn launch vehicle. In addition to the Juno five program, ARPA authorized the development of a liquid oxygen slash hydrogen upper stage rocket.

This one was called Centaur, and the upper stage design would become part of launch vehicles like Atlas the Titan three. In the Titan four, it was intended to fly on Saturn launch vehicles, but that never actually happened. While ARPA began those programs, the agency would eventually transfer them over to NASA in nineteen fifty nine as that agency began to take on the role of developing the non military,

civilian US space program. I've got more to say about the earliest days of Darba, but before I get to that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Before I jump off the topic of space for a little bit, another ARPA initiated project I should mention is the Television and Infrared Observations Satellite Program or TYROS t I r O S. TYROS would be the prototype satellite for weather reporting, research,

and forecasting. It grew out of an older Army project called Janus, which is making me think of James Bond type stuff. But the project was not just about sussing out the technology we would need to design and build to achieve the goal. It was also about the process of bringing together all the pieces that you would need to make it happen, which included scientists, engineers, contracting firms,

federal agencies. So it was a real practical test of the administration side of URPA, not just its scientific prowess, but how could it bring together all these different components to work towards a unified goal. It was really complicated. So it's one thing to build brand new technology that no one's made before, but it's another to navigate all the various bureaucracies in the academic, industrial and political worlds.

TYROS would become the first weather satellite to be placed in orbit, and it happened on April first, nineteen sixty. It sent back messages as a television signal to a ground station at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The mission wasn't meant to last a super long time. I want to say Tyros was an operation for like seventy six days, but in the course of those seventy six days it would send back twenty two fifty two images via TV

signal back to Earth. In addition to transferring the civilian based space projects to NASA, ARPA would transfer the military projects to the various branches of the U. S Military, which of the agency to focus on other programs like nuclear test detection technology of the Vela project and the anti missile technologies in the Defender project. So in order to counteract missiles, first you gotta know where those missiles are.

So before McElroy and Eisenhower had established ARPA, the President's Science Advisory Committee produced a report calling for the need for technologies that could detect, track, and identify a large number of objects moving at high altitudes and speeds. In n ARPA would respond to that need by holding a competition, and the goal was to design a two dimensional phased array radar that had automatic beam steering control. Now that sounds complicated, but the basic idea is actually pretty simple

to grasp. Radar sends out radio waves and then it listens for the returning echoes after the radio waves have bounced off something and come back to the transmitting area for being received by a new antenna. The timing on those echoes you know how long it went out versus came back, and the frequency of the returning waves will tell the radar operator how far away something is and whether it's moving toward or away from the radar station.

The thing about waves, though, is that you can combine them in different ways to either boost the signal in certain directions or to cancel out the signal in certain directions. Noise canceling headphones do this, so we're going with sound waves here instead of radar waves or radio waves, but stick with me. Noise canceling headphones will produce sound waves that are in one eighty degrees out of phase with

incoming noise. So if you were to graph out the sound waves of the ambient noise in the room, you would have peaks and valleys. Right, you've seen sound waves or depictions of sound waves before, the noise cancelation technology will produce troughs and peaks that are in one degrees out of phase, so the peak on one on the ambient sound will match up with the trough of the sound produced by the noise canceling headphones, and ultimately those

two opposing waves cancel each other out. The phased array would do something similar. You would have a transmitter or lots of transmitters actually sending out a signal to a series of radar antenna. Between the transmitters and the antenna, you would have a phase shifter which can change the signal slightly before it gets to the respect of antenna.

The phase shifters are controlled by a computer, and the computer runs calculations so that the phase of the signals going to each antenna are such that the computer can electronically steer the direction of the radar beams. That eliminates the need to actually physically turn the antenna. You don't need to mechanically move them at all. Using the physics of waves, the computer can strengthen the signal in certain directions and eliminate it in others, effectively pointing the beam

electronically just by tweaking those phases. It's pretty cool. The project became known as the Electronically Steered Array Radar or s R E s a R. It was a success. The Bendix Corporation built it and it was a proven technology. Star would lead to the development of the FPS eight five and extremely powerful radar that became part of the Space Track system overseen by the Air Force. The FPS

E D five is thirteen stories tall. The radar consists of five thousand, one hundred thirty four transmitters, four thousand, six hundred sixty receivers, five thousand, nine hundred twenty eight transmitter antennas. It's truly enormous. Construction on the FPS A D five began in nineteen sixty two. It was meant to go into operation in nineteen sixty five, but there was a fire at the facility that pushed everything back and it wasn't ready to go until nineteen sixty nine.

But it can track up to two hundred objects simultaneously. In nineteen sixty ARPA and the c i A partnered to fund another program. This one was called Corona, which used to be a top secret classified project that's since been declassified. Now it's no surprise as to why it used to be top secret. Corona was a series of

spy satellites. The original Corona satellite was the first imaging reconnaissance satellite, meaning it would take actual photographs of the areas that would pass over to collect intelligence on behalf of the United States. So the idea was you would

make this satellite. It was only designed to go into orbit for a relatively short amount of time, going over the Earth maybe a dozen two dozen times, collecting images as it goes along, and then ejects a capsule that contains the film because it was actually shot on film. They used a film camera and have that returned to Earth where the United States military officials would retrieve it, and then you could go over all the images. So the early history of Corona actually predates the founding of

our PA. The US recognized the need to develop reconnaissance satellites in the nineteen fifties. The YOU two spy plane, which was effective over much of the world, was not as useful when it came to the Soviet Union because the USSR had developed high quality radar systems capable of

picking up the U two. So initially the hope was that the YOU two would only be needed for a year or so before a satellite solution could take its place, because the satellite would pass at an altitude so great that radar would probably not be able to pick it up.

But setbacks and bottlenecks kept all of that from happening quickly, and so the YouTube had to stay in operation longer than they had intended, including over the USSR and whenever soviets would detect a YouTube that would raise danger of a confrontation, one that might begin with shooting down a plane, possibly end with escalating tensions, and it could potentially result in armed conflict. So there was a need to find

a sneak kere way to spy on people. On May one, nineteen sixty the U S s R did shoot down a YouTube plane, which justified those fears that people had had in the fifties. By that time, the Corona project had been in development for quite a bit but had yet to have a successful flight. Now I could do a full episode about Corona in the future. It was a fascinating project, but we're gonna skip ahead a little bit. So the project had numerous early failures. You had one

attempt was a misfire on the launchpad. Three attempts failed to achieve orbit to went into orbit, but the orbit was considered highly eccentric, in other words, not useful. UH. One of them prematurely ejected its film capsule, which was again meant to res atmosphere for a retrieval uh. But there was another one that just the camera failed completely. One of them the camera worked for a short while

but failed nearly immediately afterward. So from teen fifty eight until nineteen sixty, the Corona project was a series of misfortunes and failures, ranging from near success to total catastrophe. This was the case until essentially August of nineteen sixty. ARPA and the CIA had provided the funds needed to push to actual success. So while the project predated Arba, ARPA was able to put funds to it to keep it going long enough for the team to actually get

it to work. So in August nineteen sixty, the Discoverer thirteen spacecraft was a successful proof of concept. Discoverer, by the way, was the public cover name for the Corona classified missions, so the United States would admit that it was launching a payload into space. It was kind of hard to cover that sort of stuff. Up and they called it Discoverer, and they claimed it was a scientific research satellite, but in fact it was a reconnaissance satellite.

So the Discoverer thirteen had a successful launch. I guess that's ironic that it was thirteen and was lucky. It orbited the Earth several times, it ejected its return capsule successfully. The return capsule was retrieved, even though it landed hundreds of miles away from where they had planned it to go. But this particular satellite didn't have a camera aboard. It was really just a diagnostic flight to see if the

tweaks that had been made to the spacecraft would actually work. Uh. The hardware was delivered directly to the Smithsonian and the well first the President, then the Smithsonian after retrieval, because there was no need to cover it up. The secret spy stuff hadn't been part of it. So everyone just thought, oh, well, that's cool. We shot something up into space and then we were able to retrieve it. That would obviously be an important component when we get to the point when

we were ready to send people up there. So everyone kind of bought that this was a step toward putting people in space. In reality, the Discover fourteen project, the one to follow of the first successful flight would be the first to capture actual images on a successful launch that happened on August eighth, nineteen sixty, It carried a twenty pound load of film. It made seventeen orbits of the earth, including seven flyovers of Soviet territory, and it

took numerous images. In fact, it took enough images that it produced more than all the YouTube missions that had ever flown over the Soviet Union up to that point combined, but at a lower resolution. The resolution was somewhere around forty feet, meaning that was the smallest it could image, so not super sharp pictures. Well, that wraps up this

first episode about DARPA the origins of DARPA. We have tons more to cover, and I hope you will join me for the next few shows where we look more into the UH, the history and evolution of the agency and some of the technologies it was instrumental in pion you ring. It's a fascinating thing. I've got a few other things I want to talk about. First of all, if you want to get in touch with me, the best way to do it is to go to Text

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