How Cold War Spying From Space Connected the Galaxy to Utah

Harold Mitchell watched from the cockpit of his plane as a spacecraft fell from the sky. Four thousand feet above him, the spacecraft glinted in the sun as it dangled from a parachute. Mitchell called out to the crew in the cargo hold—they had to get ready to catch it.

The men, all from the U.S. Air Force, opened the back of the plane and extended a set of poles with a rope and hooks at the end. Mitchell flew them closer, and the parachute disappeared under the nose of the plane.

A series of bangs like gunfire rang out as the parachute hit the rope, causing a series of shock-absorbing loops to snap apart. They had successfully caught the hurtling object. The crew then reeled in their catch and hauled it into the plane. Moments later, a gold-plated space capsule sat on the floor in front of them. The year was 1960, the capsule was called Discoverer 14, and it was one of the first of its kind.

A week earlier, Discoverer 13 had become the first object ever retrieved from Earth’s orbit when Navy divers pulled it out of the ocean near Hawai'i. They didn’t know it at the time, but they had just opened the door for future scientists.

Similar capsules would later become key tools for space exploration, bringing astronauts and pieces of the solar system to Earth. Starting in the 1960s, the Hawaiian waters of the Pacific Ocean became a place connecting humans directly to space. And eventually the Pacific Ocean would be replaced by the Utah desert.

But the true intention behind the first of these spacecraft redelivered to Earth was actually for spying—a purpose that was hidden from the public for decades.

After the mid-air catch of Discoverer 14, the capsule was secretly loaded into a plane in Hawaii, and shipped to Rochester, New York. An unmarked truck took the capsule to a darkened room in a secure facility. Using wrenches and ratchets, a team opened the capsule, revealing the deeply guarded secret inside: a large roll of Kodak film.

Kodak workers inspected the film by feel in the dark. They processed it, carefully labeled the photographs, and handed them off to the CIA. The photographs contained images of airports, factories, construction sites, and more, deep within the borders of the Soviet Union. This was the CORONA project, which conducted reconnaissance using satellite-based cameras during the Cold War. Spying had just been taken into the Space Age.

Launching rockets into space and catching returning capsules are both impossible to hide, so the U.S. Department of Defense publicly called the program “Discoverer,” said to be testing new spaceflight technologies.

These early spying spacecraft “provided absolutely invaluable intelligence that was not obtainable by any other means,” says James David, curator of space history at the Smithsonian. Originally, the U.S. used planes for photographic reconnaissance. But in 1960, those flights stopped after the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane and captured pilot Francis Gary Powers. CORONA and its successors allowed the U.S. to keep eyes on the Soviet Union, and David says the spying spacecraft helped keep the Cold War from turning hot.

Extraordinary measures were taken to keep the project secret. Engineers built the capsule with a special valve that was plugged with salt. If recovery planes or Navy divers failed to grab the capsule, the salt dissolved, sinking the spacecraft to the bottom of the Pacific. And while Harold Mitchell went on TV after his catch of the “Discoverer” capsule, the Kodak engineers processing the film had to keep quiet.

“The word ‘Kodak’ was not supposed to be associated with any of these things,” says David McDowell, a former Kodak engineer. He and his coworkers had to travel incognito, and when they met with General Electric—the company that built the capsules—they were brought in the back door. They were not even allowed to tell their families about their work until the program was declassified in the 1990s.

In the 1970s, CORONA was replaced by the GAMBIT and HEXAGON systems, which flew dozens of missions through the ’80s. GAMBIT and HEXAGON imagery is still mostly classified. “For some reason, they’re still spooky about how good the images were,” said Robert Shanebrook, another former Kodak employee. The programs were extremely successful, and buckets of film regularly fell from space for over 20 years.

After the last HEXAGON spacecraft fell to Earth in 1984, capsule returns became more rare. Reconnaissance satellites began using digital imaging, and the U.S. replaced crewed capsules with the Space Shuttle in the early ’80s. Until SpaceX’s first Dragon spacecraft launched in 2010 carrying small satellites and a wheel of cheese, the Russian Soyuz was the only capsule that flew regularly. In fact, the U.S. didn’t return any capsules to Earth for almost two decades.

But something else brought the need for the technology back.

In September 2004, a helicopter pilot took to the skies above Utah, hoping to catch a capsule falling from space. Sandy Freund had just started working as an engineer at Lockheed Martin and eagerly awaited the catch. It was the final stage of the Genesis mission, NASA’s first attempt to bring a scientific sample back from space since the 1970s. The Lockheed-built capsule held tiny particles of solar material trapped in delicate wafers, eagerly awaited by Freund and the Genesis science teams “They can do so much more in their laboratories here on Earth than they can do [with samples] on board a spacecraft,” says Freund. “They rewrite history books.”

But something went wrong. The mistake had actually been made before Freund arrived at Lockheed, and even before the Genesis capsule launched three years earlier. A component involved in deploying the parachute was installed incorrectly. The parachute failed as the capsule fell through the atmosphere, and the spacecraft impacted the desert floor at a speed of over 100 mph.

Scientists salvaged some samples from the wreckage, and Freund learned valuable lessons. She began studying ways to prevent similar failures, which she applied to later sample-return missions. One of these was Stardust, which successfully carried particles from comet Wild 2 back to Earth in 2006.

Freund later joined the team of OSIRIS-REx, the NASA-led mission that brought back fragments from the asteroid Bennu in 2023. After struggling to open the capsule, they finally succeeded in January 2024. “You get a sense of pride from having just a small part in that,” says Freund.

NASA is now hoping to bring back samples from Mars, which are already packed up and sitting on the Martian surface after being collected by the Perseverance rover. And developments in the private sector hint that we may see more capsules falling from the sky in coming years.

In February 2024, Varda Space Industries announced that they had recovered their W-1 capsule from orbit at the Utah Test and Training Range, the same site where the Genesis and Stardust capsules fell to Earth. It turns out the Utah desert is an excellent place to conduct the catch, since it’s sparsely populated and there’s no salt water to potentially damage the materials. Varda is using the same methods in order to test systems to produce pharmaceuticals in space, since microgravity can enable production techniques that are difficult or impossible to accomplish on Earth.

A few days after the recovery, Varda engineer Andrew McCalip posted a pair of pictures on social media. In the picture on the right, he stands next to the recovered W-1 capsule in Varda’s California factory. On the left, he stands next to the Discoverer 13 capsule, sitting in the Smithsonian.

Those early Cold War spy missions pioneered the technologies used by Varda and NASA scientists to deepen our connection to space. Through their work, the Utah desert now links the Earth to the rest of the solar system. And if Varda and other companies with similar ambitions are successful, we may start to see more capsules like these falling from space on a regular basis—but maybe with fewer secrets inside. Maybe.