3:00pm EST., Friday February 10th

Presenting Live via Zoom

Top Secret in Orbit: the other other space program

NASA was formed in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in October 1957. But while NASA assumed a prominent and public role as America's civil space agency, and while it was no secret that the United States also began military space programs at the dawn of the Space Age, what is often overlooked is that in addition to the civil and military space efforts, there was also a third American space program, a program focused on gathering intelligence information on America's adversaries using satellites. This talk will discuss some of the early projects to put intelligence-gathering spacecraft into orbit, and how they evolved over the decades to provide a wealth of information from so-called "denied areas," where often even spies could not operate.

Dwayne A. Day works for the National Academies where he has overseen studies on the protection of Earth from hazardous asteroids, the exploration of the solar system, the development of large space telescopes, and the size of the NASA astronaut corps. He has a Ph.D. in political science from The George Washington University and has worked in several space policy related jobs over the past two decades, with brief stints working as an Air Force contractor as well as historian for the Congressional Budget Office. He served as a consultant to the Institute for Defense Analyses Science and Technology Policy Institute on issues such as the Russian space program and NASA's humans-to-Mars plans. He was an investigator for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. He writes frequently on the history and politics of the American space program, particularly military space projects and the collection of intelligence information using satellites and other systems.