You Are Here by Hiawatha Bray
Author:Hiawatha Bray [Bray, Hiawatha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780465080984
Publisher: Basic Books
7
Long Shots
AT SEVENTY THOUSAND FEET YOU CAN SEE A SKY TURNED BLUE-BLACK and star-studded even at high noon and, below it, the curve of the earth, stretching for hundreds of miles in all directions. And if you are carrying the right kind of camera, you can photograph the homes and factories and highways below, even the military bases, with their guided missiles tipped with nuclear bombs.
Francis Gary Powers had the right kind of camera, but on May 1, 1960, he was taking pictures in the worst possible place, high over the Russian city of Sverdlovsk. It was Powers’s twenty-eighth flight in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane, and his last.
Powers saw an orange flash and felt a brutal thud of concussive air, and then his airplane began to come apart. The canopy tore free, and Powers was dragged into the open sky, held to the disintegrating U-2 only by his oxygen hose. He managed to rip himself loose and open his parachute. Powers abandoned any thought of using the poison-tipped suicide needle he had been issued, to prevent being taken alive, and furthermore he had not been able to reach the switch that would have shredded the aircraft’s top-secret film and camera equipment.
The government of the Soviet Union captured Powers and his illicit photographs intact, red-handed proof that the United States was violating international law by flying spy planes over Russia. It was one of the greatest American humiliations of the Cold War.1 Worse, it was literally a poke in the eye. The United States dared not use the U-2 over Russia anymore, so the nation’s military planners were blinded, their most reliable source of intelligence lost.
But not for long. Less than five months later, on August 19, Powers was sentenced in a Moscow courtroom to ten years’ imprisonment for spying. On the same day US Air Force lieutenant colonel Harold Mitchell, flying a modified C-119 cargo plane about three hundred miles west of Hawaii, swooped in on a metal and ceramic capsule dangling from a parachute. After two unsuccessful tries, Mitchell snagged the capsule at an altitude of eighty-five hundred feet. A spacecraft had been brought back to earth intact—an essential prerequisite to human spaceflight.
Ever since Russia’s 1957 Sputnik triumph, the US space program had been stuck in second place. Here at last was something to brag about. The scientists, engineers, and pilots involved in the project were celebrated as heroes of the space age. They were feted with medals and parades and made guest appearances on the big TV shows.2
They deserved it all, though few Americans knew why. Discoverer 14’s reentry capsule had been filled with photos covering 1.4 million square miles of the Soviet Union, more than all the images shot during the twenty-four successful U-2 missions over Russia. Among the images it captured were pictures of the same missile base that Powers had been sent to photograph. Discoverer was the name created for public consumption. The program’s true name was Corona, a campaign, funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that built the world’s first photo-reconnaissance satellites.
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