[music playing]
NEIL ARMSTRONG: That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
LANCE REDDICK: There are those who believe that behind
the scenes of one of America's greatest
and most celebrated endeavors lies
a treasure trove of secrets.
When you talk about space, you can get into the top secret
very, very quickly.
With all secrets, highly classified programs,
there's a very small group of people in the know.
There were two initiatives of the early space program.
One peaceful, and one war-like.
For more than half a century, the United States Space
program has accomplished feats beyond
our wildest imaginations.
We've sent men to the moon, placed a rover on Mars,
and launched a probe that's still orbiting Jupiter.
But while these are some of the best known achievements,
is there another, more secret agenda?
Perhaps the answers to these questions
are ready to be revealed in "America's Book of Secrets."
[music playing]
Chantilly, Virginia.
Summer, 1990.
Construction workers break ground
on a sprawling yet unidentified facility 25
miles west of Washington, DC.
After journalists questioned the purpose of the new complex,
the government abruptly and reluctantly admits
to the existence of a decades' long secret organization, the
National Reconnaissance Office.
Most of the planning on secret space missions
happened in the National Reconnaissance Office, which
was established in 1961, but actually
wasn't declassified until 1992.
So there were a period of decades where
the Pentagon would not even name this office
or acknowledge that it existed.
STEVE TRIMBLE: The NRO was one of the most closely guarded
secrets of the Cold War, until they decided
to build a huge headquarters campus in Chantilly, Virginia,
in 1992, and people started wondering, well, what is this?
And this whole history of what they had done in the Cold War
started coming out very slowly after that.
LANCE REDDICK: On February 22, 1995,
President Bill Clinton declassified one of the NRO's
most clandestine Cold War spy operations, that had first
been launched in the 1950s.
The CORONA satellite program.
On my mark.
3, 2, 1.
Mark.
The top secret CORONA project was a direct response
to the launch of Sputnik.
There was a recognition that satellites were the future.
It was simply too risky to fly reconnaissance aircraft
over certain locations.
STEVE TRIMBLE: CORONA was our first imagery satellite.
It was very primitive.
You have to remember, we didn't have digital communications
at the time.
So it was one thing to have something in orbit
that was taking pictures.
Well, how could you get the pictures down to the Earth
where we can actually see them?
And the solution they came up with
was they ejected the film capsule in a container
that could survive reentry.
A parachute opens, a C-130 comes along with a hook
out the front to snag it as it's descending in this parachute.
And then if it was over the ocean,
a ship would be nearby to grab the capsule before it sank.
But that was the only way to do it back then.
The public got to know CORONA a little bit
through its cover story, which was that they were
weather satellites launched on behalf of or in conjunction
with NASA.
No one's going to question the need for weather satellites,
so why would they think there's something else?
But really, there's a whole lot of something else.
STEVE TRIMBLE: There's been a long series
of declassified files, starting with the CORONA satellites.
The information that tends to be the most closely guarded
secrets in the US government are the sources
and means of how the intelligence community
gets their information.
Those facts are considered to be the most treasured secrets.