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during the Cold War, a period of intense rivalry after World War Two between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, both major superpowers invested in spy satellites.
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And some of the engineers who worked on US government programs didn't even know for sure they were helping the U.
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S spy.
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They were sworn to secrecy, and they had suspicions that their work was internationally important.
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The project was declassified in 2011 so now they could talk about it.
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Program was conducted with strict need to know basis over the life of the program.
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About 100 miles of film was exposed, providing almost a half a million images of the Soviet Union.
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It was a masterful performance.
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Then E.
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Right now way couldn't tell anybody what we worked on.
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Friends, family, even our wives.
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She was always fighting off somebody asking, What heck does your husband do?
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He's never here.
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It was kind of tough in the early years, particularly parties and stuff.
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When people would ask you, What do you do?
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Well, I'm an engineer.
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That's about all you could say, and I could remember quite well the feeling that we were contributing to something that we thought was important to the country and fortunately were successful because I think it led Teoh a more peaceful world.
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I'm John Schaefer worked at Eastman Kodak for 35 years.
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We worked in the area that we couldn't talk about what we worked there, and we used to call it research and engineering.
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It was the government side of the business where we worked on Spy in the Sky satellites.
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We didn't have a need to know what the government was doing, and we was drummed into us.
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We knew they weren't taking the pictures of amusement parks in the United States.
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We knew that was foreign territory that they were looking at.
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Gambit was able to at its best, imagery identify objects that were smaller than 1 ft in size.
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It's one thing to know that an object is there.
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It's another thing to know how quickly it's advancing.
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So say we're interested in the development of intercontinental ballistic missile began but allowed us to not only identify its location, but we could identify whether or not it was becoming a more sophisticated weapon.
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So it was an effort, really, to safely observe what the Soviets in the Chinese and others were up to.
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Even to this day, we continue to classify the best resolution capability of the campus system.
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This is a building that was owned by the Navy.
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But Kodak had done a lot of work here.
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This is where it all started.
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My role was in the systems group image motion.
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Compensation was a very, very significant contributor.
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Two Emmys resolution Because the satellite is moving fast over the surface of the Earth, you're taking high resolution photography with very long focal length lenses.
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You've got to either move the camera or move the film to avoid smear.
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We chose to move the film because you can't really pan the camera.
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We firmly believe that we helped the U.
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S.
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Government and the U.
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S.
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Air Force understand what the threat to the United States waas.
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I feel that most of us were very proud of the work we did.
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It would save lives.
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So to the extent that we could contribute to this program, I felt good.
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There was a feeling of patriotism because what we were doing was over and above anything anyone could hope toe work on a lot of the people that graduated from school the same time I did were drafted and went into the service and we're in areas.
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We had deferments because of what we were doing.
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You knew there were people out there.
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They're making bigger sacrifices.
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And if there's anything we could do to stop that, it was well worth working on mhm.
