Harl-Man

UHH friends
I posted the following in the wrong place earlier today, it should have been here in general chit-chat, my apologies to all of you.

I’m from Rochester, NY the city where George Eastman founded KODAK.
Beyond the film(s) many of us have used and still use, KODAK was also (behind the scenes) instrumental in the top secret program known as GAMBIT.
I personally knew one of their scientists (now diseased) who worked on this program and had to keep his work secret for many years.
Photography for many of us is a passion, enabling us to record our views of nature, family and history, but for many KODAK employees it was their daily toil to enable our nation to see and record from outer space what was happening on the ground.
If you can, visit Rochester, NY and the Rochester Museum and Science Center to learn more of this photographic history.
Regards,
Harley Bowman

https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/digital-exclusives/declassified-cold-war-satellite-camera-returns-home-to-rochester/amp/

Bob Mevis Loc: Plymouth, Indiana

Thanks Harley.

dancers Loc: melbourne.victoria, australia

could you mean deceased......??

Harl-Man

Yes
Sorry

dancers Loc: melbourne.victoria, australia

BIG difference! LOL

Bmarsh Loc: Bellaire, MI

Could only see trucks in a parking lot?? I worked for Perkin-Elmer back in the 70's and their cameras could read license plates from space. How did the Gambit camera get it's data back to earth? The P-E camera dropped big containers of film that were snagged out of the air by C-130's over the Pacific Ocean. But such cameras allowed both Russia and the USA to "trust but verify". During the Cold War years.

wrangler5 Loc: Missouri

At least it worked better than the D21 drone program, a Mach 3 drone with a camera designed to be launched over the Pacific (originally from an SR-71, in most cases from a dedicated B-52) and fly into the interior of China. It was supposed to take pictures of their nuclear test site, turn around and fly back out over the Pacific, where the camera would be ejected with a parachute, to be caught on its descent by a C-130 capture aircraft. The drone would crash at sea.

But in the years it was operational, '68-'71, it never worked - no cameras were ever recovered, either because the drone didn't return or the camera package wasn't caught. It used film, though, presumably from Kodak. Probably the same stuff the SR-71s were using at the time, because Beale AFB, where the unit was based, had the processing equipment on hand.

Harl-Man

Thanks for your insightful post

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

Thanks for posting this Harley.
--Bob