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Spy Sats and Subs: The U.S. Military's Secret Deep-Sea Operations ( Source- The National Interest / Author- Steve Weintz)

USS Parche ( SSN 683) ( Source- Wikimedia Commons / Author- United States Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- Steve Weintz Seemingly ripped from the pages and screens of a geopolitical thriller, one of the Cold War's most incredible adventures stretched from outer space to the ocean floor, involved bus-sized satellites and deep-diving subs, and pulled together sailors, spooks and scientists into a secret new national capability. On June 15, 1971, eleven years after the first spy satellite began taking its photos and the first submarine reached the bottom of Earth's oceans, a U.S. Air Force Titan III missile lofted a spacecraft the size of a Greyhound bus into orbit. The first of America's third-generation spysats, the KH-9 HEXAGON carried 33 miles of film and four recovery capsules to return it all to Earth. Its cameras and film stock could count the slices of a pizza from 100 miles up. In those pre-electronic-imaging days, large film cameras a