Four Black Mice and America's First Spy Satellite

In 1959 the U.S. Air Force told the world it was launching mice into orbit. Discoverer 3 carried four black mice. They never came home — and neither did the story. Behind the biology cover was CORONA: the first American spy satellite, built to photograph the Soviet Union from space and drop the film back to Earth in a bucket that a cargo plane caught in mid-air. This is the story of the twelve failures before it worked, the capsule that came down on the wrong side of the world, the photograph that covered more Soviet territory in one flight than every U-2 mission combined, and the intelligence number that turned out to be wrong. Every frame in this video comes from public domain or openly licensed archives. Every claim is sourced from declassified U.S. government records. CHAPTERS 0:00 Four mice that never came home 0:50 The cover story 4:52 Going blind 6:29 The diagnostic flight 9:29 The flag 10:34 The bucket of film 12:38 The number that was wrong 14:28 Keeping the secret 15:52 The archive opens CREDITS Fairchild C-119J photographs: National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. Ambient wind: "Cold Front Blowing In" by kjy883, via Freesound, CC BY 3.0. Narration: synthetic voice. #ColdWar #SpySatellite #CORONA #Declassified #History