The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is one of the 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. which designs, builds and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the United States government. It also coordinates collection and analysis of information from airplane and satellite reconnaissance by the military services and the Central Intelligence Agency. It is funded through the National Reconnaissance Program, which is part of the National Foreign Intelligence Program.

The NRO works closely with its intelligence and space partners, which include the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the United States Strategic Command, Naval Research Laboratory and many other high level agencies and organizations. The NRO is responsible for operating Ground Stations around the world which collect and distribute intelligence gathered from reconnaissance satellites.

The NRO was established in 1960 to develop the nation's revolutionary satellite reconnaissance systems. It was endorsed by Dwight D. Eisenhower in February 1958 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first orbital satellite. The need for the agency obtained greater urgency when Gary Powers was shot down in a Lockheed U-2 on May 1, 1960.

The NRO's first photo reconnaissance satellite program was called "Corona". The Corona program, whose existence was declassified February 24, 1995, existed from August 1960 to May 1972, although the first test flight occurred on February 28, 1959. The Corona system used (sometimes multiple) film capsules dropped by satellites, which were recovered mid-air by military craft. The first successful recovery from space occurred on August 12, 1960, and the first image from space was seen six days later. The first imaging resolution was 8 meters, which was improved to 2 meters. Individual images covered, on average, an area of approximately 10 by 120 miles (16 by 190 km). The last Corona mission (the 145th), was launched May 25, 1972, and this mission's last images were taken May 31, 1972.

From May 1962 to August 1964, the NRO conducted 12 mapping missions as part of the "Argon" system. Only seven of these missions were successful.

In 1963, the NRO conducted a mapping mission using higher resolution imagery, as part of the "Lanyard" program. The Lanyard program flew one successful mission.

Missions of the NRO subsequent to 1972 are still classified, and portions of many earlier programs remain unavailable to the public.

The existence of the NRO was declassified by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, as recommended by the Director of Central Intelligence on September 18, 1992.

A Washington Post article in September 1995 reported that the NRO had quietly hoarded between $1 billion and $1.7 billion in unspent funds without informing the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, or Congress. The CIA was in the midst of an inquiry into the NRO's funding because of complaints that the agency had spent $300 million of hoarded funds from its classified budget to build a new headquarters building in Chantilly, Virginia a year earlier. The presence of the classified new headquarters was revealed by the Federation of American Scientists who obtained unclassified copies of the blueprints filed with the building permit application. After 9/11 those blueprints were apparently classified. The reports of an NRO slush fund were true. According to former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith, who led the investigation: "Our inquiry revealed that the NRO had for years accumulated very substantial amounts as a 'rainy day fund.'"

In 1999 the NRO embarked on a project with Boeing entitled Future Imagery Architecture to create a new generation of imaging satellites.

[Source: Wikipedia]

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