TTB and the Corona/Keyhole Satellite Program

Long-time Townsend Brown inquirer Jan Lundquist – aka 'Rose' in The Before Times – has her own substantial archive to share with readers and visitors to this site. This forum is dedicated to the wealth of material she has compiled: her research, her findings, and her speculations.
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Jan Lundquist
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TTB and the Corona/Keyhole Satellite Program

Post by Jan Lundquist »

I can't prove that Townsend was involved with the Keyhole satellite program, but "Morgan" once told Linda about photographs that were like viewing through a keyhole.
The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972. Google acquired Keyhole in 2004, and Keyhole's Earth Viewer reached a wide public as Google Earth in 2005.
Origins of Google Earth Jeremy Norman’s HistoryofInformation.com Exploring the History of Information and Media through Timeline
https://www.historyofinformation.com/de ... tryid=3145

Once I started Looking I found that Townsend's trail runs closely to many of the events that contributed to the US Space program and i post about that elsewhere. I also noted that three of his close friends and associates had some unique expertise in photography:
  • Fenmore Johnson is considered a pioneer in underwater photography. He and Townsend met aboard Eldridge Johnson's yacht, The Caroline, on the Johnson-Smithsonian Deep Sea Expedition in 1933.
  • W. Bradford Shank wrote the 1939 book on Filters and Their Uses. He would go on to work at Los Alamos during the war, partner with Townsend in his some of his post war activities, and advise Hollywood on films about the Atomic Bomb.
  • Edward W.S. Hull, Townsend's "model maker" was the young USMC pilot who flew reconnaissance over Iwo Jima. He had a lifelong interest in photography and in oceanographic research. (He also wrote a couple of books that were published by the Oakridge Atomic Energy Agency).
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Re: TTB and the Corona/Keyhole Satellite Program

Post by natecull »

Just a quick note on Morgan's comment here:
The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites
Yep. The Keyhole secret project name had been long declassified and was well-known in the Internet community by the time this company got set up as a startup. So the private imaging company name, as a homage to that secret project, would have been an instance of typical 1990s "nerd humour", since we nerds as a sub-species absolutely love tech and spy and military references.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History
The core technology behind Google Earth was originally developed at Intrinsic Graphics in the late 1990s. At the time, the company was developing 3D gaming software libraries.[9] As a demo of their 3D software, they created a spinning globe that could be zoomed into, similar to the Powers of Ten film.[9] The demo was popular, but the board of Intrinsic wanted to remain focused on gaming, so in 1999, they created Keyhole, Inc., headed by John Hanke.[9] Keyhole then developed a way to stream large databases of mapping data over the internet to client software, a key part of the technology,[10] and acquired patchworks of mapping data from governments and other sources.[9] The product, called "Keyhole EarthViewer", was sold on CDs for use in fields such as real estate, urban planning, defense, and intelligence; users paid a yearly fee for the service.[10]
As an another example of this kind of "nerd humour", the name "Google Earth" is also a similarly joking reference to an all-powerful computer program called "Earth" from Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel, "Snow Crash".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
Many virtual globe programs, including NASA World Wind and Google Earth, bear a resemblance to the "Earth" software developed by the CIC in Snow Crash. One Google Earth co-founder claimed that Google Earth was modeled after Snow Crash, while another co-founder said that it was inspired by Powers of Ten.[21] Stephenson later referenced this in another of his novels, Reamde.[22]


Just noting this to ground the conversation a little: Morgan circa 2005 knowing the origins of the 1999 tech company name "Keyhole" does not necessarily mean that there are any specifically military connections between the Keyhole project and Keyhole the company. But on the other hand, as Wikipedia notes, Keyhole the company did also have "defense/intelligence" customers, so like all Silicon Valley things, the lines between military and civilian in the Internet industry are blurry.

Regards, Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
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Re: TTB and the Corona/Keyhole Satellite Program

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Nate, I think Morgan was very intentional in his mention of the name. The technology that came along in the nineties would not have been possible without those fabulous cameras the Keyhole carried.
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Re: The Missing Notebooks and Spy Satellites

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Now that more than fifty years have passed, we are able to learn more about the early satellite missions than we have known before. The story at the time was our satellites were to be collecting tor the researchers participating in the International 57-58 Geophysical Year.

Now we know that surveillance purpose was their first and foremost purpose. The programs were under the purview of the CIA, the airforce and navy were in charge of the rockets. To them, satellites were just "payloads". Then came the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Organization, so secret that its existence was not revealed to the public until many years later. That seems to be the organization that brought Townsend to Chantilly.

When Townsend took a small boat to row to from the Duchess in the Potomoc to visit Mrs. Scattergood (according to Helen) he was most certainly going to the Scattergood farm, which had become the CIA HQ in VA. Given the proximate timing, I would wager that he was participating in some sort of transition planning for the forthcoming handover to the NRO.

The notebook gap begins right around the same time. Linda believes those are the notebooks he took with him on his trip to San Antonio.
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