, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.of the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence organization whose existence wasn’t declassified until 1992, but you have perhaps come across some of its creepy kitsch: patches from its surveillance-satellite missions. Considerthat shows a yellow octopus strangling the globe with its tentacles, with the words “Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach” stitched beneath. Yikes.
Lockheed execs began contemplating what they would need to do to make that happen. Number one, carving out that space in space required…well…space. “During the 1950s, the Bay Area was full of just unused land that was fairly cheap,” says Bateman. But it wasn’t just the area’s wide-openness that appealed to Lockheed. “Most importantly, Stanford University was located there,” he continues. The defense contractor could siphon smart engineers from the school.
Starting in the late 1950s, Stanford created the Industrial Affiliates Program, through which Lockheed employees taught university courses—ensuring students’ education would benefit future intelligence-industrial contributors—and also attended university classes, so they could stay up on the latest developments.
Creating such kinds of film pushed photographic science along. As Bateman’s paper points out, “Technology is not just ‘applied science.’ Rather, technological needs can also lead to scientific advances.” “In New York, it’s kind of a different story,” says Bateman, speaking of the same era in the Northeast. “There isn’t really this wave of anti-government sentiment.” Partly, perhaps, because the Rochester Institute of Technology trended more conservative, and partly, Bateman’s work posits, because “the intelligence community offered photographic science students access to some of the most advanced technologies in their field.” That’s a pretty tasty carrot.