Features 19 kite projects, step-by-step instructions in full colour.

From Kites to Cold War tells the story of the evolution of manned airborne reconnaissance. Long a desire of military commanders, the ability to see the terrain ahead and gain foreknowledge of enemy intent was realized when Chinese airmen mounted kites to surveil their surroundings. Kite technology was slow to spread, and by the late nineteenth century European nations had developed the balloon and airship to conduct this mission. By 1918, it was obvious that the airplane had become the reconnaissance platform of the future. Used successfully by many nations during the Great War, aircraft technology and capability experienced its most rapid evolutionary period during World War II. Entering the war with just basic airborne imagery capabilities, by V-E and V-J days, air power pioneers greatly improved imagery collection and developed sophisticated airborne signals intelligence collection capabilities. The United States and other nations put these capabilities to use as the Cold War immediately followed. Flying near the periphery of and sometimes directly over the Soviet Union, airborne reconnaissance provided the intelligence necessary to stay one step ahead of the Soviets throughout the Cold War.

This report is divided into two parts: Part I includes the design, development, operation, and engineering evaluation of Tiros I; Part II is concerned with the meteorological uses of the television data. The developments leading to the design of the Tiros I meteorological satellite, the technical design and development of the Tiros I spacecraft and its instruments, the details of launch, tracking, and data acquisition, and an engineering evaluation of the satellite system and its instrumentation are described in detail in Chapters 1-7. The uses of the television pictures from Tiros I are discussed in a series of 11 articles (Chapters 8-18) by the staff members of the U.S. Weather Bureau, Meteorological Satellite Laboratories. Methods for using cloud pictures to identify synoptic scale and mesoscale phenomena and limited detection of wind patterns are described in case studies. Appendix A shows some of the basic photogrammetry used to locate geographically the cloud features in the television pictures.