Historians sometimes postulate that fine details are lost in just a few years, larger pieces of the picture in a couple of decades, and major elements in some time frame longer than that. The desire to pin down what happened is one of the things that make historians into detectives, continually rediscovering and reinterpreting the past. So it is, Robert Dienesch would say, of the reconnaissance satellite. Most people of the Boomer generation, who lived this history, remember Sputnik in October 1957. The shock that followed the Soviet Union's orbiting of a satellite, the radio signal emitted by the satellite, and the romance of the space-faring dog Laika, who followed in a second orbiter, captured the imagination. Details such as the relationship between space rocketry and the nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile, or the concept of satellites as platforms for other purposes—like spying—are dimly recalled if at all.
President Dwight D....