first of all welcome to the udvar housing center i want to congratulate you and thank you all for your service i know you're retired turning veterans i understand and uh and all enrolling in in college and that's that's just absolutely fantastic i i have always been a big believer that the military is a great place to get a start and then after that when you kind of have a little bit of a feeling as to what you want to do with your life to go ahead and start your college education so congratulations to all of you for that a lot of people think that the sr-NUMBER_TOKEN was developed as a result of gary powers being shot down in his uNUMBER_TOKEN on may NUMBER_TOKENst NUMBER_TOKEN and as you'll see as we go through the dates that's not actually true it's not untrue but it's not a true fact there there's more to it than just that july NUMBER_TOKENth NUMBER_TOKEN was NUMBER_TOKEN rather was the first uh soviet union overflight by a u-NUMBER_TOKEN aircraft done by the central intelligence agency two important things during the cold war and you all are familiar with the cold war i'm sure to some extent the soviet union was a closed society we needed to know what was going on in there with their weapons development with their missile development what were they doing we felt the only way to really do that was overfly the soviet union the uNUMBER_TOKEN he refers to is the lockheed u-NUMBER_TOKEN a high-altitude reconnaissance plane developed by aeronautical engineer kelly johnson earlier during world war ii johnson led the design of the p-NUMBER_TOKEN lightning p-NUMBER_TOKENs were used during operation vengeance where the u.s located and shot down japanese admiral yamamoto over the pacific yamamoto was then the leader of the japanese imperial navy and one of the key architects of the japanese attack on pearl harbor an original pNUMBER_TOKEN is currently on display at the museum the u-NUMBER_TOKEN was designed to fly above NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN feet safe from the range of the soviet mig-NUMBER_TOKEN their best interceptors at the time and safe from soviet radar and missile defense systems or so it was believed first flight was in july NUMBER_TOKENth NUMBER_TOKEN two very important things happened at that point the first one was they found out our intelligence experts and our scientists found out that the information that the youtube brought back was second to none it was fantastic it was it was exactly what they were looking for great pictures they could see the missiles they could see what was going on in the soviet union they could see the military bases very well that was the good news the bad news was that the soviets knew the uNUMBER_TOKEN was there they could see it on the radar they could track the uNUMBER_TOKEN they knew it was there so our scientists at that point felt that probably four to five years before soviet missile technology caught up to the uNUMBER_TOKEN and boy they hit one hit that one pretty much right on the head because it wasn't but you know four years later the powers was shot down over the soviet union in his uNUMBER_TOKEN may NUMBER_TOKENst NUMBER_TOKEN. following that in NUMBER_TOKEN when president eisenhower worked with khrushchev to get powers back there were no more manned overflights
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