The first time I heard about this cold war spy satellite program.
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Even the mere existence of the satellites, which would be built by a band of veteran engineers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., would remain officially secret until July 2023. That’s when the National Reconnaissance Office declassified a one-page acknowledgment about Parcae. Since its establishment in 1961, the NRO has directed and overseen the nation’s spy-satellite programs, including ones for photoreconnaissance, communications interception, signals intelligence, and radar. With this scant declassification, the Parcae program could at least be celebrated by name and its overall mission revealed during the NRL’s centennial celebration that year.
Aspects of the Parcae program had been unofficially outed over the years by a few enterprising journalists in such venues as Aviation Week & Space Technology and The Space Review, by historians like Day, and even by a Russian military advisor in a Ministry of Defense journal. This article is based on these sources, along with additional interviews and written input from Navy engineers who designed, built, operated, and managed Parcae and its precursor satellite systems. They confirm a commonly held but nevertheless profound understanding about the United States during that era. Simply put, there was nothing quite like the paranoia and high stakes of the Cold War to spur engineers into creative frenzies that rapidly produced brilliant national-security technologies, including surveillance systems like Parcae.
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women drivers
A fascinating discussion between Jessica Brockmole and Anne Helen Peterson
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In the first two decades of the century, automakers advertised widely in newspapers and magazines, to both men and to women, as they tried to find the ideal markets for their cars. Early automotive ads drew on imagery of the Gibson Girl and the New Woman, showing driving as being an activity for the healthy, outdoorsy, and free-spirited woman, and they offered positive messages about the enjoyment and independence women could find behind the wheel.
But that, of course, changed as time went on. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, automakers had a better idea of what sold and how to efficiently build those models. Automakers had to become more targeted in their advertising, selling their brand rather than selling their particular piece of automotive engineering. Curtis Publishing Company, one of the largest magazine publishers in the country, dove into researching automotive consumers and users in order to attract the auto industry’s lucrative advertising dollars. When they noticed very little auto advertising on the pages of their Ladies’ Home Journal, they began to specifically study women and their car purchases.
Despite all this research, however, the conversation between the auto industry and their female consumers remained relatively one-sided. These market researchers tended to interview the male automotive dealers that the women patronized rather than the female buyers themselves. When the researchers did occasionally question women, they cherry-picked the answers for their final reports that conformed to acceptable ideas about women and cars.
Despite interviewees talking about economy, reliability, mechanical prowess, and ease of driving, Curtis seized upon scant mentions of style and appearance and they highlighted these in their reports of the studies. These carefully curated results confirmed what market researchers, and the American population as a whole, already assumed about women and their preferences—that women might tremble at the thought of being responsible for such a powerful machine but might be persuaded to purchase one at the sight of a pretty body style.
No matter that women themselves said they appreciated mechanical innovations under the hood. Men were skeptical, and interviews with car dealers—who considered women in the showroom as flighty and clueless but nonetheless bossy and influential—validated that skepticism. This supposed confirmation, under the guise of research, reassured those Americans who had been anxious about women gaining ground in technology use. If all that women were after was an attractive car to be seen in, they would not really encroach in the masculine domain of technological knowledge.
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05:31 in General Commentary, history, history of technology, transportatiaon | Permalink | Comments (0)