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That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

There are those who believe that behind the scenes of one of America's greatest

and most celebrated endeavors lies a treasure trove of secrets.

When you talk about space, you can get into the top secret very, very quickly.

All secret, highly classified programs.

There's a very small group of people in the know.

There were two initiatives of the early space program, one peaceful and one

warlike.

For more than half a century, the United States space program has accomplished

feats beyond our wildest imaginations.

We've sent men to the moon, placed a rover on Mars.

and launched a probe that's still orbiting Jupiter.

But while these are some of the best -known achievements, is there another,

secret agenda?

Perhaps the answers to these questions are ready to be revealed in America's

Book of Secrets.

Wallops Island, Virginia.

July 15th, 2020.

The newly minted U .S. Space Force launches a powerful Minotaur 4 rocket

orbit.

On board are multiple reconnaissance satellites.

At least, that's what the public is told.

Recently, the Space Force was in charge of launching Minotaur satellites into

outer space.

And people began to wonder...

Why? Why is the Space Force, in one of its first acts, sponsoring the launching

of these satellites?

We're talking about tiny satellites, hundreds of them that can be launched to

give you instantaneous readout of what's happening on the ground in areas where

there's no Internet capabilities.

They said the Minotaurs were simply surveillance satellites, very high

surveillance satellites. But in reality, we don't know what might be aboard

them.

a lot of classified things that the public will not know about or will not

about for decades until it's finally released.

The satellites that were launched there definitely have military capabilities,

but we don't know what exactly they do.

Launched in December 2019,

Space Force is the sixth branch of the United States military.

According to its congressional mandate, its mission is to provide freedom of

operation for the United States in, from, and to space, as well as to

prompt and sustained space operations.

However, some are beginning to suspect that Space Force is also preparing for

combat on a battlefield that exists not on Earth, but among the stars.

Why? Because it's not the first time that potentially deadly global conflicts

reach to such heights.

We sometimes forget that NASA and the space program was born in a military

confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Back in 1957, the United States was caught totally off guard.

October 4th, 1957.

At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union,

the Soviets successfully launched the world's first satellite.

Sputnik 1.

The Russian probe circled the Earth for just three weeks in a low elliptical

orbit. However, its impact on global events is colossal.

The Soviets shocked the world by the launch of Sputnik, and suddenly

about the Cold War changed.

Sputnik was a two -foot diameter ball with an antenna.

Circled around once, maybe twice, and that was it. But it was the first, and

worked. And it scared the hell out of the United States in 1957 when that

happened.

Just one year after the launch of Sputnik 1, the National Aeronautics and

Administration has unveiled to an eager public NASA is an inspiring American

endeavor with a stated mission to explore the stars.

NASA was created deliberately as a completely civilian agency, separate

military, but the military had its own need to be present in space.

The number of people in the U .S. government had been looking at Soviet

satellites,

rockets, and such like.

So NASA became a sort of useful repository for all of this. It became a

way for the U .S. military to say, look, this is all peaceful and friendly and

open and scientific. Well, a lot of it was, but not all of it.

Many experts contend this is the moment when America's secret space program

began.

When we use the term secret space program, what we're really talking about

separate parallel development of space technology starting back in the 1950s.

Guys at NASA, the engineers, the astronauts, they had no idea that this

parallel secret space program even existed.

Secrecy was one of the foundations of the early space program, and as a

consequence, there were two initiatives sponsored by the government.

One peaceful and one war life.

Prior to the formation of NASA and just six days after the launch of Sputnik 1,

the U .S. military began to fund a secret program that would result in the

Boeing X -20, also known as the Dinosaur, the details of which

were only recently uncovered.

Back in 1957, Boeing got a contract for one of the most amazing revolutionary

aircraft that's ever been conceived of.

And that's the Dinosaur Program.

The X -20, or Dinosaur, is effectively a one -man space shuttle that the U .S.

Air Force and NASA's predecessor organization, the National Advisory

for Aeronautics, started developing in the mid -1950s as a way to start testing

some early technologies for eventual space flight.

The Air Force wanted to use the boost glide system, where you're putting a

spaceship on top of a rocket, send the rocket into space, the spaceship

separates from the rocket, and then it's a glider.

and it comes down very steeply, picks up speed, gets to Mach 20 or so, then

pitches up while it's still at 100 ,000 feet above the Earth, and then just

coasts along the top of the atmosphere.

And it can do that for a very long time.

The dinosaur program would run for six years and cost more than $6 billion in

today's dollars before it was abruptly canceled, mere weeks after the

assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Although no documented evidence has ever been produced that any dinosaur craft

were actually launched into space, there are many who believe that the program

was not abandoned.

It may have been just the first of many projects buried by President Lyndon

Johnson under a new layer of secrecy.

President Johnson was obsessive about secrecy. So rather than go public about

the space program, he buried it deeper.

The whole point about black budgets is that there's a sum of money that

doesn't approve specifically.

NASA is a great cover for the Department of Defense.

So you've got public funding for NASA, and you've got the Department of Defense

hitching a ride, and that's the best cover of all.

We'll probably never know.

how much is being spent on secret space program activity.

Government accounting is, shall we say, murky at the best of times.

People say follow the money. Well, the point is you can't, and you're not

supposed to be able to.

We see our astronauts waving at us from the International Space Station, but

that's only the tip of the iceberg, because you realize that the CIA, the

many branches of the government, are dealing with secret projects, most of

give us reconnaissance and intelligence about the capabilities of enemy forces.

In 2014, the federal government revealed an ambitious Cold War lunar project

that had existed for more than 50 years, Project Horizon.

Project Horizon was the United States Army's plan for building

a fortified, permanent, inhabited installation on the Moon.

And it was managed by a whole new Army Corps, combining

engineers, artillery, construction, and infantry, and guided missiles.

The manned Moon Bay was to have 12 permanent residents.

and those astronauts would have a strategic mission that included

reconnaissance. But this was to be armed. Make no mistake about it, this

military mission.

According to official records, Project Horizon was ordered abandoned by

President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960.

But is it possible that the secret program's mission may actually have been

accomplished?

is only the president for a maximum of eight years. But these colonels and

generals that have 30-, 40-, 50 -year ambitions and plans that they're putting

into motion.

So is it plausible that the U .S. could have built a secret military base along

the lines of Project Horizon's proposals on the moon?

Yeah, it's absolutely plausible.

How does the public learn about such large -scale but classified American

programs?

Well, on occasion, even with the strictest of security protocols in

intriguing evidence has been uncovered, and completely by accident.

Chantilly, Virginia, summer 1990.

Construction workers break ground on a sprawling, yet unidentified facility 25

miles west of Washington, D .C.

After journalists questioned the purpose of the new complex, the government

abruptly and reluctantly admits to the existence of a decades -long secret

organization, the National Reconnaissance Office.

Most of the planning on secret space missions happen in the National

Reconnaissance Office, which was established in 1961, but actually wasn't

declassified until 1992.

So there were a period of decades where the Pentagon would not even name this

office or acknowledge that it existed.

The NRO was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.

Until they decided to build a huge headquarters campus in Chantilly,

1992. And people started wondering, well, what is this? And this whole

of what they had done in the Cold War started coming out very slowly after

On February 22, 1995,

President Bill Clinton declassified one of the NRO's most clandestine Cold War

spy operations that had first been launched in the 1950s.

The Corona Satellite Program.

On my mark, three, two, one, start.

The top secret Corona project was a direct response to the launch of

Sputnik. There was a recognition that satellites were the future. It was

too risky to fly reconnaissance aircraft over certain locations.

Corona was our first imagery satellite.

It was very primitive. You have to remember we didn't have digital

communications at the time.

So it was one thing to have something in orbit that was taking pictures.

Well, how do you get the pictures down to the Earth where we can actually see

them? And the solution they came up with was they ejected the film capsule in a

container that could survive reentry.

A parachute opens.

The C -130 comes along with a hook out the front.

to snag it as it's descending in this parachute. And then if it was over the

ocean, a ship would be nearby to grab the capsule before it sank.

But that was the only way to do it back then.

The public got to know Corona a little bit through its cover story, which was

that they were a weather satellite launched on behalf of or in conjunction

NASA. No one's going to question the need for weather satellites, so why

they think there's something else?

Really, there's a whole lot of something else.

There's been a long series of declassified files, starting with the

satellite. The information that tends to be the most closely guarded secrets in

the U .S. government are the sources and means of how the intelligence community

gets their information. Those facts are considered to be the most

treasured secrets.

Although the Corona satellite program, which collected more than 800 ,000

from space, offered the United States an edge in espionage over the Soviets, it

was far from the only interstellar operation being conducted during the

War.

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, 2005.

While conducting a facilities check, NASA Special Agent Dan Oakland and a

security manager named Henry Butler stumble upon a mysterious locked door.

The men eventually get a master key and gain access to what at first appears to

be just a long -sealed storage room.

But searching the room with flashlights, they would soon make a confounding

discovery.

And they discovered some old boxes, and they opened them up, and inside they

found two spacesuits.

These two suits that no one had ever seen, and they looked a lot like NASA

suits, except that they weren't white. They were blue.

The blue was actually an Air Force blue, so it suggested that maybe it was for a

secret Air Force space program. And the suits were numbered 007 and 008,

suggesting that there were more of them, at least potentially eight of them. So

who were the pilots? Were they potential astronauts?

And what did these suits mean?

All these super -secret organizations do have a sense of humor sometimes. They

have their little in -jokes.

007 shows that it is a homage to James Bond. It is literally spies in

space.

Freedom of information inquiries into the origins of the bizarre spacesuits

would lead to another fascinating NRO declassification.

Another Cold War -era project known by the acronym M .O .L.

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL, was the first time America

tried to have basically a space lab that would be a permanent fixture

in Earth orbit where we could shuttle astronauts back and forth.

A veritable treasure trove of photographs and documents were released

Manned Orbiting Laboratory.

And the documents went into incredible detail, all highly classified at the

time, of course.

And the photographs were stunning.

The astronauts headed for the MOL were a special cadre of officers trained to

gather detailed photographs of Soviet missile silos, bases, and facilities.

The guys that were the manned orbiting laboratory astronauts, they had to keep

it so quiet that their wives didn't even know they were astronauts.

Imagine waking up 10 years later and realizing that your husband had been an

astronaut all along.

That's how secret this was.

It was going to be every month they would send up a new crew of astronauts,

they could be taking these pictures with this really amazing camera.

Then you could sift through these photos, find the ones that are the most

important. and send those down.

It was totally operationally fine.

It just got superseded, really, by the fact that the automated satellite

really had become so good, even by the late 60s, that they didn't really need a

manned orbiting platform to do that kind of work.

People say, well, the program was cancelled.

The plug was pulled.

But all that means is that the game has moved on. You don't just cancel a

program without it having been replaced by something else.

Even as the manned orbital laboratory was being shut down, another, more

advanced space program was being ready to take its place.

But hidden just beneath the surface of this new program's publicly announced

goals was a significant and extremely secretive military agenda.

Kennedy Space Center, Florida, April 12, 1981.

And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Space Shuttle Columbia, or FTS -1, soars into orbit.

America's space shuttle program is now the high -profile and hugely popular

public face of NASA.

Its launches, inspirational events.

Its astronauts, American icons.

And its ultimate aim?

Decidedly unclear.

As conceived, the proper name for the shuttle program is the Space

Transportation System.

So the question is, what are they actually transporting?

People say, well, where's the evidence for a secret space program?

The evidence is the shuttle itself.

At the Udvar -Hazy Center, part of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in

Chantilly, Virginia, James David is a curator of space history.

and an expert on America's shuttle program and its 135 missions that have

place over the course of three decades.

Behind me is the third space shuttle that was delivered to NASA.

The shuttle program was actually the program in which there was the closest

deepest cooperation between NASA and the Department of Defense and the

intelligence agencies.

And actually...

There's still a lot of secrecy concerning that relationship today.

Over the past 20 years, James has personally examined thousands of heavily

redacted declassified documents and uncovered many startling revelations.

I first saw some declassified Central Intelligence Agency or CIA documents in

the year 2000 that discussed one.

very, very small aspect of the relationship between NASA and

the intelligence agencies.

And then I also filed my own declassification request for documents

weren't releasing on their own.

The biggest revelation was the extent of cooperation between NASA

and the intelligence agencies.

The stated purpose for NASA's shuttle program was to launch new communications

satellites into space, maintain the International Space Station, and serve

orbiting laboratories.

However, James has discovered that these missions also, in many cases,

had ulterior motives.

Let me point out with this laser the payload bay doors of the shuttle.

The payload bay is 60 feet long and 15 feet wide.

And those dimensions were a larger area than what NASA needed for any of its

payloads. But to get Department of Defense and CIA support for the shuttle

program, NASA had to agree to the larger dimension.

So, of course, that meant a larger vehicle.

So then.

What else was NASA transporting into space aboard its shuttles for the CIA or

other American intelligence agencies?

In the early days of the shuttle program, the Department of Defense

flying about a third of all shuttle missions.

This was not only to launch satellites, but it was also to perform some

experiments.

Many of the military missions on the shuttle are still classified today. We

not know what took place during those missions.

Did they deploy a satellite?

Did they inspect a foreign satellite?

We don't know.

The existence of the programs, the operational details of the programs, and

intelligence, all of the above, were classified and for the most part still

classified today.

While the details of what technology was deployed and what covert experiments

were conducted haven't been revealed in their entirety, some of the missions

that have been declassified already offer tantalizing hints.

So the space shuttle was used to place classified military satellites into

orbit. In fact, Project Onyx, we know, was put into orbit by the shuttle

Atlantis in 1988.

The onyx refers to satellite radars.

So big radars in orbit that are looking at the Earth.

It can see through night. It can see through fog.

And it can create maps and pictures that are almost as clear as a photograph.

Although more than 700 billion astronauts...

have bravely carried out the space missions on behalf of NASA over the

the shuttle program's existence.

Another class of space explorers was actually intermingled with them.

They were known simply as Space Command.

In 1982, Space Command was set up, and this was part of the United States Air

Force originally.

The main spaceflight engineer program was the critical...

part of Space Command.

The Air Force's manned spaceflight engineer program was an effort to send

military troops into space on the space shuttle so that when the shuttle flew

confidential and classified missions, military troops could be there with

Space Command also had its own launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

And, according to reports...

Plans for a $3 billion stealth spaceport in Los Angeles for covert shuttle

missions outside those covered by NASA.

The plan was to have a permanent cadre of astronauts selected

separately from the normal astronaut program.

These people would be recruited from the same pool, but the training and the

operations, of course, were completely separate.

32 astronauts.

134 support personnel to make all this happen.

But the manned spaceflight engineering program and space command, this was to

absolutely 100 % a military program, military astronauts, a military mission.

We have main engine start.

Four, three, two, one, and liftoff.

Liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.

However, on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger

exploded just 73 seconds after launch off the coast of Cape Canaveral,

taking the lives of the seven astronauts aboard.

The national tragedy would cause a three -year suspension of NASA's space

shuttle program and ultimately put an end to the clandestine manned

engineer program.

Many experts are certain that the shuttle was being used for military

operations, but were actual space weapons being deployed?

Perhaps answers can be found by examining a classified Air Force

looks similar to the NASA Space Shuttle, but boasts a number of very different

capabilities that are out of this world.

Cape Canaveral, Florida. May 17, 2020.

The unmanned plane specifically designed for space travel, the X -37B.

is launched on its first mission as part of the U .S. Space Force.

One technology that's been around for a while, which is top secret, very little

publicity about it, is the space plane, the X -37.

It is robotic.

No astronauts inside at all.

It looks like a toy version of the space shuttle.

Think of the space shuttle with the gigantic rockets.

And then shrink it.

It launches on top of a rocket high up into the atmosphere.

It can linger in orbit for years.

Its longest mission is 780 days.

This is something that the Pentagon is really, really secret about.

So if the X -37B were to launch and it's on a classified mission, well, they

can't hide the fact that they launched it.

And you can even see it fly over if you track the orbit. But what you don't know

is what it's doing when it gets there.

The X -37 series of spacecraft was initiated in 1999 as part of a joint

between NASA and the Air Force with a stated mission to repair satellites that

were already in orbit.

However, in 2004, the program was then transferred to the Defense Advanced

Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and became classified.

in the aftermath of the cancellation of the space shuttle program.

And it was very clear at the time that the Air Force had some access to space

with the space shuttle, and they didn't want to lose it.

So the X -37B preserves that bespoke, unique military access.

So the X -37 mission does remain a secret.

What I can talk about is that the things that we put on that aircraft are

experiments.

It's more of a learning platform.

That's the reason why it stays in the classified world because it has to do

us. It has to do with the DOD part of it. That's the reason why it stays

classified.

But that's about all I can really discuss about that because it's an

experiment as it is right now.

For many observers, the significance of the X -37B isn't just what it does, but

also who makes it. A notoriously opaque division of the Boeing company known as

Phantom Works.

It is just one of many public -private partnerships that has rocketed the

space program into the 21st century.

There are a lot of commercial space organizations now like Bigelow Airspace,

Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic.

And they are putting their own investment dollars as well as government

investment dollars to create a next generation of space capabilities.

There's a new dimension to the game of secret space program and black budget.

And that new dimension is the private sector.

Because now you have all these companies that make accountability and scrutiny

even more difficult.

Because we in the United States live under a democracy, we have the Freedom

Information Act by which private citizens can actually get access to a

government information and even classified reports on occasion.

But private corporations are not covered by FOIA.

Many of the private space companies like SpaceX don't even have shareholders, so

there's no requirement to even be transparent with people who invest in

business, so they are able to be more opaque in what they're doing and

in.

Even though, by most accounts, a Cold War ended nearly 30 years ago,

insiders say that in the current geopolitical climate, the intense layer

secrecy shrouding American space missions is absolutely critical.

The Hainan Province.

November 24th, 2020.

China's Long March 5 rocket blasts off, reportedly, for the purpose of gathering

geological samples from the moon.

It's a startling, ambitious mission from an emerging space superpower, one that

some believe is also intent on staking its claim.

Many people don't realize this right now, but we are in an absolute Cold War

space race with China. China realizes that the next superpower economy is

to come from whoever holds the most ground on the moon.

So the Chinese are landing everywhere they can so that they can claim that

estate. And they have mining operations planned as soon as the technology

becomes available.

What we're seeing now is a new space race.

It's a struggle going on between the United States, between Russia, and

China to dominate space.

You're starting to see launches about once every week to every two weeks.

China, they're launching. Russia, they're launching.

What are they doing up there?

We actually have a lot of assets in space right now that are very expensive

complicated assets.

For example, the entire banking and stock exchange system uses a

satellite network up in geosynchronous orbit.

And if something were to happen to those satellites, the stock exchange would

collapse, at least be halted. The banking systems would shut down.

Our space assets, our economy, our weather reports, the Internet, all of it

done in outer space. And so it now becomes a matter of economic security to

protect our assets in outer space.

The U .S. Space Force's stated mission is indeed to protect allied interests in

space.

But if history is any guide, its actual mission may, by necessity,

encompass much more than has been revealed.

The Space Force asked for $15 billion in fiscal 2021.

Budget watchers have predicted that of that, about a third is in classified

space programs.

I'm excited about what's going on in space.

There's things all the way from satellite communications to cargo in

moving fuel around. When you talk about space, you can get into the top secret

very, very quickly.

But why the need for such secrecy about the agenda of Space Force and its

civilian partners?

Some suggest it's because the Cold War, which many believe had come to an end in

the early 1990s, has actually begun to heat back up.

February 2020.

Space Force Chief of Operations, General John Raymond.

voices concerns over the unusual and disturbing behavior of a pair of Russian

satellites. According to the general, the foreign probe's actions could be

classified as threatening.

There was an American intelligence satellite in orbit, and a Russian

approached and got close and stayed close.

This is concerning for a couple of reasons. There can be some sort of

sensor on the satellite that is looking at the American equipment.

Or in a more nefarious scenario, satellites can actually reach out in

actually disable or disarm another satellite.

You can send up a special kind of satellite that has the ability to line

another satellite and either dock with it.

use antennas to intercept or spoof what it's saying.

And in the last few years, there's been a lot of complaints that that's what the

Russians are attempting.

At the same time, we do have something kind of like it called GSAP that we use

in geostationary orbit.

What it actually does and how it does it is also very, very secret.

American and foreign satellites engaged in secret sabotage of one another?

If so, does that signal the early stages of an escalating space -based arms

race?

Do I think our adversaries are poking around in space?

Absolutely.

When you're talking about weaponizing space, we always consider our adversary

be able to have that capability.

Do I have proof of that? No. But I think I would be short -sighted if I didn't

think that was happening.

We control over 50 % of the satellites in outer space.

And a war in outer space would take place in a matter of minutes, not weeks

months. Because our rockets travel at 18 ,000 miles per hour, it takes only a

half an hour to strike targets anywhere on the surface of the planet Earth. So a

space war would be quick, brutal, and deadly.

And we want to make sure that doesn't happen.

Although mutually assured destruction would seem to inspire diplomatic

for conflicts revolving around outer space, what if the threats to mankind in

the galaxy are not only human in nature?

Robert Weirich notices an object some 15 million miles from Earth.

It's estimated to be more than 3 ,000 feet long and passing through our solar

system. The discovery of Oumuamua was a sensation.

Astronomers had never seen anything like it before. It looked artificial.

Because of its cylindrical shape, some people theorized that it might be an

extraterrestrial spacecraft.

If there's an alien threat, it's very likely that the U .S. military already

knows. It would be very difficult to conceive that we're being visited by

extraterrestrials without the U .S. military and specifically Space Force

knowing about it.

Astronomers had just 34 days to study the cigar -shaped contours of Oumuamua

speculate on its origin until it finally exited the solar system.

But for many experts, questions about Oumuamua were also reminders about the

need to prepare to combat any space -based threat to life on Earth.

Just to boil all this down, what if the secret space program isn't just to fight

wars in space against other satellites, isn't just to fight wars on planet

Earth, it is to protect the Earth because we believe they are coming.

The secret of a secret space program wouldn't be the hardware or the software

the military astronauts. It would be the alien presence. If that's what the

secret space program is really about, not just about Russia and China, but

meeting an extraterrestrial threat, then this is the biggest secret of all time.

Could the government actually be drawing up plans to confront an

extraterrestrial threat?

Some insiders suggest that not only is it taking place, but that it is part of

an even bolder strategy, one that would allow human beings to leave Earth for a

new home.

Boca Chica, Texas, July 2019.

Elon Musk celebrated rocketry company SpaceX.

Tests a prototype of a futuristic, potentially interplanetary vehicle.

The Starhopper.

Starhopper is a prototype for the Starship, which is a gigantic, state -of

-art vehicle that will one day perhaps take us to Mars to create the first Mars

colony. This is a whole new era, because Elon Musk envisions a network

of Starships.

taking us between the planets in a colonization of the entire solar system.

The Starship will carry cargo and eventually people to the Moon, Mars, and

beyond. This deep space transportation vehicle is competing for a NASA contract

to actually be the thing that brings the first astronauts down to the surface of

the Moon.

It's the stuff with science fiction, but that's where I see us going.

I don't think science fiction got it wrong.

I think science fiction may turn into normality, but as soon as we can get

faster and faster and faster and travel, I think that's going to happen.

I do.

Is it possible that the reality of humans living and traveling in outer

a closer encounter than we realize?

If so, why would our government and the private entrepreneurs that they work

with keep it a secret?

If we're developing a technology that's going to give us an edge in getting to

the near space around the Earth and the moon and the asteroids, maybe even on to

Mars, and to create this huge futuristic economy, we're certainly not going to

tell the rest of the world because it's going to remove our advantage.

There's a practical reason why space matters.

There's a lot of money to be made from satellite services.

to things like mining asteroids and things that could be incredibly

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

There's also really an aspirational aspect of space that I think is really

important.

Space holds the answers about whether we are alone in the universe, and I think

that's worth exploring.

Exploration of outer space is among humankind's most significant and

inspirational achievements.

But is the quest to colonize this cosmic frontier leading us all to a new home

or to a devastating galactic battlefield?

The answers may one day be revealed in America's Book of Secrets.