Two articles about the recovery of reentry vehicles and mission requirements
There are two interesting articles online related to Hexagon. One is about the military’s 6594th Test Group at Hickam AFB whose tasks were to catch the parachutes that returned the Corona, Gambit and Hexagon’s reentry vehicles from space. That article can be read by going to
The other article is about the recovery of the reentry vehicles but also discusses interesting episodes and problems that occurred on some of the missions, mission requirements and the recovery of one reentry vehicle whose parachute did not deploy and the attempts to recover it from 16,500 feet at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and the relationship between Perkin-Elmer, the Navy and the CIA in that recovery. That article can be read online at: PDF 531.1KB