Part of our comprehensive series on the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and its "spy satellite" network, this volume covers three aspects of military satellite programs: the Grab and Poppy ELINT satellites used for electronic intelligence; the MIDAS missile defense space-based infrared early warning satellites, and a history of the military polar orbiting meteorological satellite program. ELINT: Grab and Poppy were pioneering space reconnaissance activities during the 1960s. The intelligence these programs collected played a vital role in U.S. national security at the height of the Cold War. The programs succeeded only because of the creativity and perseverance of key contributors and others who participated in Grab and Poppy development and operation. MIDAS: After a security and policy review, late in 1998 Lt Gen Eugene L. Tattini, Commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, declassified MIDAS, an action that liberated its history to be shared with a much wider audience. This history compasses the origin and early years of space-based infrared (IR) sensors employed to detect the launch of ballistic missiles and, in time, the flash of ordnance detonated on Earth and in the atmosphere. It addresses the people, institutions, ideas, and machines brought to the task and their relationship to each other over a twelve-year period at the height of the Cold War, between 1955 and 1967. Beside treating the primary actions and events, it also attempts to account for the expectations and tensions that existed among the key participants: aerospace engineers who created the spacecraft and payload, their military superiors who anxiously sought an operational system, and still others in the Pentagon and Congress who doubted whether the technology would work, insisted on more research to demonstrate it, or sought to cancel the program after six ignominious flight failures. DMSP: Successful operation of overhead photoreconnaissance satellites, the RAND Corporati