Check out this interesting history of the Kettering Satellite Tracking Group, a club of students organized by teacher Geoffrey Perry at the Kettering Grammar School in Northamptonshire, England during the Cold War: Kettering Cosmos: How school children exposed Soviet secret – BBC News.
The group monitored Soviet radio communications dealing with the space program and made a number of revelations about Soviet space activities. For example, in 1966 they were the first to reveal publicly the location of the Plesetsk launch site in north Russia.
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