Itek Corporation was a United States defense contractor that initially specialized in camera systems for spy satellites and various other reconnaissance systems. In the early 1960s they built a conglomerate in a fashion similar to LTV or Litton, during which time they developed the first CAD system and explored optical disc technology. These efforts were unsuccessful, and the company shed divisions to various companies, returning to its roots in the reconnaissance market. The remaining portions were eventually purchased by Litton in 1983, and then Hughes, Raytheon, and Goodrich Corporation.

Richard Leghorn was a former United States Air Force (USAF) aerial reconnaissance expert who had first proposed flying reconnaissance missions over enemy territory in peacetime. Leghorn left the Air Force to become head of Eastman Kodak's European division, and started writing about the "Open Skies" proposal, which he strongly supported.

Open Skies proposed to allow any signing nation to overfly any other, which Leghorn believed would lower international tensions by allowing countries to verify the actions of their adversaries. Eisenhower raised the issue at the 1955 Geneva summit meetings as a way to reduce mutual fears of a surprise attack. At the time, the United States would have had a huge advantage if Open Skies was adopted, as their numerous European and Asian airbases would allow them access to the Soviet heartland, while the lack of USSR bases in the Americas — this being prior to the Cuban Revolution — would have made the treaty an empty promise. Unsurprisingly, the Soviets opposed Open Skies, something Eisenhower later admitted he fully expected.

While Leghorn's writings on the topic were being widely read, he was secretly informed that the United States had already taken him up on his initial proposal, and the United States Air Force (and Royal Air Force) were in the process of flying reconnaissance flights over the USSR. Aware that this would generate vast amounts of photography over long periods of time, Leghorn realized that a major problem would be storing the resulting imagery and allowing it to be easily retrieved for study. Kodak was in the process of introducing its "Minicard" aperture card product, and Leghorn felt this was a natural solution for the problem. Leghorn sought improvement by combining it with machinery dedicated to the task of indexing the information required for reconnaissance. Leghorn contacted his long-time friend Theodore "Teddy" Walkowicz about forming a new company to build such a machine for the Air Force. Walkowicz was an associate of venture capitalist Laurance Rockefeller, and eventually secured a seed loan for $600,000 in exchange for a directorship. Leghorn became president of the new company, whose ITEK name was a phonetic short form of "information technology". Since Leghorn formerly worked at Kodak, there is speculation that the company name was an acronym for "I Took Eastman Kodak".

Weeks after the company formed in late 1957, Leghorn took it in an entirely different direction by purchasing the Boston University Physical Research Laboratory (BUPRL), which researched reconnaissance cameras. BUPRL was designing the HYAC-1 camera for the USAF's reconnaissance balloon efforts, cameras that would eventually fly on the WS-461L balloons during 1957. Now at Itek, the company won contracts for similar cameras for aircraft like the U-2 and SR-71.

The CIA quickly informed them of their top secret Corona to produce the first spy satellites, and asked them to bid on the camera systems. Itek returned a design that used a rotating mirror to record panoramic swaths of the ground. Film was delivered from a canister and wrapped around a cylindrical window that allowed the maximum length of film to be used in a single exposure, increasing resolution. The rotation of the mirror was timed to properly account for the movement of the satellite to avoid stretching the images on-film. The result was a single long photograph showing a "strip" of land. At the time, the CIA had already contracted Fairchild Camera and Instrument to supply cameras, but Itek's submission was technically superior and won them the contract in March or April 1958. To soften the blow, the CIA had Fairchild build the devices until Itek could start its own manufacturing capabilities.

Leghorn was upset by the terms of the agreement, and at one point in 1959 issued a "stop work" order on the project to change its terms. The CIA quickly acquiesced, although they were spooked by the event. Had Itek lost the Corona contract, it was highly likely that the company would have collapsed. This possibility so worried the CIA that they arranged a personal meeting between Rockefeller and the CIA's chief of technical development, Richard Bissell, to inform Rockefeller of the Corona project and make him aware that national security rested on the company's well-being. Leghorn, he felt, needed direct supervision.

Shortly after winning Corona, Itek also won the contract for the Air Force's satellite program, SAMOS. SAMOS originally envisioned a semi-real-time system that downloaded imagery via an onboard scanner, but later expanded to envision a number of different imaging systems based on a single airframe. One of these, E-5, was a project to provide low-resolution wide-area imagery for mapping purposes, which the Air Force needed to plan ingress routes for bombers during war. The SAMOS project was eventually abandoned, leaving several of the E-5 cameras in storage at a Lockheed facility.