
Decades later, a Cold War secret revealed - olegious
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/12/25/national/a072136S43.DTL&tsp=1
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tokenadult
The GeoEye site photo gallery gives a good idea of the resolution of currently
available commercial satellite photos (presumably the company has incentive to
show especially good examples of its photography from satellites).

<http://www.geoeye.com/CorpSite/gallery/Default.aspx>

The resolution shown is a lot less than the resolution necessary to read
automobile license plates from space (a common 1960s claim of satellite
capabilities that was surely an exaggeration for propaganda effect). Much less
could a satellite read a notebook in a secret agent's hand, or anything of
that kind. I think a lot of members of the general public are confused about
the capability of satellite photos, because Google Maps displays aerial photos
taken from airplanes under the heading "Satellite," which is always incorrect
for the more close-in views (which also are seriously lacking in resolution).

The book Physics for Future Presidents and a course handout for a "physics for
future presidents" course at a university

[http://books.google.com/books?id=6DBnS2g-KrQC&pg=PA204&#...</a><p><a
href="http://personal.carthage.edu/kcrosby/phys100/worksheet-
licenseplates.pdf"
rel="nofollow">http://personal.carthage.edu/kcrosby/phys100/worksheet-
licen...</a><p>both go through the steps for calculating the likely resolution
of photographs taken by an earth-orbiting satellite.

~~~
mturmon
Those are neat links.

But, in using a 94-inch aperture, they neglect the possibility of flying an
optical interferometer, or a deployable mirror. This technology opportunity
has probably not been neglected by the powers that be.

Here's a couple of links (they speculate it's a deployable for RF SIGINT, but
truth is we don't know):

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/22/tech/main7077593.s...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/22/tech/main7077593.shtml)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_(satellite)>

It sounds like I misplaced my tinfoil hat, but that's what you would have
thought about recovering films with a grappling hook.

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ShabbyDoo
What saddens me about this story is the real but largely unexamined cost of
war -- the appropriation of talent for projects with no positive impact on
humanity. Yes, this satellite project was valuable in that it perhaps helped
avoid future wars. However, what benefits could we all have received from the
work of these obviously talented engineers? I'm not suggesting that such a
satellite program was not a good governmental decision given the state of the
world -- just that, in the absence of such adversarial relationships between
countries, these engineers could have made the world a much better place
somehow. We might mock the allocation of engineering talent to the latest
group shopping or social networking "fad", but at least people are getting
some possible benefit.

~~~
munin
there is a certain value in at least halting regression, in my opinion. if
your work did not advance the sum of human knowledge, then did it at least
keep the fires burning a little longer? then it was not a waste, in my
opinion.

also, if it makes you feel any better, these projects tend to have a way of
trickling down/out knowledge...

~~~
CamperBob
_also, if it makes you feel any better, these projects tend to have a way of
trickling down/out knowledge..._

Absolutely. The HST, for instance, is basically a Cold War spy satellite
that's pointed the other way.

~~~
sesqu
Except kabdib pointed out that HST had to have all of the tech reinvented,
since nothing trickled out.

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kabdib
Go read _The Hubble Wars_ and all this schmaltz about a top secret project
will dissolve in anger.

They knew a lot of things that could have made Hubble much more of a success;
the "wiggle" of the solar panel booms, the radiation issues of the various
magnetic anomolies that Hubble would have to fly through.

They didn't say anything.

Secrets. Feh.

~~~
quanticle
Not only that. Perkin-Elmer was given the contract for grinding the primary
mirror on the Hubble. Yes, the same primary mirror that was misground and
required a multimillion dollar Shuttle mission to go fix with a pair of
"eyeglasses" (secondary mirrors).

The reason for the screw-up? The same sort of time pressure that these
engineers were working under. Working under time pressure like this isn't
heroism. It's stupidity, and leads to screw-ups like Hubble.

EDIT: The Hubble mirror was even polished at the same Danbury plant where
these spy satellite mirrors were being assembled. I wonder if one of the
reasons for the Hubble mirror being misshapen was because personell were being
pulled to work on CIA contracts?

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aw3c2
single page: [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/12/25/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/12/25/national/a072136S43.DTL&type=printable)

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russell
A lot of information was in the public media as much as a decade ago: the
satellite designations, the film recovery method, the approximate resolution.

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jcfrei
I'm wondering whether they were incapable of sending back the pictures via an
analog signal or didn't do so because they were afraid of eavesdropping - any
ideas?

~~~
7952
A canistor full of film has very high bandwidth compared to a lossy analogue
signal.

~~~
greenyoda
It's like a very expensive version of "sneakernet"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet>).

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InclinedPlane
If you wonder why there seems to be a relatively recent boom in commercial
spaceflight, this is why. During the cold war the best and brightest aerospace
minds were heavily recruited into secret projects building spy satellites,
ICBMs, super-sonic military aircraft, and other projects.

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georgieporgie
I assume this is related to this really interesting NPR story from awhile
back:

[http://www.npr.org/2011/10/29/141824562/spy-satellite-
engine...](http://www.npr.org/2011/10/29/141824562/spy-satellite-engineers-
top-secret-is-revealed)

My favorite part was the technology used to return the photos to earth:

 _Once a reel of film was finished, it was loaded into a re-entry pod and sent
back to earth. "And then at around 50,000 feet, a parachute would slow it
down, and a C-130 airplane caught it in midair over the Pacific," Pressel
says._

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gcb
more shocking than anything related to the technology, is why they didn't
declassify the price for project. I mean, if there's no risk of start a war
with previous allies when this get's public, which greater danger may be on
revealing the public money used on this?

And in the news reporting, why there's no mention of which legal mechanism
allows for such a huge secrecy from the public, at all? should we all just
accept that the cold war was the best that could have happened to the world
and gladly accept many more to come?

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seany
There's a good set of articles about kh-9 on the space review. They go into
much more technical detail.

<http://thespacereview.com/article/1927/1>

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indiecore
Now just imagine what's Top Secret RIGHT NOW.

~~~
praptak
Probably a little less than back then, the incentives are not so strong.
During the Cold War it was like in Harry Potter: _"one cannot live while the
other survives"_ , now the struggle for power in the world is less intense,
it's more about influence and profit rather than destroying the other side.

~~~
its_so_on
well, China manufactures all America's stuff. I will leave it to you how the
Soviet-era threat of Nuclear bombs compares, to an American, with the threat
of not getting any more stuff.

~~~
jmesserly
This is a common misconception. The US is the world's largest manufacturer:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Ma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Manufacturing)

Now, it's true that as a percent of GDP, China is the largest manufacturer.
But per capita it is either Japan or Germany (depending on which charts I was
looking at), with US not far behind.

(Unfortunately as the world's largest national economy, a beggar-thy-neighbor
export policy doesn't work so well for us.)

