Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program

spacecom has some very interesting articles that detail some or the early recon satellites KH8 and KH9.
They are apparently now declassified.
Main article
KH8 ???? GAMBIT
KH9 HEXAGON

Link on Yahoo

Note that the satellites (3 of them) were actually displayed for one day only at an invitation only event at the at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, Va,

Very cool. I always knew the government had technology like this back then. Just think, if they had this technology back then, just think what they have today. We all know they have systems in space now that can monitor earth in real time video in HD. S&F

reply to post by unknown32

I strongly do not believe that we have satellites with real time video links - and no HD.
Satellites move way too fast for any decent real time video capability.

That's not to say that there are not real time capabilities, but they are generally provided by stealthy planes/drones with long 'on orbit' durations. Probably mostly being done now with the Aurora/TR3B or something similar.

reply to post by fah0436


I guess you never heard of geostationary orbit. We can also stream 10mbps directly from Mars, doing it from orbit we could push 100mbps. Think about that for a minute. Netflix runs HD on less than 3mbps. That's megabits, not megabytes.

reply to post by BIGPoJo


GEO satellites orbit at 22,000 mile altitude.
They could have nothing like the resolution of the recon birds that are LEO (100 mile altitude).
Factor of 220 difference!

reply to post by fah0436


Look up geosynchronous orbit.

How do you think Satellite dishes are able to get a signal 24/7? If their satellites were moving you would only get a signal when the satellite was within a certain range...

It is more than possible that we can have live stream video surveillance from space.

reply to post by gimme_some_truth

Data rates are one thing.
Pixel resolution is another and is driven by distance to the target.

reply to post by fah0436


Just pointing that out to demonstrate that we can control the speed of the satellite based on its altitude, but think about this. Most secret satellites will be in LEO, it doesn't matter how fast they are moving because the shutter speed can be extremely fast. You could also take an array of these things and build a composite image with extremely high resolution, in 3D.

reply to post by BIGPoJo

Not sure where you're going with this.

But after getting digital photos using the best resolution possible, both NRO and NGA do image enhancement and stereo imaging and even 3D modeling, But they do that with super fast GROUND based computers in non-real time.
This work does not need to be done in space or in real time.

I suppose you could make the case for a real time need in some cases (like to monitor an ongoing intelligence mission). But that where long duration planes/drones would be used for maximum resolution and real time reasons. Or better yet, the craft actually used to support the ongoing mission.

reply to post by fah0436


The feeds would be realtime and the post processing would take place on the ground, almost realtime.

2nd.

reply to post by BIGPoJo


What feeds? Feeds from an array of LEO recon satellites? All in some kind of synchronized orbits to overlap coverage?

Sure - i guess it could be done - if money were no object.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to build/launch and maintain the latest generation (KH-13 think it is)?

NRO's philosophy is a few really good big ones.

Your multiple approach would better fit with NASA's/DOD's CHEAPSAT philosophy.

Originally posted by fah0436
reply to post by BIGPoJo

 

What feeds? Feeds from an array of LEO recon satellites? All in some kind of synchronized orbits to overlap coverage?

Sure - i guess it could be done - if money were no object.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to build/launch and maintain the latest generation (KH-13 think it is)?

NRO's philosophy is a few really good big ones.

Your multiple approach would better fit with NASA's/DOD's CHEAPSAT philosophy.

Yes that's correct, the NRO is about long-term strategic intelligence (high quality multispectral, not real time continuous coverage).

With a satellite over a target, I think they can now get a frame every 10 seconds or so, and for a certain amount of time the focus can move to track a single location on ground (with moving point of view of course).

This is still not sufficiently practical for US Army/USMC tactical intelligence needs though, and they're looking at the smaller well-populated satellites & UAVs.