Caught on camera: Satellite tracker photographs secret spacecraft
(space.com)48 points by alex_young 3 hours ago
48 points by alex_young 3 hours ago
The size being the same was not because of design reuse, but because that's the size limits imposed by the Space Shuttle payload bay. (1) Many of the contractors were the same, but that's because they won a competitive bidding process with a CCD design against a different set of contractors vidicon tube technology. Now, their experience with CCD's did come from the KH-11 process, but their bid did have competition.
1: Speculation but reasonably informed: in 1970 when the USAF was asked to set the size of the payload bay (in exchange for USAF political support on a program that had just survived by one vote, their parameters became the design guidelines for the STS) they basically went with their latest design at the time, the KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which had already been canceled but was the latest thing anyone had. If the people at NRO who provided the specs had known how the future was going to go, they would have probably wanted a shorter but wider payload bay, so you could put bigger main mirrors into space. But, and this is total speculation, in 1970 when they are committing to this the KH-11 is far enough in the future that they don't have a good understanding of what it should be like. The KH-11 was designed to be carried into space by the STS, but the STS was delayed so its first flights were on unmanned rockets, and then after Challenger the NRO tried to get all of their satellites off the STS and go fully unmanned. A couple of satellites were far enough along that they were committed to the Shuttle after Return to Flight, but no more were committed after that point.
There's a hard physical limit (the Rayleigh criterion) on the resolution of an optical system by how big the open end is. You won't get "super zoom" capabilities without a satellite the size of a stadium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN#Resolution_and_gr...
The alignment has to be better than half a wavelength. That's doable for RF, but for optical telescopes you're talking nanometers. That's not possible (currently or in the foreseeable future) for a spacecraft constellation.
Trump famously tweeted images from an Iranian launch facility that had exploded. They were incredibly revealing of US satellite capabilities, even though that was probably not as zoomed-in as they could go.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/oval-offi...
In 2022 Trump declassified this satellite picture showing amazing resolution of current generation: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2019/09/05/ap_1924315303447...
Speaking of secret spacecraft - has anything interesting ever been revealed about the “Zuma” satellite, which failed to reach orbit a few years ago? It was supposedly a very expensive, very important program, but so secret that no agency ever admitted to owning it.
Why don't you download/run it and tell us what it is.
I would have read the article, but after a few nag-popups and ads, my laptop fan kicked on, so I closed it. Space.com is one of the few websites I care about that I would like to be a bit more browser-friendly.
> ... but after a few nag-popups and ads, my laptop fan kicked on
On my Linux I have 12 workspaces or so and my main browser is always on a specific workspace. Then I configured my system to always put the CPU in "powersave" mode when I'm switching to that workspace. Actually all my workspaces besides the one where I do dev are in powersave. Fixes the fan issue. Works for GPUs too (there are tools to configure the max TDP of a GPU: even if approximative, it works).
I'm also blocking ads / millions of domains at the DNS (I'm running both unbound and dnsmasq).
I wonder what the satellites think about Mr. Schöfbänker's tracking rig.
I find this passage quite amusing:
"Schöfbänker has also cross-haired with his equipment the "KH-11 Kennen" electro-optical satellites that were first introduced in 1976. "They are somewhat similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, but optimized to look down to Earth, instead of studying space," he said."
It's fairly well documented that the Hubble was effectively a US spy satellite pointing towards space, not the other way around. Or at least, it used all of the infrastructure in place to manufacture spy satellites.
Same maximum mirror size, same set of contractors/facilities, etc. It had a very different set of sensors, data systems, and focal range, but more or less demonstrated the US's spy satellite capabilities at the time.