Polar orbits are all about recon. It is a major Russian advantage in Ukraine.
Satellite imagery from overhead can be transmitted line-of-sight to analysis centers in St Petersburg essentially in real time.
US satellites imaging Ukraine have to store and wait for pass over NRO in Chantilly for the line-of-site downlink. It’s about 40 mins of delay.
There was a time when there were plans for uplink of low earth orbit satellites to geosync altitudes (23,000 miles) and then across to another geosync vehicle over Chantilly for downlink, but it’s still a few minutes of delay and in the old days, experiments were failing. Dunno if they ever perfected that. Sooo much easier to store and forward that I suspect they didn’t spend that money.
Thanks for the post. I was unaware of our delay vs the Russian smaller delay.
Improvement of the old days of parachute drops from low orbit satellites.
The latency of the Starlink network is less than 100 milliseconds. Why not use that?