Posted on 01/01/2012 12:14:42 AM PST by neverdem
The amazing story of how our supersecret, Cold-War spy satellites took photos of the Soviet empire and dropped them to Earth, all without the help of computers, bandwidth, or digital cameras.
Here's your mission, should you choose to accept it: build a camera that can take high-resolution photographs of the Earth from orbit and return them to the Central Intelligence Agency. There's only one catch: you don't get to use a computer or a single kilobyte of network bandwidth.
That's the task that the United States government gave to a group of engineers at the optical instruments company Perkin-Elmer in Danbury, Connecticut at the height of the Cold War. It was October 1966 and the new development of the new satellite system, Hexagon, was underway. The project was a follow-on to very successful Corona satellite program and a complement to the higher-resolution Gambit satellite.
All these programs required 315,000 feet of film to be dropped in re-entry vehicles from orbit and retrieved in mid-air by U.S. forces. Gambit and Hexagon were declassified late this year, and its engineers were profiled this week by the Associated Press.
Hexagon was known as "Big Bird" and up to 1,000 Perkin-Elmer employees worked on the program during its peak in the 1970s. Almost nothing was known about the program, except for scraps of information that leaked out to reporters. For example, in 1977, the AP reported, "At present, the United States has only one Big Bird reconnaissance satellite at a time in orbit. If the Big Bird were to be destroyed by surprise attack, it might be months before the Air Force could replace it." It was also known by the likes of William Safire...
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Maybe a little more research is in order. I’m thinking NSA.
Maybe a little more research is in order.What? The NSA is 'running' your local telco operation? (They don't run ours and DIDN'T run our MTSO switch when I was with ATT WS in the 90's ... if you would get out of the basement and get a real job in the real world you would not believe all these 'ccok and bull' stories fed your way.)
Sheesh ... some of you ppl are 'off the planet'.
Find a REAL person at the REAL phone company and ask them those questions I gave you earlier ...
I've worked in this field and seen the hardware; 99.999% of you have not.
Now, wiretaps (an individual 'number') and monitoring trunk circuits en mass in and out of the country are a different matter ...
Since when is being a lineman a real job?
I was a college student studying math and physics when spuknik went up.
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the KH-11 was the first American spy satellite to utilize electro-optical digital imaging, and create a real-time optical observation capability.[3]
KH-11 was the first reconnaissance satellite equipped with Charge-coupled device (CCD) array technology for imaging. Data is transmitted through a network of communications satellites; the Satellite Data System.[1] The initial ground station for the processing of the electro-optical imaging was a secret National Reconnaissance Office facility in Area 58, located in the continental United States.[8]
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After the failure of the Boeing led Future Imagery Architecture program in 2005, NRO ordered from Lockheed two additional legacy hardware KH-11s. USA-224, the first of these two, was launched in early 2011 two years ahead of schedule, and US $ 2 billion under the initial budget estimate.[11]
Four generations of U.S. electro-optical reconnaissance have been identified:[12][13]
Implied links in my above postings will give code 404...go directly to Wikipedia ...se link at post # 45.
The big eye ball in the sky. :)
See the Perkin-Elmer projection printer in 1973 (again in 1981) at this link.
You have now 'jumped the shark'; who said anything about a 'lineman'?
Go back and re-read for content once in your life; note the term 'switch engineer'.
Hey Jim, you are starting to bring new meaning to the word Chill. Lighten up dude.
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