NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes For Astronomy 237
First time accepted submitter SomePgmr writes "The U.S. government's secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens."
Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Informative)
They are sitting in a cleanroom in upstate New York [nytimes.com]. There is a longer, more detailed article [nytimes.com] in the New York Times. The satellites may save $250M each or more on various NASA missions, but they still need to be launched and have a program built around them — which may put dark matter research more than a decade ahead of schedule.
For the folks who don't know what the National Reconnaissance Office [nro.gov] is, the NRO is the member of the US Intelligence Community [intelligence.gov] responsible for designing, building, launching, and maintaining the United States' intelligence satellites. It does not do intelligence work itself, nor does it direct the use of space assets. Judging from some of the comments on the NYT article, I should also say this: NRO has been around for a half century, and its existence was declassified two decades ago, so this isn't some kind of "new"/shadowy intelligence agency. While its work is classified, its purpose and function is well-understood.
For a look at what kinds of work NRO does, see
Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program [space.com]
Twenty-five years after their top-secret, Cold War-era missions ended, two clandestine American satellite programs were declassified Saturday (Sept. 17) with the unveiling of three of the United States' most closely guarded assets: the KH-7 GAMBIT, the KH-8 GAMBIT 3 and the KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellites...
Secret No More: Spy Satellite Designer Reveals Life's Work [space.com]
Phil Pressel had kept a secret for 46 years. A secret that he shared with no one, not even his wife, since he first went to work for the Perkin-Elmer optics company in 1965...
Aside: I know this is difficult to comprehend for some on slashdot, but US intelligence assets in space are almost exclusively used for FOREIGN intelligence. Occasionally capabilities of, e.g., the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) may provide civil support in natural disasters. Our intelligence operations are not transparent, and are kept secret to deny our adversaries knowledge of our techniques, capabilities, sources, and methods. Be happy that we're able to repurpose for science intelligence assets that might otherwise have been destroyed or kept secret beyond all usefulness.
Erg...dark ENERGY, not dark matter (Score:3)
Of course I noticed the mistake right as I posted it... :-/
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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In my more conspiracy-inclined moments I sometimes wonder whether the 'defect' in the Hubble mirror wasn't deliberate, to keep the Soviets from being able to figure out how good Big Bird and the rest of the fleet really were. There are dozens of steps in the manufacturing process, and the final one, polishing, has to be programmed to follow the actual curve to an extreme exactitude. Did they really make the same mistake all along the line?
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What happened with Hubble is very well-understood, in terms of the specific event that caused the error, and the management climate that led to multiple tests detecting the error being ignored. In answer to, "Did they really make the same mistake all along the line," yes, yes they did. At least two major tests after the mirror was ground which showed the error were themselves dismissed as flawed.
The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report [nasa.gov], or the "Allen Report", has all the details.
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:4, Insightful)
Our intelligence operations are not transparent, and are kept secret to deny our adversaries knowledge of our techniques, capabilities, sources, and methods.
Security through obscurity is neither.
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Instead of hiding the existence of our intelligence assets, we should be strongly encrypting them.
No would ever know they exist, because the assets themselves would look like random data.
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Very insightful.
Instead of hiding the existence of our intelligence assets, we should be strongly encrypting them.
No would ever know they exist, because the assets themselves would look like random data.
You honestly think this isn't already done? I am fairly certain that strong encryption is commonplace is all intelligence operations.
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Yes. You might as well just tell me your password.
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That's what anonymous cowards (whose only real knowledge of security is the platitudes they quote) believe. It's also quite wrong. In the real world of security, obscurity is a valuable tool in the kit. You can't prepare to thwart a measure you don't know the existence of.
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Funny)
An awful long post for one minute after the story's timestamp. I'll save the rest of the Slashdotters here the work and accuse you of working for Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Linus Torvalds, the NSA, the CIA, the KGB, the Democrats, the Republicans, Adolf Hitler and Mr. Rogers.
More on topic, any idea where in "upstate NY" they're being kept? Whether you go by the NYC definition of Upstate or the rest of the state's definition of Upstate, it's still a pretty big area and odds are I'll be near it sometime within the next two weeks. I'm going to guess somewhere near either Rome or Watertown.
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You, however, are obviously working for the Spanish Inquisition. Precisely as I expected.
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Funny)
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Sorry, can't hear you, someone's carrying on about a dead parrot and there seems to be a penguin on the Telly
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Yes, but that says nothing about the Spanish Inquisit[b]ors[/b]!
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:4, Funny)
However, anyone who did not expect that comment is obviously brain-dead.
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Funny)
I spend all day at working writing up responses to posts which haven't yet happened on /. , in the hopes that I will be able to swoop in with a insightful long post that quickly. However nobody ever posts about Barney or Daredevil 2.
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Informative)
An awful long post for one minute after the story's timestamp.
A subscriber sees the articles before a non-subscriber, although you can't post until the story is visible to everyone. But you have plenty of time to read the article, and to jot down your thoughts and links in a text editor and wait for it to be ready for comments. Wouldn't you rather see a well thought out, informative comment like that one rather than a Frosty Piss or a joke that takes up the first 200 comments listed? I sure would!
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A subscriber sees the articles before a non-subscriber, although you can't post until the story is visible to everyone.
LIES, ALL LIES!!! It's a shill; plainly that is the only answer. Don't try to use your logic on me, I'm wearing my tinfoil helmet today; it's casual Monday in the office, and nothing matches leopard print quite like a tinfoil hat.
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Probably the Rome Labs. That would seem closest in line with their mission.
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An awful long post for one minute after the story's timestamp.
See that little asterisk after his name and Slashdot ID? It means he saw the story way sooner than you did.
He probably had his post finished by the time it showed up on your screen.
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> any idea where in "upstate NY" they're being kept?
From the first link in the post you're replying to:
"For now, the two telescopes and some spare parts are still in their clean room at ITT Exelis, in Rochester."
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I must have missed that. Depending on which location (they have two here), it's just a few miles from where I'm at.
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A bunch of other posters said Rochester. Either way, I'm in Rochester now and will be going through Syracuse soon. Do you think I could hide a stolen spy satellite in my trunk?
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And if it wasn't, how would you know? They're secret. This means that "we use it on foreign targets only" is entirely based upon trusting the government's say so, and they have every reason to lie (or just to make sure that the department which is giving us the denial isn't in the know about how the satellites are actually used). Indeed, if it's observi
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:4, Insightful)
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I would apply Occam's Razor and say that if the US wanted to conduct overhead surveillance within the borders of the US it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to use airplanes or drones. Orbital recon is preferable only when you can't easily overfly the target.
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If the satellite is already launched, already needs to be operated, and is passing over the U.S. as part of it's normal orbital path, a few illicit observations here and there are essentially free.
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Funny)
Also, when their orbits are designed to overfly interesting places in the (former) USSR or China, how likely are they to overfly interesting stuff stateside?
How likely? 100% chance.
Do spend a little time reading up on orbital mechanics some day.
Don't be like Tom Clancy, who wrote in one of his novels that the CIA had a satellite in geostationary orbit over the north pole.
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Funny)
All you need to a lot of fuel. Of course orbit is really the wrong term.
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Oh, FOREIGN intelligence. That's OK then. Those evil foreigners have no right to privacy, they aren't even *American*!
Re:Satellites still need to be launched (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, FOREIGN intelligence. That's OK then. Those evil foreigners have no right to privacy, they aren't even *American*!
In the eyes of the CIA and the NSA and their international counterparts, no, no they don't.
That sort of is the whole point of intelligence gathering, just comfort yourself in the knowledge that you are nowhere near interesting enough for any agency to look at you.
Translation ... (Score:5, Interesting)
This translates to "we have far cooler spy stuff now".
But, and here I demonstrate how little I know about satellites, would something designed for looking down at Earth be easily adapted to astronomy?
You'd think the optics/instruments would be optimized for a different problem set.
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That's exactly what I was wondering.
Re:Translation ... (Score:5, Informative)
The article indciates that these are just the mirrors and the shells. There are no instruments and they're currently sitting in a warehouse instead of being in space. NASA would need to equip them and launch them before they could even be used for anything, but it would shorten the timeline (over the Webb Telescope) since they're similar to the existing Hubble telescope.
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A lot more practical than retrofitting Hubble or building a new satellite from scratch.
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As the Hubble approaches it's end of life and no possibility for refurbishment from the shuttle, seems that NASA should offer an X-prize to companies that can viably offer and execute a mission for unmanned or manned refurbishment of the Hubble. $500M would make an interesting prize and be only a fraction of what a servicing mission from the shuttles cost. Even if the mission just replaced consumables such as fuels, coolant and failing gyros, keeping the Hubble going for a few more years would be worth it
Re:Translation ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Translation ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually the mirrors are the really difficult part, with current or even slightly more advanced electronics, these critters should kick holy hinny. The really cool part, is that there are two. Place these little bad boys a couple million miles apart and now you have a Hubble class interferometer. You should be able to see aliens french kissing on planets closer than 200 light years. Add to that, these guys can be made to see in anything from infrared to hard UV, and this could be a huge boon to cosmology and those of us who enjoy astrophotography.
My only question is if these are the discards what the heck are they watching us with now? I'm worried about street cameras, this is a whole new level of invasion of privacy. So now its "Does a bear crap in the woods, film at 11...
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Total speculation here, but I wonder if the retirement of the shuttle has an impact here? Is it possible that these telescopes were sized to fit in the shuttle launch bay, and with no more shuttle that requirement has been dropped and they can build in a larger primary mirror?
I can certainly imagine that at some point in the last 20 years (which is probably when the authorization for these scopes happened), that somebody put in a requirement that they had to be compatible with the shuttle.
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None of the militarys KH-11's (the one NASA "cloned" the first time when they built up the Hubble) were launched using a Shuttle mission.
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Google gets most of their images from aircraft.
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Tell it to Tech. Sgt. Chen [youtu.be].
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From a different article on this I read earlier today, it would seem that the fact that it was designed for wider views actually helps it for certain tasks - monitoring for supernovae, for instance.
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From a different article on this I read earlier today, it would seem that the fact that it was designed for wider views actually helps it for certain tasks - monitoring for supernovae, for instance.
If only we had them operational 776 years ago.
Re:Translation ... (Score:5, Funny)
From a different article on this I read earlier today, it would seem that the fact that it was designed for wider views actually helps it for certain tasks - monitoring for supernovae, for instance.
If only we had them operational 776 years ago.
They were, it's just taken this long for Holy Roman Empire Intelligence to declassify them.
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From a different article on this I read earlier today, it would seem that the fact that it was designed for wider views actually helps it for certain tasks - monitoring for supernovae, for instance.
That would likely be a waste of an orbital telescope. We have lots and lots of ground based scopes already watching for this. You can do this with really small scopes. Amateurs do a lot of it. We also have telescopes arrays that are specifically designed for covering large parts of the sky very quickly, they're better suited to this kind of duty.
Re:Translation ... (Score:5, Informative)
Bear in mind though: these aren't complete, launch-ready satellites. You've got the major components of a telescope, but you are likely lacking the actual camera, plus most of the rest of the satellite components (solar panels, flight computer, thrusters and gyros, batteries, thermal management, etc.). Still, it gets you a lot closer than designing from scratch. Plus, by having certain components fixed from the get-go forces a lot of the rest of the design into place, rather than spending years trying to get past the blank page of infinite possibilities.
Re: Astro mirrorss vs earth-looking mirrors (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some secondary characteristics of the mirror that may be less than perfect for optical astronomy. The Hubble mirror was ground smooth enough to focus the Lyman Alpha spectral lines of neutral hydrogen (best way to see H2 gas clouds). These wavelengths are in the UV. Presumably an earth-looking satellite won't have much use for UV, but it might be better at IR, which is also useful in astronomy. Also in service of the short wavelength goal, the Hubble primary mirror was made of a very exotic glass with near zero thermal coefficient of expansion. The mirror has glass stiffening braces in back that were *welded* on; no annealing necessary. Presumably spy satellites rarely have multi-hour exposure times, so thermal stability may not be so necessary. On the other hand, it sounds like the spy satellite secondary mirrors are adaptive optics. This is good for correcting for atmospheric distortion, but it needs a bright source (earth based scopes with AO use lasers to create a bright source high in the atmosphere for distortion correction). Perhaps the AO can be used to correct for thermal changes to the primary; I don't know...
Re: Astro mirrorss vs earth-looking mirrors (Score:4, Interesting)
The UV capability of Hubble was nice, but for looking into the early Universe - the current focus of research (understanding the Big Bang; understanding dark energy and dark matter) it is useless - everything of interest has been red-shifted into the IR. The whole design focus of the James Webb Telescope is IR operation, that is why it will be sent far from that big glowing heat-ball called Earth (it will have a sun shield of course).
In longer articles (Washington Post, NY Times) they are proposing that these could be James Webb Jr. telescopes, providing some of its capability earlier, and then increasing the value of Webb by observing the "easy" stuff, leaving Webb to do what only it can do.
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The mirrors are the difficult part. Hubble was damaged at birth due to defective mirror production, the corrective lens helped but any thickening of a lens will reduce the light that gets through to some extent. The Newtonian reflector didn't use a front lens at all - which would be great in space where you've not got to worry about atmosphere and corrosion (although micrometeorites are a pain).
Once the Enterprise [buildtheenterprise.org] is built, though, we can just fly to the stars. Well, once someone invents the warp drive.
Re:Translation ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would imagine satellite imagery is being supplanted by covert reconnaissance drones. The achilles heel of spy satellites has been their fixed orbits. They can pass over a target only at certain times, can't loiter, and frequently can't get an ideal viewing angle (if the hangar doors open to the West, you have to place the camera there to peek inside). People paranoid about being spied upon can predict when the satellites will be overhead (their orbits are public knowledge since it's virtually impossible to hide anything in LEO), and simply hide everything they're doing when the satellites could see. Yes these problems can be overcome by changing the orbit, but that requires burning fuel, and there's only a finite amount aboard each satellite with (as of the Shuttle's retirement) no way to refuel them.
Drones overcome all these problems, at the cost of being easier to down [slashdot.org]. But they're several orders of magnitude cheaper (a few $million vs a few $billion), and there's nothing particularly secret about optics and CCDs. The thing that's puzzled me about the drone which was downed in Iran is that it wasn't near any valuable targets I can think of in Iran. It wasn't near Iran's nuclear plant, it wasn't near Tehran, it wasn't near their major military bases, and it wasn't near the Strait of Hormuz. All of these could have been more easily accessed by a drone launched from a nation "friendly" to the U.S. (Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE). But this drone went down way out in the boonies near Afghanistan, which makes me suspect either the USAF was telling the truth and it malfunctioned in Afghanistan and strayed into Iran, or that drones have pretty much supplanted spy satellites and the U.S. is flying a bunch of these all over the place even over medium- and low-value targets.
The wider field of view would be the biggest impediment. But the uses NASA is thinking of need a wide field of view. And even then, you can add optics which narrow the field of view (increase the focal length). It's not as ideal as the larger optics being shaped from the onset for the longer focal length (more margin for error), but it's not that big a problem. Hubble basically had the same problem - its primary and secondary optics were ground to the wrong shape. This was corrected by inserting small lenses into the light path to correct the error.
Presumably the NRO stripped out all the instrument sensors and processing electronics. Those are the parts which were most suited for terrestrial targets, and which would've had to have been replaced anyway for deep space (very very low light) applications. Typically this involves cooling the sensor to cryogenic temperatures to decrease the noise floor. So overall this is a very, very good deal for NASA. Assuming they can find a way to launch it (the 94" mirror size was dictated by the largest diameter which was able to fit into the Shuttle's cargo bay).
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Stubby Hubble. . . . .Heh, heh, heh. . . . . . Get it?
Stubble?
Apologies...it had to be said.
Strat
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I'm sure SpaceX would be happy to launch them (Score:3)
The CEO did a good interview on 60 minutes last night.
Re:I'm sure SpaceX would be happy to launch them (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'm sure SpaceX would be happy to launch them (Score:4, Insightful)
Now this is perfect example... (Score:2, Insightful)
of what could happen if we spent more on useful, scientific space programs instead of spending it on military. Think of how many missions could have been launched if we did that. How much more we could have learned about the universe.
NASA Has 2 Hubbles (Score:5, Informative)
NASA has a fully functional copy of Hubble "sitting around" at Goddard Space Flight Center as well. If something goes wrong in space, fabrication of replacement components and the training of the astronauts that will fix it does not occur in space. It is invaluable to have an exact duplicate on the ground for this reason.
Interestingly, the total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B. Many programs that people think are NASA projects are actually defense projects. For example, the GPS system is not included in NASA's budget, it's spearheaded by the Air Force Space Command, and comes out of the Defense budget.
Chances are the main satellites that these are duplicates for have been decommissioned, so these are no longer needed. I would guess they are actually two distinct but similar designs, and not two copies of the same design. I would assume NASA already determined that the risk of these satellites failing and NASA being incapable of fixing them is outweighed by the desire to have higher powered telescopes in space.
My mother has worked in the thermal blanket lab at Goddard for years. Several years ago, she got one of the engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope to take her and I on a tour of the clean room where they are fabricating one of the core components, the micro-shutter array. The micro-shutter array is an array of 65,536 shutters on an area about the size of a postage stamp. We got to go into the clean room and see the entire process. It is very similar to the process used to fabricate semiconductors, and I think they were operating at about the 60nm level. The idea of the micro-shutter array is that each shutter can be independently operated to shut out interfering light sources, so that the telescope can look much further back in space and time for deep fields. These should be spectacular. Instead of imaging the entire shutter area as the Hubble does, JWST will be able to close all but one micro-shutter which should allow very long exposure times, and the ability to see extremely distant objects. More on the array at http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/microshutters.html [nasa.gov].
Also, the Hubble is huge. It is a cylinder with a diameter of perhaps 15ft and a height of roughly 40ft. Pictures really don't do it justice, I had no appreciation for the size until I saw it. I know my mother did some of the thermal blanket fabrication (think the tin-foil looking stuff on the outside of spacecraft) for Servicing Mission 4. Disclaimer: This is a cross-post of something I wrote at Hacker News earlier today.
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Not just higher-power, but optical. There's other, more powerful, space telescopes being built* but none are in the visible or near-visible spectrum.
*Admittedly, the Congresscritters want them cancelled, but they are for now being built. Even if NASA got these two, I'd be worried that Congress would continue being "cent-wise and dollar-foolish", with the result of them either never being launched or being sold to the Russians. Where they might well be converted back into spy satellites.
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Those microshutters kinda look like a DLP mirror array, except used to pass/block light rather than reflect/deflect it. Everything is in line rather than at a near-180-degree angle. I have to wonder if there is any commonality to their development, and possibly to their application -- could these shutters be used to make a better, brighter projector for consumers? The R&D is already done and it can't be THAT groundbreaking or we wouldn't be reading about it here -- the military would want to sit on anyt
Re:NASA Has 2 Hubbles (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting you should say that, because it's basically her background. She was involved in the design and production of women's clothing before she worked at NASA. Basically, she'd design patterns then make dresses. She claims it is much easier to design patterns for spacecraft than women, they don't move as much and they aren't as picky.
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The Hubble is the size of a school bus.
A full sized school bus? Or one of those short ones Slashdotters rode?
Nice (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice to know we can afford to build spy satellites that we don't need. We have our priorities straight.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that defense is a much more immediate concern than astronomy, I would say that the priorities are exactly correct.
That's not to say I don't wish we would spend more on space, of course. And military stuff does often get re-purposed like this, so the defense budget is not a complete money sink.
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Nice to know we can afford to build spy satellites that we don't need. We have our priorities straight.
Does this really surprise you? You need to take another look at how much money is spent on the military and black budget stuff. These satellites are a drop in the ocean.
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My wife must run the NRO. Like these satellites, shoes come in pairs. And she buys far more of them than she needs.
What color are these telescopes? And is there a matching dress hanging up somewhere?
Launch Vehicle? (Score:2)
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Don't you think NRO figured out what kind of LV to use before building them?
Perhaps they were counting on the Shuttle. On one of its classified launches. But they got stuck on the ground when the program was canceled.
Or more accurately, they surplussed the telescopes and gave up their launch slots, thereby leading to the termination of the Shuttle program.
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You do know that NASA has other launch [wikipedia.org] vehicles [wikipedia.org] than the Shuttle, right?
Other, more expensive, launch vehicles.
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Say whaaa? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Same thing they've been using to justify everything for the last 11 years or so -- terrorists and national security, with the odd bit of protecting children thrown in for good measure.
They likely developed something way cooler than these since they were commissioned.
The military-industrial complex does loads of stuff they don't like to tell peopl
I spy with my little eye in the sky. (Score:2)
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I'd rather not look this gift horse in the mouth. (Though in Soviet Russia, gift horse looks you in mouth.)
Why these exist (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine that that is exactly what these were, spares that were never needed. As other commentors have noticed, they probably are obsolete, and since they don't have any instruments, are probably very adaptable to astronomy.
Hubble had some common history with KH-11 KENNAN (Score:2, Informative)
As this NASA HUbble document says [nasa.gov] "changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites." Hubble and KH-11 were apparently shipped in much the same container [wikipedia.org] (suggesting they're physically pretty similar) and both were integrated at Lockheed's Sunnyvale, CA plant. Given that there are only so many US aerospace contractors able to work on either project, there will have inevitably been some degree of cross-fertilisation betwe
To get a much better view of Uranus... (Score:2)
This is an outrage (Score:2)
Damn scientists, perverting military tech for their inhumanly-focused aims.
How would you feel, if you were a contractor who worked on one of these satellites and who always assumed it would be used for some kind of warlike purpose -- maybe even to locate someone or something which needs to be blown up -- only to discover your work was going to be used for peaceful purposes?
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Damn scientists, perverting military tech for their inhumanly-focused aims.
How would you feel, if you were a contractor who worked on one of these satellites and who always assumed it would be used for some kind of warlike purpose -- maybe even to locate someone or something which needs to be blown up -- only to discover your work was going to be used for peaceful purposes?
Yea, I'd be upset. We have never re-purposed technology from war to peace before. It has NEVER happened except for, HUMV's, motorcycles, atomic energy, aerodynamics, satellites used for communications, GPS, LORAN, encryption, radio communications, computers, explosives, Helicopters, emergency medicine, phased array antennas, ceramics, semiconductors, jet engines, transport aircraft, and WD-40, just to name a few.
What else d'ya have? (Score:2)
Reminds me of an old story (Score:3)
Our secret space program real space program (Score:5, Insightful)
Ladies and gentlemen: Why NASA never has enough money.
I like it. (Score:2)
From junk to useful at the stroke of a pen. Science is always a loftier and more honourable goal than war.
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They don't need them to watch you do that. They already contract that out to ceiling cat.
Now, turn your head to one side and cough.
Re:Obsolete? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Two Military Spy Telescopes... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll borrow this free topslot.
Seriously. The US budget division is bonkers, retarded and upside down. They secret projects have so much money just lying around that they can build two hubble-class telescopes just like that, and then figure out that they don't need them so they can hand them over to NASA, why don't they need them? Well, probably because they built something a lot better and launched it already.
Now consider then what else they're doing, and what say NASA could do with even a fraction of the money.
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Re:Two Military Spy Telescopes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, imagine how expensive maintenance is going to be without Shuttle.
The military's fleet of a total of 15 to date (4 operational, 10 decommissioned and one failed to reach orbit), doesn't get "serviced" by the Shuttle. Although they are similar in respects to the Hubble, none of them were launched by the Shuttle (they were launched by Titan-3Ds for the most part, a few with Titan-IV's and the most recent one with a Delta V Heavy), nor has the shuttle or ISS service them.
NASA tries to fix them, the NRO tends to make their satellites crash into the atmosphere when they reach their end of life regardless if its a design flaw or its just a old bird in the sky.
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Re:Two Military Spy Telescopes... (Score:4, Interesting)
Judging from TFA (I know, I know...)
They aren't quite built yet, and won't be ready for launch for another 8 years at least. Not sure how much of it is funded, or will be funded by anyone outside of NASA after the handoff.
I'm thinking it's an old (and likely over-budget) black program that didn't live up to its promises, that the USAF didn't feel like funding anymore, and so they wanted to find a graceful way to dump it.
IMHO though? Over the years, politics and politicians have shoved NASA's mission around back-and-forth enough to give it a permanent case of ADD. This only shoves it around more. I doubt that NASA really has much of a coherent mission outside of a few programs that have remained (thankfully!) largely untouched by politics.
I may be wrong about this, but seriously - if you were A VP, in a business that was founded sought out round widgets... only to have a succession of CEOs who pushed you towards finding square ones, then polyhedral ones, then only trapezoidal ones, and then square ones plus any green triangular ones you stumble across, but then someone gives you a detector specifically built for round ones?
Yeah... I wouldn't invest too awful much into any given new project either.
Almost be better off giving the dosh and gear to a more focused private industry/academia/whatever at this point. :/
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The secret projects have so much money just lying around that they can build two hubble-class telescopes just like that, and then figure out that they don't need them so they can hand them over to NASA, why don't they need them? Well, probably because they built something a lot better and launched it already.
Those two birds were built in the late 1990's and early 2000's - meaning, they are more or less 10 year old
In the span of 10 year time, NRO could have a generation (or two) newer birds with much better capabilities, already in orbit
Now consider then what else they're doing
NRO could have already pointed their newer birds out to the heavens and might already discovered something ultra-ordinary
But NRO being NRO, they just couldn't tell us what they have discovered, could they?
So... they did the next best thing - they "gifted" these two de-commissione
Re: (Score:2)
Renouncing your Citizenship is as easy as a visit to the State Department. You're welcome to go turn in your card and go somewhere else. In fact, please, do it.
Especially right before your company goes IPO.