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Comment by tfm | Hacker News Reader

"Putting an astronomical telescope in space was a natural solution, and it followed directly—and, according to some, very directly—from the spy satellite program."

Can anyone expand upon this? I know the NRO has recently donated some of its old gear to NASA, but is there much cross-pollination between the space-operating agencies?

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According to many, hubble was a either a repurposed keyhole satellite, or was developed as a cover for a new generation of spy satellites. Rumour has it there are literally dozens of HST equivalents in orbit, but only one of them points away from earth.

Here's a source which makes this rather clearer - if this wasn't the case, why would the NRO happen to have two hubble-spec telescopes just sat around? http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/jason-davis/nasa-...

No, there is not much cross-pollination between science agencies and the military agencies. When I was in astronomy one of the professors in my department was on the committee to figure out what to do with the old telescopes that the NRO donated to NASA. From what he said, no one in the astronomy community had any idea that these telescopes existed and they learned about them from the New York Times, just like everybody else.

It has turned out to have put the astronomy community in a bit of an awkward position. Although the telescopes are free, they still need to be outfitted with appropriate instruments, and, of course, launched into space. Each of those projects costs roughly as much as the telescope itself, so the donation really only covers ~1/3 of the total cost of putting a working telescope in space. Unfortunately, the community just doesn't have the budget to do that. Furthermore, the telescopes aren't really ideal for astronomy since they were designed to look down rather than up. (That is, they are designed to focus on relatively nearby objects rather than on objects "at infinity.") But politically we can't turn the telescopes down, since that projects a bad image to Congress. Beggars can't be choosers, after all, so we have to look grateful while we try to scrape together the funds to get something useful out of them.

Putting spy satellites in space presented many challenges and lessons that could be directly transferred... - Building, Launching and Orbiting very sophisticated sensitive sensors, lenses, elements and equipment into space. - Developing compression algorithms and comand and control protocols. - Calibrating readings against known ground-based objects

There were, of course, self-destruction and counter-intelligence measures that probably won't be needed...

I also have trouble with this claim. Its been documented several times that problems NASA stuggles with have sometimes been solved by the DoD, but due to classification cannot be shared with NASA. No, this isn't some evil conspiracy, but NASA is open-ish and the contractors that do their work don't do so under classification, so anything given to NASA would quickly fall into the hands of America's enemies.

That said, I think this is true in a very general sense for more commodity space tech. Lets say, lens grinding on this level has been done for DoD projects, but because that's probably not classified (at least past a certain level), its easy for NASA's contractors to just re-use that lens grinding method than re-engineering a new one. Because the spy satellite programs are classified, we really can't know how much of it goes back into NASA programs, but I imagine something might.

Let's suppose you were an expert in optical design for space systems -- lenses, mirrors, coolers, detectors, electronics, thermal design -- and worked at NASA on a space telescope.

When that space telescope (say it was Hubble or Spitzer) was launched, you would be looking for another project. That's a small world. Maybe you would talk to a friend who works for intelligence agencies and find out what they are looking for.

And the reverse happens too. If you've explored the design space for an intelligence agency, you would be well-positioned to re-use that knowledge for a space telescope. You mention the classification barrier, but the basic physics drivers will be more apparent the second time around.

Case in point: Larry James (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/about/bio_james.php), who is the Deputy Director for JPL, but who used to be Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance at the Pentagon, and who before that was a Shuttle payload specialist. He's a technical executive, but there are pure technical examples as well.

OK, and a second example, of a segmented mirror demonstrator: http://www.nps.edu/About/News/NPS-New-Home-for-Giant-Segment... ("NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, named for the former NASA administrator and scheduled for launch in 2014 [erp!], will deploy the next generation of SMT technology on a mission to image light from the earliest galaxies in the universe.")

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