Inside America's U-2 Spyplane [video]
wsj.com
wsj.com
Vernier is correct, hands off should have been handed off.
I saw a minor typo, but couldn't find an email address for you, so posting here in the hope you see it. In the first paragraph of the addendum you have an "Out contact" that should be "Our contact".
"From there you reduced the indicated by 2.5K for over one-thousand feet"
Thank You for posting this.
Also, the history (70 year old plane) has a great look into military and intelligence collaboration with American industrial design firms, like Lockheed Martin.
The "grown up versions" of this are probably all classified at this point. The declassified modern capabilities give some hint to what the CIA is able to do. The ARGUS-IS is able to surveil, in high definition, in real time, entire cities while tracking thousands of targets, identifying them as people by their shadows, synthesize data with other sensors (cellular, wireless surveillance, etc), all without being detected.
It was never intended to be undetectable, just unhittable, because it flew so high that missles and guns didn't have enough velocity to even reach that high.
The pilots don't usually see raw product because it's really not in their lane - but they are the aircraft commander and pretty much know quite a bit of detail about stuff mounted to the aircraft.
You basically go from 0 to 95 in a few seconds to catch up with the landing U2. It's definitely worth the trip to the base, which is north of Sacramento - they're amazing aircraft.
LA Times article from 1989 when it was discussed (the first time; the SR-71 was retired twice):
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-09/opinion/op-1582_1_air...
A sheet of slow (fine grain) film at this size can capture detail way beyond what any digital sensor I know of - surely it can be scanned with the equivalent of multi-gigapixel resolution - and if one were to develop such a monster sensor, it would have a hard time competing with the film in all but a few edge cases. (Most notably the ability to transmit imagery to the ground immediately, provided the necessary bandwidth is available.)
You make a good point about the scanning. Any wet film product these days must generally be scanned to allow for further production in our "soft-copy" world.
My (attempted!) point was that fine-grain film* creates a negative which will be a challenge to match for most sensors out there - it is my understanding sensor yield drops drastically as it increases in size, so if you need a huge sensor, film is still the most cost-effective solution for a lot of applications. Then again, 'cost-effective' and 'national security' are two phrases which do not often come up in the same sentence!
*) My favourite - ADOX CMS20, has a resolving power which easily outperforms even a Summicron 50 at a sensible (not diffraction-restricted) aperture - more than 500lp/mm; the manufacturer claim up to 800lp/mm are resolvable (!)
That translates into some 12,500 line pairs/inch of film/sensor, as long as the optics are holding up their part of the bargain - or somewhere just short of 1 gigapixel from a 24x36mm frame, if scanned using -cough- sufficiently expensive equipment.