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Comment by NickBusey | Hacker News Reader

Or does some government actually already have this, but doesn't use it in these cases due to not wanting to reveal their advantage?

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I bet the United States' National Reconnaissance Office already has satellites that have the capability. And it's fair to assume they won't be redirecting sensitive military hardware for civilian purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office

Assuming for a moment the NRO has developed suitable optics to image the Earth real-time from geo at say 1 FPS, along with a sensor, and way to pipe everything back to the ground. There are still a couple unavoidable major flaws with such a system:

1) Clouds

2) You can't see all latitudes from geo, the higher the latitude gets, the more marginal the images will be.

So I really doubt such a capability exists. Look a the FOV for a geo satellite like GOES-15: http://www.wmo-sat.info/oscar/satellites/view/151

I don't understand where #2 is coming from. There's plenty of places to go in space other than GEO.

How are you going to continuously monitor the same area on the Earth without being in GEO? We'd know about a constellation of NRO satellites with continuous coverage of an area of the Earth from the folks at satobs.org.

You can't see anything from GEO, it's just too far away to be useful. No way they'll put them out that far.

Yeah, I know. The whole point of my post was in response to abhiminator that I don't think the NRO has the capability to get a live stream of the entire Earth continuously. Are you agreeing with me, or are you saying you think there is an undiscovered & undetectable NRO LEO/MEO constellation continuously observing all parts of the planet?

> continuously observing all parts of the planet?

No there's no way this is happening right now. I'm confident that they can continuously observe specific arbitrary locations of interest, but not the entire planet all at the same time. That's crazy talk.

Thank you for the write-up. I stand corrected.

It's not unheard-of; https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/spysat-and-shuttle-...

On a (much) smaller scale, there is ARGUS-IS [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS

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