Spy in the Sky – The KH-9 Hexagon (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Spy in the Sky – The KH-9 Hexagon (2014)

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36 pointsdirtyid9 comments

Something i always think about is how far ahead the military tech is compared to civilian.

With the Hubble Space Telescope for example we have one example of a design that's extremely similar to a 90's era KH-11 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen ) pointing outwards at the stars. We have dozens more, including newer, 30 years more advanced designs of spy satellites pointing inwards. That's pretty depressing. I get that defense is a requirement but our biggest scientific projects are essentially just offcuts of military tech with its unlimited budgets. Imagine if the space telescopes had similar budgets to spy satellites.

[A] It's from 2014.

[B] It's on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmWlw8Ufo6Q

That said, optical imaging satellites are amazing.

The first time I read the story about how they retrieved the film canisters from the KH-9, I didn't believe it..

tl;dr - the satellite would drop "buckets" with exposed film from orbit, and the US Air Force would catch them mid-air over the Pacific ocean.

Some good details and photos here: https://spie.org/news/spie-professional-magazine-archive/201...

Some of the ideas they came up with during the cold war sound like people were quite high when they came up with them. However, these were serious people coming up with outside-the-box ideas. "If we can think of it, so can $THEY" was a huge motivator.

A practically unlimited budget goes a very long way

I was lucky enough to hear about a KH-9 being shown off at Smithsonian Air & Space Udaz Hazy, back in 2011[1]. Hung out with some of the crew & engineering folk, heard stories of trying to catch these buckets with if I recall up to 500 lbs of film in them. For some reason I'm picturing them in helicopters with a long boom arm out the front, but I feel like the Air Force isnt allowed to use helis? Quite the amazing satellite.

[1] http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1568

Very cool!

I was at Udvar-Hazy back in 2013 and I guess I completely missed the KH-9 because I was in a hurry so I sort of ran through the place mostly to see the Blackbird and the Space Shuttle.. I guess I'll just have to go back!

The article I linked shows that they used Hercules aircraft to catch the buckets as they parachuted down back towards the water...

It feels like there's some detail missing here.

You can't just "drop" something from a satellite that's in orbit: it will also stay in orbit. So you need something to slow it down enough that goes low enough to start re-entry.

Then there's the whole problem of re-entry. You can't just drop something and expect it to survive re-entry without burning up in the atmosphere unless it has things like a heat shield and a way of keeping the heat shield oriented so that it keeps acting like a heat shield.

The missing details may be in the referenced book, but either way there certainly are some.

Hence my "tl;dr" prefix.. ;-)

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