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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Are drones replacing space telescopes?

This sounds like a reasonable speculation to me. Drones would be orders of magnitude cheaper, more manuverable, expendable, not as subject to being obscured by cloudcover, able to survey many places at once or swarm over a wide area, etc.

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But we can't fly drones over China and Russia like we can Pakistan

You can if you make them small enough. I don't think any of us know what the classified state of the art is.

Uh...look at this thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo

This is made by Festo, a German industrial automation company. They did this for a trade show.

It was "for fun".

Imagine what we're capable of building for spying on China. I doubt we're having problems with it.

And satellite surveillance is less useful these days.

1960s - we have photographed Soviet SAM sites around Moscow. We know where to avoid to send bombers in.

2010 - we have photographed a semiconductor fab in china. We don't know what they are making but we can tell where the fab is to an inch.

You can tell a lot about what they're making based on its proximity to other resources, the shape of the buildings, the schedule of supply deliveries, etc. Intelligence analysts are a crafty bunch.

Yes but - shipping schedules, raw materials, invoices and hirings will tell you a lot more about that than high resolution sat photos of a building in an office park in a city center

How'd that work out for the US with Iraq?

http://articles.cnn.com/2004-04-03/us/powell.iraq_1_official...

Has anyone written a definitive account of the intelligence failure here? A step-by-step kind of thing, not a pointless "BuSh LiEd!!!" kind of thing?

Yes. A commission appointed by Bush took a look at the nation's intelligence community after the Iraq failure and found it to be severely lacking.

http://articles.cnn.com/2005-03-31/politics/intel.report_1_m...

Thank you, that lead me to the actual report here- http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/index.html

If you had some sort of theoretical wide-scale, long-term coverage, I wonder if you could actually track the supply shipments from the source?

Hmmm.

You might find this interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

cloudcover and atmospheric distortions.

Nowadays, you use adaptive optics to correct atmospheric distortions. Consider this January 2012 press release:

http://www.nps.edu/About/News/NPS-New-Home-for-Giant-Segment...

("National Reconnaissance Office Deputy Director Air Force Maj. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski [...] officiated at the unveiling of the Naval Postgraduate School’s latest high-tech research and teaching acquisition, the agency’s Segmented Mirror Space Telescope. The Naval Postgraduate School is the proud new home for the Segmented Mirror Space Telescope (SMT), designed and developed for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) as a technical demonstrator and experimental testbed for cutting-edge space imaging technologies.")

These instruments are making single-mirror telescopes (like the ones described in TFA) obsolete.

Drones cannot do long term monitoring.

My understanding is that drones are preferred for long term/constant monitoring. Spy satellites are not placed in geostationary orbit, so they only have a few minutes of exposure per day to a place of interest as they fly over.

The Global Hawk [1] drone is optimized for high altitude loitering. Operating multiple drones in the area is one way to overcome the problem of running out of fuel.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Ha...

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