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Comment by jolj | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like extremely late to the game, we are talking about 1960s tech.

Very surprising for a country as large as the UK, I can only assume they used US satellites up until now, and started designing their own due to Trump

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As a Brit, I reckon Brexit, and the restricted access to ESA [0], are the far more reasonable explanations here...

[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-involvement-in-the-eu-space-p...

which one of these programs constitute of a military reconnaissance satellite?

None that I'm aware off.

so I assume Britain received its imaging intelligence from the US as part of five eyes. or else I cannot explain how a nuclear armed country has skipped over one of the main prerequisite for missile targeting for 60 years

The UK nuclear arsenal has always been a strategic deterrent. The weapons in the UK arsenal (trident missiles with MIRV warheads) are designed to destroy cities, so unless the Russians have managed to conceal the locations of their major cities, targeting shouldn’t be an issue.

Presumably part of the nuclear doctrine is to take out your enemies nuclear launch sites before they launch

Also, even large cities have places which are better to target

>Presumably part of the nuclear doctrine is to take out your enemies nuclear launch sites before they launch

It is not. The UK, like most nuclear armed states, has a "No first use" doctrine, meaning its nukes exist only to retaliate, to turn cities to ash.

Whoever is nuking you, to the point that you use those retaliatory nukes, might be targeting your weapons, but they are on submarines in friendly waters, so not likely to be destroyed before they can launch.

Your link says:

"The UK’s membership of the European Space Agency (ESA) is not affected by leaving the EU as ESA is not an EU organisation."

I think you meant the EU Space programme, but that does not seem related to military imaging satellites.

Ah, another excellent benefit.

The British have had military satellites since Skynet 1A in 1969 [0], although these historically supported comms rather than ISR.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(satellite)

yes which only makes sense they were used to support five eyes sigint and used US satellites for visint

Didn't 1960s-era spy satellites use physical rolls of film that were dropped back to Earth and caught by planes or helicopters?

Yep! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)

Yeah it was pretty insane, catching it mid flight. Really cool. You can't make that stuff up.

Imagine tracking and catching something falling from space using only 60s tracking tech. No GPS. Wow.

There's no way GPS is more useful than a radio signal from the package.

No but the latter only works if you're already in proximity. With the speed these things come down you have to be already in the right vicinity to catch it.

This is where GPS+track prediction could help a lot. And why I think it's so impressive.

I was 15 years old in 2004 when I have guessed the existence of that program :)

I was reading a scientific magazine article about the planed return of the Genesis spacecraft’s samples. They were writing about how the probe will float back to Earth under a parachute and a helicopter will catch it mid—air. That plan sounded absolutely bonkers crazy to me and I would have assumed they needed a long process of trial drops to practice this stunt, but the documented evidence shown that they were quite non-chalant about it. Almost as if they have done such things previously. But since there were no public evidence of prior art I assumed some classified spy stuff was what gave them the experience needed to be confident about the skill. (This was 7 years before the declassification of the existence of the KH-9 program)

Elementary, My Dear Watson!

(yes, I know it's not a real quote)

You should see how often I was wrong about stuff though! :D

I only wrote about this because later it become clear that I was right.

I would never tell you about how much time I spent thinking about how a submarine could use laser back-scatter to track the slightly warmer wake of an enemy submarine. :P Not until they declassify that too.

Probably a combination of Trump and Brexit. The Tory governments made a big song and dance of investing to replace the access to European space programs that they lost, I wouldn't be surprised if this project sat in the folds of one of those efforts - even just financially.

On the other hand - this was actually delivered, so maybe not a Tory thing at all... /S

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