SR-71's "R2-D2" Could Be Key to Winning Future Fights in GPS Denied Environments | Hacker News Reader

SR-71's "R2-D2" Could Be Key to Winning Future Fights in GPS Denied Environments

twz.com

11 pointsmonomania6 comments

Slight aside, I remember reading a post here on HN; the poster said they created an astronav system for use with webcams and published the code on github, only to receive on knock on their door a little while later from somebody who explained that this code in fact violated ITAR restrictions and they needed to remove it.

Reminds me of https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/open-source-passive-radar-ta...

Astronav systems have expensive moving parts that aren't very githubbable. There was an SDR software defined radio passive radar project that got taken down. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

So… while that’s true of most astronav systems to date (particularly the ones meant to be used during daytime, and especially with reference stars potentially near the horizon), I’m not sure that’s really a hard requirement.

If you restrict the domain to nighttime or exoatmospheric, a high-resolution wide-angle camera paired with an offline astrometry database has the makings of a strapdown astronav.

Widening the domain again, the natural motion of the vehicle is probably enough, when combined with inertial sensors to aid pixel-shift image stabilization, to achieve the same kind of processing gain as the older systems got with shutter-synchronous detection.

Would that hold up in court if the person were willing to challenge it? That seems a clear cut violation of that person's speech, but I guess anything for "national security".

US secrecy laws hold up in court. Just ask any contractor who accidentally brought home a classified document or three (and their name doesn't rhyme with Bonald Bump).

Think that's an unfair restrictions on speech? Just wait until you hear about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret

Reply on news.ycombinator.com