Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

cheschire·

Let’s launch hard drives back and forth between earth and LEO. Like sneakernet in space.

View on HN

U.S. spy satellites were returning film payloads to Earth as late as 1986:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon

That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it.

The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_2

never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes reentering the atmosphere

I have just decommed an old datacentre that we're moving out of and this is basically what my 30-year-old travel-worn farm truck Range Rover looks like right now.

The hard part is getting an IO card with built-in hardware decelerator

Been there, done that.

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

They'd drop their film back down to earth.

If they're heavy enough, it doubles as a space fountain.

railgun microSD

but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes

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

What's crazier is that there was a similar system to retrieve people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com