If you've ever seen the publicly released videos and audio of an RQ9 operator in communication with ground units watching the activity of a group of men/vehicles on the ground, in live real time, something like that.
As compared to periodic revisits by LEO orbit satellites that don't maintain persistent live coverage, or the extreme distance and data acquisition problem that aiming sensors in geostationary orbit at a 10x10km target area might pose.
It's widely accepted in the commercial two way satellite telecom industry that the NSA has comparable things with big unfolding umbrella-like antennas in geostationary which serve a similar purpose for signals collection.
How does that even work, do people just accept that their satellites hang around suspiciously close to other geostationary satellites and hoover up the very edge of the beam somehow?
Because if you're transmitting stuff *to* geosynchronous birds you have to aim pretty accurately.
If you have a NSA-type geostationary satellite somewhere in approximately a 1/5th arc of azimuth along the equator of the earth that can 'see' an area on the ground, with antenna systems aimed at the area of interest (let's say, Afghanistan), it's not necessary for your NSA satellite to be anywhere close to the actual service provider's satellite.
Note that Thuraya BGAN-like devices and handheld phones talk to geostationary, Iridium is LEO (but likely some combination of LEO, molniya orbit and geostationary can "sniff" it), Globalstar is similarly LEO in its service provider architecture, and Inmarsat is geostationary.
Also lots of conjecture out there that sigint platforms exist which are good enough to capture ordinary handheld device cellular traffic or VHF/UHF radio traffic that's not intended by its users or terrestrial operators to go into space at all. This is probably done from a combination of low earth orbit platforms and more complicated orbits or what we would call MEO (maybe about the same height as an o3b satellite?) to achieve longer dwell times over an area of interest.
Same concept for an Iridium 9555 or its successor in a dock plugged into the small coaxial cable that goes to the external hockey puck sized antenna. This is all happening between approx. 1400 to 1700 MHz in either system.
Look up the detailed RF specs for the isatphone 2.
Both of these only work because the channel size is extremely narrow.
The antenna on the commercial satellites that do two way S/L-band to handheld stuff (or INMARSAT BGAN size terminals) from geostationary is massive, I've no reason to believe that a high budget billion dollar NSA satellite at MEO or higher altitudes wouldn't have a similarly gargantuan unfolding antenna.
Nobody does what you are saying, because physics, which leads me to believe that you are confused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-202
The whole point of the SR71 is to be stupidly fast, to the point of being impossible to catch. It could outfly missiles, and the mission was done and over by the point anyone could scramble a proper defense. Have it fly circles over a target and you're negating its one main unique selling point.
Want to loiter over a target? Use an RQ9. Want an impossible-to-stop snapshot camera? Use a satellite. So what's left for the SR71? I guess there are some missions where 1) you don't have air superiority, and 2) the target can hide in time from well-known satellite orbits, but 3) the target can't hide with 15-minute warning from a plane - but are those really common enough to justify the massive investment it'll take?
The RQ9 is fine to loiter over and watch an area that has little to no air defenses, more stealthy things are needed if there's some form of credible air defense. There's a number of non faked photos of downed rq9 in yemen in the past couple years that were shot down by fairly basic air defense systems the Houthis acquired from Iran.
We have confirmed the loss of like 40 reapers in Iran.
Yeah, probably way to much science fiction there, way too many things would go wrong, and spy satellites tend to have huge antenna have fun trying to stuff that in a rather small payload bay. However... One of the space shuttle mission profiles was to deorbit a satellite. Officially, the space shuttle never did this. But I think the airforce really liked the idea and wanted to retain the capability.
So you're sitting in your orbit and any changes (especially so close to the massive body) are super expensive. Which means sending anything after you must be pretty trivial (once the missile is already in orbit).
Spaceship just launched 30+ starlink v3 sats on its first orbital flight two days ago. It might as well have been flat disks of missile sats, even multi missile per each disk. Sitting there waiting, getting energy from solar, only having to expand fuel when a strong solar storm temporarily increases atmospheric drag on LEO + some minimal station keeping. A missile type sat with completely different budget for fuel and mass has a big advantage.
Maneuvering for a rendezvous (intercept), given 5-40 hours time, is very cheap in terms of ∆V (fuel used).
Only if you're in approximately the same orbital inclination. Plane change maneuvers once in LEO are very expensive in delta V.
Raising the apogee, then changing the inclination there is relatively cheap - and you can adjust the plane change and apogee to time a collision. Remember - there is no need to recircularize. Just collide. If the goal was to recircularize then I don't know if raising the apogee would be worth it, maybe for extreme cases. But not for a collision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
Imagine implementing the above from LEO.