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Cold War Satellite Pics Declassified
wwwssabbsdotcom writes "Looks like 25 years ago, we were taking pretty good B&W pics of the rest of the world, interesting story. How about those Cuban Missile Crisis pics, do they have that roll available?"
Contrary to earlier reports, NIMA is releasing virtually all of its imagery from these programs except for imagery of Israel.
Now, I could be all suspicious, and beleive that this not showing Israel is in part so that we don't betray the fact we always knew about the Israeli nuke program, even back in its nascent stages, and look more like chumps who let Israel push us around and do the very things we claim not to tolerate from Hussein, and are pissed at North Korea about; but to do so would be paranoid and probably get pegged by the IAO as an Israel/America hating terrorist, and if there's one thing that crimps my discourse, it's thinking that I might be thought of as anti-american. (Stupid America, we suck.)
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
Well, my comment was based on the laws of physics. You can throw as much technology as you want at the problem, but it's physically impossible for a Hubble-sized mirror, looking straight down from Hubble's altitude, to read a newspaper headline. You would have a hard time even telling that you were looking at a newspaper.
We should avoid using spy movies as a basis for estimations on what our government is capable of.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
While much of the talk here is about either seeing celebrities naked baking under the Mediterranean sun or spying axis-of-evil governments and the such, the main use these images will have is that they are the first imagery of the Earth from space available. They do record images of the poles from where ice cover can be estimated. Again, forest cover can also be estimated from a time before civilian satellites were a reality. In other words, these images provide us remote sensing data from quite a long while ago. This should help the investigation of better climatic models and so on.
While there may indeed have been film recovery of satellite films (this sounds marginal, but not outside of the realm of possibility), the idea that the film was designed at an airbase if the parachute failed is absolute bollocks.
given the aerodynamics of a tumbling film canister and high altitude winds or whathave you, they'd be lucky to hit a given county, much less a given airbase. The plan is stupid--if the film cannister is designed to potentially survive a parachute-less fall, why would they bother with the parachute?
That there was something top-secret flying near an airbase during the cold war is not hard to believe. The notion that this was a film cannister recovery device with lights on it (let me get this straight--it has lights on it AND is designed to renter the atmosphere?) is incredibly hard to believe.
Well you don't need the space shuttle to get something into low earth orbit. In fact many of the commercial remote sensing satellites are fired up on rockets developed by Lockheed Martin, Orbital, etc.
.6 meter resolution. I would have to assume that the government has classified satellites with better resolutions.
BTW, the U.S. government is currently allowing nonclassified LEO remote sensing sats of a
Hiding secrets is easy. Just create a structure, temp. building, a parking garage etc., the US has been doing that for years. As in "You can't unfold these plans unless you're in the shed".
Except when you are an incredibly genious country like india.
Then you can access this thing called the internet, find out what times which satellites are passing overhead,
AND BUILD YOUR NUKES WHILE THEY ARE NOT WATCHING...