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What Life Was Like Inside the Hexagon Project
As new submitter kulnor writes, "Hexagon, a cold war secret project around spy satellites to monitor USSR was declassified last September." kulnor excerpts from the AP story as carried by Yahoo, outlining how more than 1,000 people in and around Danbury, CT kept mum about the nature of their employment: "'For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets. They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized 'cleanroom' where the equipment was stored. They spoke in code.' As more and more WWII and cold war secrets are declassified, we learn about amazing technological feats involving hundreds of people working in secrecy. I wonder what will emerge in a few decades around modern IT, the Internet, hacks, and the like." Every time I visit Oak Ridge, TN, I am amazed by the same phenomenon of successful large-scale secrecy.
Although the SR-71 was made to operate beyond the reach of fighter aircraft ans surface-to-air missiles, there was still the potential that it could be brought down, or malfunction and crash, over enemy territory. This carries a lot of risks.
In addition, the article mentions that a full-frame image from a KH-9 could cover an area over 300 miles across. That kind of wide-field view if important militarily in a way that complements the closer-up images from spy aircraft.
The SR-71 has a somewhat smaller radar cross-section than you'd expect for such a large aircraft, but it was hardly stealthy: the USSR and China could know exactly when they were overflown by it. They could also know pretty well when a spy satellite would be overhead of a certain area, but couldn't always be sure if it was taking photos during each pass. This meant that they always has to assume that their military sites were under continuous surveillance, even if they weren't, and expend significant resources to counteract that. Same, too, on our side.
Although the SR-71 could get most anywhere on the globe within a day, so long as the orbit inclination is right (they were mostly polar orbits, I would guess) you are pretty much guaranteed to have a satellite pass within 12-24 hours anyway. And once it is launched, the bird is always up there: you don't have to worry much about staging it the way you do with a limited number of aircraft. There may have been places too deep inside the USSR and China for the SR-71 or U-2 to reach.
So, in short, one could conclude that the military wanted a variety of intelligence gathering options for breadth, depth, redundancy, and theatrics. The fact that there was a lot of money available for such things, which could be spread across a lot of agencies and a congressional districts, probably didn't hurt, either. They didn't have to choose among options: they could opt to do them all.