The GeoEye site photo gallery gives a good idea of the resolution of currently available commercial satellite photos (presumably the company has incentive to show especially good examples of its photography from satellites).
The resolution shown is a lot less than the resolution necessary to read automobile license plates from space (a common 1960s claim of satellite capabilities that was surely an exaggeration for propaganda effect). Much less could a satellite read a notebook in a secret agent's hand, or anything of that kind. I think a lot of members of the general public are confused about the capability of satellite photos, because Google Maps displays aerial photos taken from airplanes under the heading "Satellite," which is always incorrect for the more close-in views (which also are seriously lacking in resolution).
The book Physics for Future Presidents and a course handout for a "physics for future presidents" course at a university
But, in using a 94-inch aperture, they neglect the possibility of flying an optical interferometer, or a deployable mirror. This technology opportunity has probably not been neglected by the powers that be.
Here's a couple of links (they speculate it's a deployable for RF SIGINT, but truth is we don't know):
While I don't know the actual best resolution of satellite imagery but I do know that the U.S. requires commercial satellite imaging to resample to 0.5 meters.
What saddens me about this story is the real but largely unexamined cost of war -- the appropriation of talent for projects with no positive impact on humanity. Yes, this satellite project was valuable in that it perhaps helped avoid future wars. However, what benefits could we all have received from the work of these obviously talented engineers? I'm not suggesting that such a satellite program was not a good governmental decision given the state of the world -- just that, in the absence of such adversarial relationships between countries, these engineers could have made the world a much better place somehow. We might mock the allocation of engineering talent to the latest group shopping or social networking "fad", but at least people are getting some possible benefit.
In a way you might as well fantasize about trees that grow sandwiches. We have to take what we're given in this world and that includes the nature of mankind and the many faults of human civilization. We should rightly strive to better the state of the world as much as we can but I don't think it's overly helpful to haul around an excessive amount of angst about human-kind being imperfect.
Wars are often caused by faulty intelligence, of the “oh, yeah, we can take this territory in a week” variety. I’m not a big fan of the defense establishment, but keeping an eye on our opponents’ capabilities is one of the more benign forms of defense spending.
there is a certain value in at least halting regression, in my opinion. if your work did not advance the sum of human knowledge, then did it at least keep the fires burning a little longer? then it was not a waste, in my opinion.
also, if it makes you feel any better, these projects tend to have a way of trickling down/out knowledge...
There's a soft-libertarian guy who runs some private UK collage, who claims that public R&D (which would include defence) does nothing but crowd out private R&D. If Bill Gates could have made more in a cushy job writing cruise missile code (or supervising contractors doing it) than running a scrappy little coding shop, he probably would have so.
Go read _The Hubble Wars_ and all this schmaltz about a top secret project will dissolve in anger.
They knew a lot of things that could have made Hubble much more of a success; the "wiggle" of the solar panel booms, the radiation issues of the various magnetic anomolies that Hubble would have to fly through.
Not only that. Perkin-Elmer was given the contract for grinding the primary mirror on the Hubble. Yes, the same primary mirror that was misground and required a multimillion dollar Shuttle mission to go fix with a pair of "eyeglasses" (secondary mirrors).
The reason for the screw-up? The same sort of time pressure that these engineers were working under. Working under time pressure like this isn't heroism. It's stupidity, and leads to screw-ups like Hubble.
EDIT: The Hubble mirror was even polished at the same Danbury plant where these spy satellite mirrors were being assembled. I wonder if one of the reasons for the Hubble mirror being misshapen was because personell were being pulled to work on CIA contracts?
A lot of information was in the public media as much as a decade ago: the satellite designations, the film recovery method, the approximate resolution.
I'm wondering whether they were incapable of sending back the pictures via an analog signal or didn't do so because they were afraid of eavesdropping - any ideas?
If you wonder why there seems to be a relatively recent boom in commercial spaceflight, this is why. During the cold war the best and brightest aerospace minds were heavily recruited into secret projects building spy satellites, ICBMs, super-sonic military aircraft, and other projects.
My favorite part was the technology used to return the photos to earth:
Once a reel of film was finished, it was loaded into a re-entry pod and sent back to earth. "And then at around 50,000 feet, a parachute would slow it down, and a C-130 airplane caught it in midair over the Pacific," Pressel says.
more shocking than anything related to the technology, is why they didn't declassify the price for project. I mean, if there's no risk of start a war with previous allies when this get's public, which greater danger may be on revealing the public money used on this?
And in the news reporting, why there's no mention of which legal mechanism allows for such a huge secrecy from the public, at all? should we all just accept that the cold war was the best that could have happened to the world and gladly accept many more to come?
Probably a little less than back then, the incentives are not so strong. During the Cold War it was like in Harry Potter: "one cannot live while the other survives", now the struggle for power in the world is less intense, it's more about influence and profit rather than destroying the other side.
Sounds good at first, but remember, the U.S. just spent around around $3e12 on wars in the Middle East, developing all kinds of technology along the way. Some of it has to be surveillance tech like this. Even a small fraction of this number would pay for a lot.
well, China manufactures all America's stuff. I will leave it to you how the Soviet-era threat of Nuclear bombs compares, to an American, with the threat of not getting any more stuff.
Now, it's true that as a percent of GDP, China is the largest manufacturer. But per capita it is either Japan or Germany (depending on which charts I was looking at), with US not far behind.
(Unfortunately as the world's largest national economy, a beggar-thy-neighbor export policy doesn't work so well for us.)
Perhaps the secrets are in terms of processing capability. They have high resolution synthetic appeture radar. Im guessing that civilian applications only scratch the surface of what that could be capable of.
The big sooper secret spy satellites are elint sats. We have a pretty good idea of the imaging and radar capabilities of satellites but the electronic evesdropping capabilities is much less widely known.
http://www.geoeye.com/CorpSite/gallery/Default.aspx
The resolution shown is a lot less than the resolution necessary to read automobile license plates from space (a common 1960s claim of satellite capabilities that was surely an exaggeration for propaganda effect). Much less could a satellite read a notebook in a secret agent's hand, or anything of that kind. I think a lot of members of the general public are confused about the capability of satellite photos, because Google Maps displays aerial photos taken from airplanes under the heading "Satellite," which is always incorrect for the more close-in views (which also are seriously lacking in resolution).
The book Physics for Future Presidents and a course handout for a "physics for future presidents" course at a university
http://books.google.com/books?id=6DBnS2g-KrQC&pg=PA204&#...
http://personal.carthage.edu/kcrosby/phys100/worksheet-licen...
both go through the steps for calculating the likely resolution of photographs taken by an earth-orbiting satellite.