Sunday, September 18, 2011

Spy Satellites Declassified

A KH-9 Hexagon Imagery Satellite.  The thing's as big
as a Greyhound bus!

On 17 September 2011 the US declassified the KH series of satellites and their mission information.

Guess now I can tell my wife what I was doing for most of those 23 years I was in the Army.

What's not discussed in the story, and I won't go into too much detail until I know for sure it's OK to discuss it in full, is the contribution these satellites made to the DoD's world-wide mapping program.  Suffice to say, without these birds we would not have been able to accurately map the vast territories of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and all the other hostile places we thought we might have to go fight in.

More to follow...  Maybe.

Brian

1 comment:

Bill said...

It's much bigger than I thought too. Although it sent back a whole bunch of excellent imagery (methods possibly still classified), in my military intelligence duties the value of the output of the satellite was very high indeed, especially in a certain sandy part of the world.