Unlock the secrets of America's spy satellites in this gripping episode of Astrographics. Delve into their covert history, cutting-edge technology, and their role in shaping the future of surveillance and space exploration.
@@karlacelar9545 But why tho? Did his team calculated that more revenue will be gained by more channels? Wouldn't be more convenient to gather as much viewers on a main channel? This is risking to be banned since that's exactly the thing that numerous spamming AI bot channels are doing.
@@secretbassrigsbetter than China's what. Protip for a Tard; complete sentences. Makes life significantly easier and hey, what do you know, people might even understand what you're trying to say. Even when trying to be a snide, toxic, Beijing funded internet troll.
In 2012 the NRO donated two unused space telescopes to NASA. Similar in size to the Hubble Space Telescope, yet with steerable secondary mirrors and shorter focal length (resulting in a wider field of view). They were constructed between 1990 and the early 2000's. When the telescopes' specifications were presented to scientists, large portions were censored due to national security. These telescopes were described as having "state of the art optics" but were considered by the NRO to be *obsolete for reconnaissance purposes*. There's a wikipedia page about this "2012 National Reconnaissance Office space telescope donation to NASA"
Sad NASA could only get funds to convert one of the free NRO satellites, but what an achievement Hubble is. Hopefully NASA will allow SpaceX to send a repair mission.
@@favesongslisti remember reading something in a magazine around the time Hubble was built. The price of Hubble was controversial, eventually reaching nearly $2 billion. But when it was approved, the mirror was built from a glass blank from Corning. The blanks were already available. Hmm...
@@michaelallen5505 NASA began feasibility studies on the telescope in 1971, and the European Space Agency decided to build a camera for the telescope in 1975. The mirror was waiting in storage for 9 years without testing :(
@@michaelallen5505 Hubble was deemed to be "shortsighted" when it was sent to orbit. It sounds like it was merely cut to specs closer to earth-facing needs ;)
Very good point. I think the general public is a little naive when it comes to Intel apparatus. Those people care nothing about the constitution other than making sure that they have plausible deniability if anyone ever accuses them of ignoring it. It was all good when we thought that they were only applying it towards terrorist threats but that power was predictably turned inward towards citizens who may possess undesirable political views. I'm sure this has been going on and evolving for many decades but it clearly accelerated under the Obama administration. At this point, they have access to MUCH more information than any government on the planet and that knowledge is pure, unbridled power. They're untouchable at the present moment but at some point there will be a president and Congress who attempts to reel them in. Fireworks
KH-11 Keyhole…take the Hubble telescope and point it at Earth, done. It’s strange no one wondered how the US already had the capability to make the gigantic Hubble mirror, right? It’s because they were already making them.
Close - Hubble may have been the first mirror of the line, but there were at least a dozen other nearly identical mirrors produced by Perkin-Elmer for down-facing applications. I saw photos in the late 1980’s taken from above from which you could clearly see features smaller than 1cm
I find it incomprehensible that we have enough satellites orbiting and looking down at us so that the earths surface can be scanned 6 times of every minute.
The problem with every satellite system is that they are totally predictable. For years the American secret industries had to do all outdoor testing when the Soviet satellites were elsewhere.
Fun Fact... several of the "baked-in" design/engineering "shortcomings" of the US Space Shuttle design were due...in no small part..to the USAF requirements for "high dynamic" launch-intercept-return capability/specifications....
The speaker provides impeccable speech easy to grasp even for me whose first language is not English. The information is crystal clear even without much background knowledge. A true role model for all other speakers.
I'm surprised you didn't mention synthetic aperture RADAR satellites. They can see through clouds day or night with resolutions down to 5 millimeters. In the 1990s, the Spece Shuttle was able to map the entire surface of Earth in a single mission.
@@donaldewing7405 you're right. Although it is(was) technically possible for the Shuttle to fly a polar orbit, it was never done. The radar map covered most of the Earth but not the polar regions. eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle-radar-topography-mission
@@donaldewing7405 It mapped 80% of the earth's land, not the entire surface, but that dataset is still used *heavily* today. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_Mission
How about a video on synthetic aperture radar (SAR)? The name isn't very exciting, but the images, resolution, and capabilities are impressive. Also, it seems like every other week China is launching a new SAR satellite into orbit.
Yeah, shocked that this wasn't covered here. The capability to see through clouds and tree cover and get a 3-D image back is, as it turns out, quite useful in military intelligence contexts. God I would kill to see the level of detail we have with that stuff these days.
@@cptjeff1I have, I was in the US Army and got to drive the big sky cameras and order pictures and whatever. Overview effect to a small degree is what I would say it feels like.
It's been around a minute, but I was likewise surprised when I discovered it one day 😂 Have you come across "Places" yet? His replacement for geographics.
I looked for a list one time, and I found what looked like it was an official site but it was far out of date. I liked it better when he just had the two, TopTenz was good for little factoids, and Today I found Out was good for these deeper dives.
The AI doesn't care, no worries, no human will ever see it --- unless you give them a reason to check the database When I was a kid there was a story about a giant book in the sky that automatically recorded everything you did and said. Did we just invent that? I thought it was a religious thing
About 9:00 you missed interception of telephone conversations (land based microwave tower to tower) - the satellite passed through the beam periodically.
I believe that given the circa 1 meter resolution of today's commercial imaging satellites, you wonder is the biggest customer for even 1 meter images is the US military. That resolution is more than enough to pick out parked airplanes, parked military vehicles, and most launch sites, even marked out sites for mobile ballistic missile launchers.
What's even crazier is the estimated resolution of the KH-11s at a 250km orbit is a mere 6cm. And that's with a 2.4 meter mirror, imagine if they had gotten a 3 meter mirror. You'd be able to read military name tags from orbit! Not bad for mid 70's tech.
the US and USSR would race each other to capture those satellite drops as they parachuted down there were a lot of cat and mouse games during the cold war
That is true, the arc resolution is physically limited by the mirror size and Hubble's mirror is the same size as the spy satellites at that time. And the mirror size means those satellites had 10 cm by 10 cm resolution.
@@JainZar1 Which means that they _could not_ discern a pack of cigarettes, nor read license plates. Beyond the theoretical diffraction-limited resolution, you have atmospheric conditions to deal with, and ordinary weather. So, _occasionally,_ you could get really good views.
Typing this before watching the whole video so I don't know if it gets covered. At the distance spy satellites are from the ground the Law of Diffraction would limit optical resolution to no greater than 2-3 inches even with _perfect_ atmospheric conditions and _perfect_ mirrors/lenses. So all the cool myths surrounding spy satellites being to read your newspaper or identify a persons face from space are just that...myths.
I still reckon it was a mistake to retire the SR-71 and replace it with satellites. The SR-71 flies a lot lower than satellites (better image quality) and its overflights can't be predicted, unlike satellites.
My father worked on some of these satellites in the 80s and 90s, and he said they could read your cirgerette brand then so I can imagine they can easily see your face and track targets I'm sure . He retired in 96 with a civilian job at Raytheon
@@Ltdeathsquid the number of satellites we have is 6k of strictly spy satellites just imaging earth not including signits and others then civillian satellite they the US can leverage the amount of coverage must be constant on the globe I imagine enemy of the state isn't far off of today's capabilities
Back in the day they would return a film canister to Earth to be analyzed by hand. These days there is so much data that a human cannot review it all. A lot is just stored to be looked at in forensic scenarios but the AIs are getting better. I mean, the AI will see you getting into your car in the morning, but it won't care ... unless you're on a watch list Simon
At a conference at MIT Lincoln Labs (Lexingon, MA) in 2001, a group put together a synthetic aperture RADAR (SAR) using a ground station in Washington, DC (Naval Observatory) and the MIT Haystack station (Tyngsborough, MA). The experiment was to image a satellite in orbit. SAR uses a larger array to image smaller objects, and this promised to be a very interesting presentation. However, inspite of the satellite, the ground stations, the communications network, and the algorithms all being unclassified, the DoD classified the product of the experiment.
I remember an informed comment from decades back about the Kennen class spy satellites that they were so powerful that they could “read the label on your underpants”. I’ve always thought that was a bit creepy for all sorts of reasons.
While not quite that powerful, on a good day (meaning atmospheric conditions) it's estimated you could get around a 6cm resolution. Practically was probably double that though. Now if there's anything up there with a 3 meter or larger mirror, then yeah, it probably could read that.
What I want to know is, what the heck happens to all the old redundant satellites ? There must be thousands floating around up there, and keeping track of them all, must be tricky, so they don't hit a human spacecraft being launched.
I was talking to a Lockheed technician once and he said they did a ground level test between two towers in two different cities spaced 30 miles apart and they can read a persons name tag at that distance.
Great video! Note to the editor: Please do not animate still images by moving them around. I don't need motion sickness while trying to look at a photo. Thanks.
A million years ago when I was squadron crew on board CV-63 I had a buddy who worked in the photo shop tell me, “…the Russians would all have heart attacks if they new how good our cameras were.”
One of the images later in this video was a rendering of a full-stack Saturn V rocket in orbit, connected to a huge PV array with pods near the ends. It was very unrealistic and looked like a wacky AI-generated image.
Seems like a vast constellation of low earth orbit satellites like SpaceX Starlink could get you pictures of just about anywhere, anytime. Being at such a relatively low attitude, quite good resolution could be obtained without exotic optics.
Which is why the NRO is working with SpaceX for a network of small, Starlink sized satellites called Starshield. They've mixed some in with Starlink deployments and are doing some dedicated launches.
@@cptjeff1 Yeah, I have pretty much suspected this for a while. I have long concluded that Starlink can never be profitable unless it also include look down cameras on their satellites. A fair while back, Musk said he would never put camorras on his satellites. But then he showed us pretty detailed views of the last Starship 3rd test flight. So we know in fact, at least some do have cameras. Go figure!
I'm pretty skeptical that US space satellites can do accurate facial recognition from space...I have no doubt there is a mythology behind this, but even thinking through the mechanics of such telephoto resolutions from that kind of distance, the size of the telescope would have to be enormous or the amount of mechanical zoom would have to be something in the realm of absolute insanity. It would border on the resolution of a single earthbound telescope being able to pick up the same fine details of the moon as the people and drones who've landed on the moon...let alone think of the type of angle a satellite would need to be at in order to not get just a top down view, but to be able to see enough of your face to know who you were because the top of peoples' heads aren't exactly the most easily identifiable, and then revisit the idea of mechanical zoom through atmosphere, dust, clouds and things of that nature at an even further distance and with the curvature of the earth...let alone if anything in that distance should come in the way like a building or a mountain or trees particularly when the satellite has to manage glare from the sun and may not be able to have the most ideal position...or it gets dark, cause identifying people from infrared isn't exactly easy or ideal and a lens with that kind of focal length isn't exactly going to be fast because so little light will pass through the aperture meaning if the subject is moving too fast or there isn't enough light this could be a real struggle to capture a clean enough frame to make an ID...There is no "enhance" button like we see in movies, you will have to have the pixel/dpi resolution and mechanical zoom to be able to pull this off...While not a technical impossibility, this is just very very very impractical. and I highly doubt we would have had such a hard time chasing down terrorists or sent bombs into civilian weddings if we could accurately identify faces from space over the last decades.
In 2008 we had access to satellite images in our Blue Force Trackers and we were notified when a satellite found a license plate we were looking for so... there's that.
I like Simon's videos as much as the next, but some of these videos are grossly sensationalized with little to no facts to back them up. Let's not forget, no matter how good a satellite is, it still follows a VERY predictable orbit. Seeing eyebrow details and freckles is cool, but if you know the satellite is coming, you'd just put on a mask.
I remember back when it came out that the NSA was spying on everyone and supposedly listening to all our phone conversations I had to catch the bus everywhere. I thought GREAT! The only calls I made at the time was checking bus schedules. Maybe Uncle Sam would learn how to tell time. 😂
Supposedly in 1986 , from a satellite in space , you could flip a dime in a rain storm , in New York City , between the skyscrapers , and they could tell you heads or tails from outer space , 1986
@@joelaichner3025 It has nothing to do with technology, but the air. The air has stuff in it, so it is not optically clear. There is a physical limit to the resolution you can get any a given distance. The closest you could come to that type of high resolution would be in a vacuum such as outer space.
17:07 - The big problem with DoD satellites is that uplink/downlink bandwidth requires radio bands to be available, and Congress keeps selling bandwidth to telecom companies to try to balance the budget.
Reminds me of the 1978 movie "Rescue from Gilligan's Island" If it were not for the Soviets sending a self-destruct signal to their spy satellite, they would have never gotten off of that island.
Have you noticed how much cash is in the hands of a few corporations and individuals? They are scraping off of everything. The cash is a big mountain, social security a big hole. The fix for Social security as is, is migrants working the infrastructure and jobs act. ID them, give them hard hats, put them to work, tax their productivity.
Constant Stare, to detect Cold Sneeze on any surface sensing satellite communication capabilities marking the beginning of new era or epoch reckoning space-time frontiers.
It’s interesting how much data they are gathering, but you have to remember that government computers are notoriously inefficient at sorting that data for use. Enormous amounts of data is useless when administered by faulty, buggy, and inefficient programs that spit out information that is inaccurate and even outright false. I’m sure they’re using AI, but given the faults that civilian AI has shown, I wouldn’t be too concerned with a government run AI. They tend to “fill in the blanks” with whatever prejudices the programmers had (true or not).
It is painfully evident that neither Simon (he shouldnt, after all he is just the presenter) nor the writter (he/she really really should) know very much about the topic. Very VERY shallow episode, a lot of factual errors...not great queality overall.
‘Weightlessness’ is how we describe the feeling of being in space, but even then you’d still be feeling Earth’s gravity. “Weight” is the force of gravity acting on a mass, so no matter where any object in the Universe is, it’s feeling some gravity (we technically feel the gravity from other galaxies, but it’s so infinitesimally small we ignore it) So weightlessness doesn’t truly exist in the Universe, it’s just a term we use to help describe the phenomenon you feel, just like the momentary weightless feeling at the top of a jump before falling What Archimedes was suggesting is that since a lever can multiply force based on where you place the fulcrum and how much lever is on either side of it, with a long enough lever and something to rest it on, you could generate a force large enough to move the Earth. (The distance it moves would be nigh impossible to measure, since the distance is multiplied by the inverse of the force multiplier, and to get a human’s force to move Earth that’s a lot of multiplication)
I think they could service Hubble if they wanted to. KH satellites are basically Hubble telescopes that are pointed down. For reference, while Kennan is 3 meters, Hubble is 2.4 meters.
With "constant stare" it seems as if a geopolitical rival could initiate a military action somewhere just to gauge the response and then continue or halt accordingly. Effectively, capitalizing on fecklessness.
I saw top secret photos in 1971 when I was at SAC HQ in Omaha NE. They had probably 3 to 5 meter resolution and were not that current. I was a technician repairing Crypto (coding) equipment and information gleaned from these was sent over our communication equipment. I can imagine what the current systems can do.
I was caught on satcam while out gathering firewood on my wilderness property. The image was sharp enough to see me leaning over the pickup bed to adjust the position of a piece of wood.
The DSP satellites scanning the entire earth's surface 6 times per minute has to me a typo. Six times a day, I could believe. 22000 miles is the height of geostationary orbits; such satellites would orbit once per day. You would need a lot of them so that one is overhead everywhere every 10 seconds.
Using the state of consumer technology today as a yardstick we have to assume that the US, and maybe others, have Constant Stare functionality already online, along with many other capabilities. The US and others would never reveal as such so they have to act surprised when events occur, but they know.
