I just posted this note to some of the Usenet groups, and thought it might be interesting to seesat folk, as you're indirectly mentioned. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The February 1996 issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics have American spysats as their cover stories. PopMech's article is written by cyberspace's own Philip Chien and PopSci's by Stuart Brown. Both are quite good, though Chien's is a little closer to my own interests. Brown's article concentrates more on CORONA, reviewing the material released last year at the GWU symposium last spring -- I'd guess he was there, based on the detail contained in the article. He concludes with a good commentary by John Pike on how spysats probably kept us and the Soviets from nuking each other by decreasing the extreme levels of ignorance-based suspicion which characterized the 1950s. It would be interesting to study the extent to which this was an "unintended side effect;" certainly in the US, and I'd imagine in the USSR, reconnaissance satellites had SIOP targeting/planning as one of their major missions. Chien covers the CORONA history also and then goes on to give a quick overview of the present and possibilities for the future. In one respect he's a little inconsistent (I think) when he says that current spysats' resolutions might be as good as 2 inches but also states that they could read a license plate placed flat on the ground. OTOH, he notes that the amateur observer community has demonstrated that finding and tracking spysats isn't very hard, and that effective ASAT systems can be derived from SCUD-level technology. As those are theses I've been advocating the US should pay more attention to, I was pleased to see the words. As an aside, I was recently talking with a professional astronomer/amateur satellite watcher about building a space surveillance system on the cheap. He'd done some preliminary design studies on an optical system, and thought that commercially available equipment could be used to detect and track satellites down to visual magnitude 15. That would be good enough to see even quite small debris objects in LEO, or small- to-medium sized satellites in GEO. Something that P.C. suggested which I hadn't thought of is that the Air Force's amusingly acronymed MSTI satellite, ostensibly an SDIO/BMDO targeting sensor testbed, might be trying out technologies that could be used on smallspysats. I'd like to believe that, but it would be nice to get some substantiation. If anyone has more (unclassified, of course) technical details on the MSTI sensors, please post them here.