I have not looked at the document since the spring, but yeah, the ready-alert and turnaround times were nuts. They were essentially treating this like a B-52.
"Given that they also talk at some length about dispersed operations, they clearly had an idea that these things would have a SIOP mission. I'm guessing that the concept was to do post-strike reconnaissance after the initial ICBM exchange and ahead of the bombers going in - that would explain the alert requirement, the once-around mission profiles and the data response timeline. If the orbital vehicle is carrying a reconnaissance suite that remains with it, then some of the issues about satellite operations are mitigated or eliminated."
I don't think these requirements were officially established. They might have been established for the study contract (in other words, "contractor should assume that the requirements are...") but they were not established at a high level within USAF. And they really are kinda weird if you know anything about how the US did (and mostly still does) strategic reconnaissance. For instance, what were the cost-benefits of this approach as opposed to something else? Does it make sense to spend billions of dollars developing a system that really can only be used in a very limited scenario? You wouldn't fly this in peacetime, and you'd be very limited in training options. Doesn't something else make more sense?
Now yeah, it was only a study. And it did not get adopted. So the questions might seem sorta moot because obviously people in charge said "this makes no sense" and they never built it. But I just find the way that the thing was set up to be very odd. A better set of ground rules would have possibly served them better.
And this is something that sometimes happened with space systems, where somebody establishes an initial set of requirements that results in a study proposal that gets rejected, but a different set of requirements may have resulted in a better, and more realistic, proposal that could have been adopted.
One last thing: This reminds me a little bit about SAC interest ca 1965-1969 in a radar satellite to conduct post-bomb damage assessment. Their idea was that after the initial nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union, SAC would have radar satellites that would fly over the post-apocalyptic battlefield and figure out how well the nukes did in hitting their targets. Their requirements were pretty high and would have resulted in a very expensive system. Ultimately, they never funded it and it never got built. But I'm guessing that that kind of interest persisted for decades in Strategic Air Command.
