Also AARS / QUARTZ super-duper stealth drone.
Those missiles were a major PITA to track down - even for spysats. A spysat takes 90 minutes to circle Earth but in the meantime, Earth has rotated under the ground track (hello, Space Shuttle crossrange) so it doesn't overfly the same spot. Well, the Soviets would move the TELs according to that weakness - gaps in KH-11 coverage.
The only solution would have been to put spysats in GEO so that they "persisted" and "hovered" above the same spot. But from 22 000 miles high and through the thick atmosphere, getting a ground resolution better than 30 feet would have taken giant optics: eye watering expensive spysats.
So back to atmospheric vehicles, ideally like the U-2R / TR-1: persistent, subsonic. Except inside Soviet airspace... only a stealth drone could have any hope of survival.
Hence AARS / QUARTZ. It was to fly ahead of B-2s and hunt the TELs for them; then pass the data to Milstars ( = GEO military comsats) and from there: to the coming B-2s.
An absurd, almost untractable problem with QUARTZ was basing. If in Europe, it could attract attention, even on highly secure airbases. But if CONUS based, it took a lot of time and fuel to bring it to Europe. Also air traffic conflict was a major PITA for drones.
QUARTZ ended gold plated and insanely expensive; didn't survived 1991.
...
Two recent spysat developments are fascinating.
On one hand, the chinese are putting spysats in GEO, whatever the reduced ground resolution; it's plenty enough to pin down big USN warships such as 1000 feet long aircraft carriers...
On the other, the NRO with Starshield seems to go the big LEO constellation way for spysats. Put tons of them in LEO and you end with global, instant coverage.
I wonder whether they had a similar idea in the 1980's : some kind of KH-11 / Brilliant Pebbles hybrid. Could have tracked down the TELs from orbit, near real time, and feed that to the B-2s via Milstars. TBH, it would probably have busted state-of-the-art broadband and storage limits.
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