KH-11 KENNEN

Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of the newly minted U.S. Space Force, says the Russian spacecraft began maneuvering toward the American satellite shortly after being launched into orbit in November, at times creeping within 100 miles of it. “We view this behavior as unusual and disturbing,” Raymond says. “It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space.” Raymond says the U.S. government has expressed concern to Moscow through diplomatic channels.
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time.com

Exclusive: Russian Craft Shadowing U.S. Spy Satellite, Space Force Commander Says

"We view this behavior as unusual and disturbing"
time.com time.com
 
How on Earth does this qualify as an Unbuilt Project?
Or are posters just flouting the rules until the mods find time to step in?
Is it too difficult to use the section General/Aviation and Space ?
 
Moose said:
13 years since they killed Misty follow-ons. Wonder what the AoA looks like now.
Click to expand...

I always felt Zuma was probably a follow on, and that the perculiaties of its launch/failure were cover to insert it in an unexpected orbit. I've nothing to back that up other than the fact I believe MISTY was launched and also public considered to be lost; the whole contractor payload adaptor thing seems tailor made to cover up a successful launch while not laying the public blame for declared failure at the feet of SpaceX.
 
I posted the above article here as again there’s rumours of declassification of the early years of the so called KH-11. The problem of course is some fundamentals about the program likely haven’t changed so do you end up declassifying parts of the modern program as a result. I’d argue that there’s probably a lot changed in those decades even in the mirror technology and especially what goes behind it like the avionics as to how relevant would the early production blocks of the KH-11 be these days with others producing not dissimilar satellites now.
 
Flyaway said:
I posted the above article here as again there’s rumours of declassification of the early years of the so called KH-11. The problem of course is some fundamentals about the program likely haven’t changed so do you end up declassifying parts of the modern program as a result. I’d argue that there’s probably a lot changed in those decades even in the mirror technology and especially what goes behind it like the avionics as to how relevant would the early production blocks of the KH-11 be these days with others producing not dissimilar satellites now.
Click to expand...
Doesn't matter, a schematic and architecture of the first one compared to a current one are basically the same. The imaging electronics (CCD vs CMOS or whatever doesn't change the spacecraft. "Mirror technology"? It's mirror. How they're made doesn't matter. Thrusters, comm system, solar arrays, etc., the spacecraft is going to look the same.
 
The mirror/aperture situation is generally going to drive the spacecraft dimensions. I expect that current EO/IR satellites look very much like the Hubble just like their predecessors.
 
Flattops from space: the once (and future?) meme of photographing aircraft carriers from orbit
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, July 19, 2021

In 1984, Samuel Loring Morison, an analyst at the Naval Intelligence Support Center outside of Washington, DC, picked three photos off the desk of a colleague. He clipped the security classification stamps off the sides of the photos and provided them to Jane’s Defence Weekly, which had only recently begun publishing. The photos were taken by a satellite of a Soviet Union military shipyard. Knowing that they had a real scoop, the editors at Jane’s put one of the photos on the cover of the magazine and featured the other two in a short article about the latest Soviet naval developments.

The photos were taken by a KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellite, which was then highly secret. They showed a Soviet aircraft carrier (technically, an aircraft-carrying heavy cruiser) and an amphibious warfare ship under construction. They were by far the most detailed reconnaissance photos that had ever been published up to that time, and instantly attracted attention worldwide, resulting in substantial publicity for Jane’s. The article inaccurately reported that the aircraft carrier under construction was to be nuclear powered, but the story was still incredibly important for establishing the magazine’s reputation for inside information.

There was really no way for Morison to cover his tracks considering that he had a part-time job with Jane’s in addition to his day job as a naval analyst, and it did not take long for investigators to trace the photos back to him. Morison was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison for two years. He died on January 14, 2018, aged 73.

Because the photos Morison provided to the media were so famous, they became somewhat of an inside joke among people interested in intelligence collection—spawning, for lack of a better definition, an intelligence meme. In late 1996, somebody leaked a satellite photograph of another Soviet-era aircraft carrier to a journalist, this one working for the conservative-leaning newspaper The Washington Times. For years, Times journalist Bill Gertz had been publishing classified information—including satellite photos—that somebody in the government was leaking to him. Usually the leaks concerned China—which Gertz considered to be a rising menace—although Russia was another topic that Gertz occasionally wrote about based on classified information. Journalists covering the national security beat in Washington were envious of Gertz’s source (or sources) and speculated that the government was trying hard to find the leaker. The Times published the photo on January 1, 1997. The story, “Ukraine won’t finish Russian flattop,” was barely newsworthy except for the fact that it was based on a leaked, classified CIA report and featured a secret satellite photo of a Soviet-era aircraft carrier. Whoever leaked it almost certainly did so with knowledge of the Morison case and printing the photo on the first day of the new year was clearly a taunt, saying “catch me if you can.”
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They mention that they're producing a book for their 60th anniversary that is going to be about 60 NRO innovations and 60 NRO innovators. My guess is that you could probably assemble your own list of about 40 each of these things and have high confidence of being right. Just look at several of the official program histories that have lists of "firsts" for those programs and that would give you a good starting point (like first spacecraft recovered from orbit). One person mentions that CCDs will be in there, but the question is how much will NRO reveal about classified support of CCD technology development? There is the official, public story about the development of the CCD, but was there also classified technology support in the early years that we don't know about? (The answer is yes, but how much will they discuss that?)
 
During the podcast they don't indicate that any major program declassifications are coming. Now I would not necessarily expect that from a podcast like this--that's the kind of announcement that you really expect to hear from the NRO Director in a speech or an interview with a trade publication. But the overall gist of the podcast is that the 60th anniversary is mostly going to be focused on the current NRO employees, as opposed to former/retired NRO employees, and there won't be any big revelations. Any new revelations will probably be in that book. So they might reveal a technology, but not necessarily a spacecraft or program.
 
Or they could link the KH-11 to the CCD. After all is it not the case that we don’t have the full story on the development of the CCD because of the classification of the KH-11?
 
www.nytimes.com

Intelligence Agencies Pushed to Use More Commercial Satellites

Congress wants the government to turn to the private sector to augment the capabilities of highly classified spy satellites.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com



Intelligence Agencies Pushed to Use More Commercial Satellites
By Julian E. Barnes
Sept. 27, 2021

WASHINGTON — A cluster of satellites operated by an American company called HawkEye 360 looked down on the Middle East early this year and discovered radar and radio waves associated with a Chinese-based fishing fleet off the coast of Oman.

When the company matched the data up with information from NASA satellites that track light sources on the Earth’s surface, it discovered the vessels were using powerful lights — a telltale sign of squid hunting — as they surreptitiously sailed into Oman’s fishing waters with their tracking transponders turned off.

The surveillance was something of a technological test — in this case the company did not notify either Oman or China. But the work, company officials said, demonstrated the kinds of intelligence that can be gleaned from their satellites, which have also detected military activity on the border between China and India, tracked poachers in Africa for wildlife groups and followed the satellite phones used by smugglers working refugee routes.

With Congress pushing the Biden administration to make more use of commercial satellites, intelligence officials are starting to award new contracts to show they can augment the capabilities of highly classified spy satellites with the increasingly sophisticated services available from the private sector.

On Monday, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency announced that it had awarded a $10 million contract to HawkEye 360 to track and map radio frequency emissions around the world, information the company says will help identify weapons trafficking, foreign military activity and drug smuggling.

The contract follows a study contract awarded to the company by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2019.

David Gauthier, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s commercial group, said collecting radio frequency data would help “tip and cue” imagery satellites, in essence telling officials where to look. The commercial data is also unclassified, allowing intelligence agencies to more easily share the data with allies and partners.

The expansion of commercial satellites with greater abilities to peer down at Earth worries some civil liberties experts. The ever-growing number of commercial satellites has eroded privacy, said Steven Aftergood, of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

But the government contracts with commercial satellite companies themselves have not yet drawn much criticism, Mr. Aftergood said, because government satellites are far more powerful, at least for now, than commercial satellites.

The exact capabilities of the government’s satellites are closely guarded secrets. However, during the previous administration, President Donald J. Trump posted on Twitter a picture of an Iranian launch site taken by a classified American satellite that had been included in his intelligence brief. The picture was far more detailed than commercial satellite pictures of the same site.

In some quarters of the intelligence agencies, those lagging commercial capabilities have dampened enthusiasm for pushing forward with more private-sector contracts. But Congress is pushing the intelligence agencies to move faster.
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Timothy Brummer said:
KH-11 has changed significantly over the years. Originally was launched by a Titan 3D with 10 foot payload fairing, currently Delta IV with 16 foot fairing.
Click to expand...

I suspect the current version has nothing remotely in common with the first generation outside general layout, orbit, and purpose. Kinda like AIM-9X.
 
blackstar said:
Timothy Brummer said:
KH-11 has changed significantly over the years. Originally was launched by a Titan 3D with 10 foot payload fairing, currently Delta IV with 16 foot fairing.
Click to expand...

Does Delta IV have a 10-foot fairing?
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The fairing progression is:
Titan IIID - 10 foot
Titan 34D - 10.5'
Titan IV - 16.7'
Delta IV Heavy - 16.7'

The 16.7' comes from having to contain a 15 foot diameter payload with rattle space
 
Byeman said:
blackstar said:
Timothy Brummer said:
KH-11 has changed significantly over the years. Originally was launched by a Titan 3D with 10 foot payload fairing, currently Delta IV with 16 foot fairing.
Click to expand...

Does Delta IV have a 10-foot fairing?
Click to expand...
The fairing progression is:
Titan IIID - 10 foot
Titan 34D - 10.5'
Titan IV - 16.7'
Delta IV Heavy - 16.7'

The 16.7' comes from having to contain a 15 foot diameter payload with rattle space
Click to expand...

But is there only a single fairing size available? In other words, smaller payloads could fly with a larger fairing than necessary.

I know this is an issue that has come up for NASA. I believe that the NASA launch services program has tried to standardize the fairing size to reduce cost and complexity, meaning that sometimes a small payload still gets a big fairing.
 
blackstar said:
Byeman said:
blackstar said:
Timothy Brummer said:
KH-11 has changed significantly over the years. Originally was launched by a Titan 3D with 10 foot payload fairing, currently Delta IV with 16 foot fairing.
Click to expand...

Does Delta IV have a 10-foot fairing?
Click to expand...
The fairing progression is:
Titan IIID - 10 foot
Titan 34D - 10.5'
Titan IV - 16.7'
Delta IV Heavy - 16.7'

The 16.7' comes from having to contain a 15 foot diameter payload with rattle space
Click to expand...

But is there only a single fairing size available? In other words, smaller payloads could fly with a larger fairing than necessary.

I know this is an issue that has come up for NASA. I believe that the NASA launch services program has tried to standardize the fairing size to reduce cost and complexity, meaning that sometimes a small payload still gets a big fairing.
Click to expand...
There was a 4m fairing for Delta IV but NASA never flew it (except 3 for GOES but Boeing bought the launch service). NASA only flew one Delta IV (PSP).

Atlas V has a 4 and 5m but both are used by NASA.

Right now, SpaceX has only the one 5m fairing.
 
Byeman said:

Right now, SpaceX has only the one 5m fairing.
Click to expand...


Okay, so to go back to Brummer's earlier post, I think the one thing we can conclude now is that fairing size does not indicate spacecraft size.
 
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Byeman said:
blackstar said:


Okay, so to go back to Brummer's earlier post, I think the one thing we can conclude now is that fairing size does not indicate spacecraft size.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
But most of the Titan IV spacecraft were former shuttle payloads. And most of the Delta IV Heavy spacecraft were former Titan IV payloads. Vick's "shroudology" drawings showed most of the TIV payloads using the available diameter.
 
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FROG: The Film Read Out GAMBIT program
by Dwayne Day
Monday, February 7, 2022

In September of 2021, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) declassified thousands of pages of documents on the development of the first near-real-time electro-optical satellite, the KH-11 KENNEN. The KENNEN was probably the most famous top secret satellite ever, the result of an embarrassing incident soon after it entered service in 1976 when a CIA employee sold a document to the KGB that contained technical details of the satellite. But included in the NRO’s 2021 release was significant information on an obscure and never-flown satellite proposal. KENNEN means “to know” in old English (and German). This other satellite had a less-weighty name: FROG.

FROG stood for Film Read Out GAMBIT, and it was KENNEN’s primary competitor in the effort to develop satellites that could return their images to Earth faster than the systems flown throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. These early satellites exposed film that was wound up into reentry vehicles that were then ejected to Earth. Those systems, with names like CORONA, GAMBIT, and HEXAGON, often could not get a satellite image to a photo-interpreter’s desk in Washington until five or more days after they were taken—sometimes weeks—but could cover many targets during each mission. The goal for the near-real-time system was to get images to eyeballs in an hour or less. FROG was considered by many to be the easier, cheaper, and quicker way to accomplish that goal. FROG was approved for development in 1971, only to be canceled six months later.
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Obviously hard in the circumstances to know how reject this brief mention is to the thread, but of it is historically it wouldn’t be the first time the system has suffered leaks.

The same document also refers to an intelligence source as “Lapis time-series video”, an apparent reference to a little-known and closely guarded satellite system for imaging objects on the ground.
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www.theguardian.com

Leak of secret US defense papers could be ‘tip of the iceberg’, report says

Disclosure already represents worst national security breach in years, and analysts suggest damage to US could get worse
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
I've written a little piece related to FROG laser-scanning system. Not FROG itself (been there, done that by more knowledgeable people than my little self), but a couple of "lateral" applications - MOL and COMPASS LINK.
In the 1966-68 era, some interesting things happened with FROG advanced technology. As Lavoisier said "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed." "Rien ne se perd, rien ne crée, tout se transforme".
Send it to Jeff Foust. Should be published in a few weeks at The Space Review - take 4: after suborbital refueling, Ariane cloth-of-doom, and Shuttle flight rates.
 
Spinning towards the future: crisis response from space
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, July 3, 2023

In the early morning of June 5, 1967, hundreds of Israeli aircraft took off from their bases and headed out over the Mediterranean and the Red Sea before turning toward Egypt. They attacked multiple Egyptian airbases, and soon more than 300 Egyptian aircraft were smoking wrecks with their airfields torn to shreds. Shortly thereafter, the Six-Day War was over.

In August 1968, Soviet tanks rolled across the border into Czechoslovakia, suppressing a movement that threatened Soviet control over the country. The Americans learned a lot about how Soviet forces operated, but had no clear warning that the attack was about to take place, and thus no ability to take diplomatic action to try and stop it.

In both cases, American intelligence agencies were caught flatfooted. American reconnaissance satellites only returned images of the events on the ground long after they were over. These two incidents prompted American intelligence officials to consider development of a new “crisis reconnaissance” capability in the late 1960s. A leading candidate was a satellite proposal named SPIN SCAN, which would have used a mature, but limited technology to return images to the ground. SPIN SCAN and several other satellite proposals of the late 1960s were concurrent, competitive, and complementary to the slow-burning American effort to develop a near-real-time reconnaissance satellite capability that culminated in the 1971 decision to build the KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellite. SPIN SCAN came closer to development than any of the other crisis reconnaissance satellites evaluated during this period. But the two significant intelligence failures of the late 1960s did not lead to its approval. SPIN SCAN’s existence, and just how close it came to becoming reality, have never been public before now.

 
Scott Kenny said:
Does anyone think that the 2012 NRO satellite gift to NASA was a pair of KH-11s?
Click to expand...

Kind of. KH-11 KENNEN, KH-12 CRYSTAL, and then was a new sat with the name of FIA: Future Imagery (.. and I forget what the "A" meant")
Boeing got the contract, rather than Lockheed (which had spysat legacy as far back as Agena / Discoverer: 1959).
Boeing then screwed up 737-MAX, Starliner style and FIA became such a disaster, by 2010 they had to return to KH-11 / KH-12 older spysats.
Boeing eventually build a few sats and mirrors before the whole disaster was canned into oblivion. Two of those birds were handled to NASA, which tried to use them for a modifed WFIRST.

Never got the final word of that story. Did WFIRST used / will it use them ?
 
Archibald said:
Scott Kenny said:
Does anyone think that the 2012 NRO satellite gift to NASA was a pair of KH-11s?
Click to expand...

Kind of. KH-11 KENNEN, KH-12 CRYSTAL, and then was a new sat with the name of FIA: Future Imagery (.. and I forget what the "A" meant")
Boeing got the contract, rather than Lockheed (which had spysat legacy as far back as Agena / Discoverer: 1959).
Boeing then screwed up 737-MAX, Starliner style and FIA became such a disaster, by 2010 they had to return to KH-11 / KH-12 older spysats.
Boeing eventually build a few sats and mirrors before the whole disaster was canned into oblivion. Two of those birds were handled to NASA, which tried to use them for a modifed WFIRST.

Never got the final word of that story. Did WFIRST used / will it use them ?
Click to expand...
Per wiki, yes NASA is using one of the satellites for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but it won't launch until 2026-27.
 

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