KH-11 KENNEN

[Flyaway]

Dig that old style IT technology, the monitors alone look like they are out of the arc!

That film does raise a personal bugbear that is it mentions the importance of satellite reconnaissance in the Cuban missile crisis, yet you get all these history books about that event and they are happy to mention the U-2 but you never hear anything about the satellite side of things.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAB68KaTpg0

 

[Archibald]

By October 1962 the only game in town was CORONA. GAMBIT-1 did not started until May 1963. And everything else - ARGON LANYARD SAMOS - was utter shit. Never worked properly.

 

[Flyaway]

Not too bad but a bit muddled in places. He seems to be arguing that it’s one thing for governments to have access to kind of resolution in images, but another for commercial industry:

View: https://youtu.be/q7AT3XHguxU?si=PTASDM95H0dWDe22

 

[Flyaway]

Apparently 10cm commercial imagining will soon be available with some limitations.

Albedo raises $35 million for commercial very low Earth orbit constellation

Albedo raised $35 million to build and launch its first high-resolution Earth-imagery satellite.

spacenews.com

Albedo Granted NOAA License to Sell 10cm Satellite Imagery

Albedo has been approved to sell 10-cm commercial satellite imagery, the Austin-area startup announced yesterday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has granted a license to Albedo, allowing it to sell satellite imagery at a resolution of 10 cm/pixel.

payloadspace.com

 

[Byeman]

That film does raise a personal bugbear that is it mentions the importance of satellite reconnaissance in the Cuban missile crisis, yet you get all these history books about that event and they are happy to mention the U-2 but you never hear anything about the satellite side of things.

They weren't responsive enough

 

[Scott Kenny]

That film does raise a personal bugbear that is it mentions the importance of satellite reconnaissance in the Cuban missile crisis, yet you get all these history books about that event and they are happy to mention the U-2 but you never hear anything about the satellite side of things.

Satellites are a known overhead time, and the low altitude satellites only hit their area of interest every so often due to how their orbital path works.

If you want pictures at 9am local, you send a plane.

 

[Flyaway]

They weren't responsive enough

Satellites are a known overhead time, and the low altitude satellites only hit their area of interest every so often due to how their orbital path works.

If you want pictures at 9am local, you send a plane.

Also at that time satellite reconnaissance was in its very infancy.

 

[TomS]

Also at that time satellite reconnaissance was in its very infancy.

Indeed.

This blog has a nice breakdown of why the Corona images of Cuba that were available were not useful. Resolution was one problem, sun angle another (the Corona mission was timed to pass over Kamchatka at the favorable sun angles, so it was not optimized for Cuba at all), and lack of retaskability (KH-4 shot what it was preprogrammed to shoot, and could not be redirected on the go).

U-2 Vs Corona: why KH-4 satellite failed to provide photographic intelligence during Cuban Missile Crisis while U-2 provided useful Time-critical intelligence

Why Corona satellite failed to provide photographic intelligence during Cuban Missile Crisis while U-2 provided Time-critical intelligence

theaviationgeekclub.com

And if I'm not mistaken, there wasn't even a KH-4 on orbit during the Crisis proper. One KH-5 was up at the beginning of the blockade, but KH-5 was a survey camera, not suitable to this kind of intelligence collection.

 

[Josh_TN]

Satellite photos of the time were probably incomparable to U-2 photos, ignoring the low altitude RF-8s imagery that was probably even more detailed.

 

[Archibald]

Indeed.

This blog has a nice breakdown of why the Corona images of Cuba that were available were not useful. Resolution was one problem, sun angle another (the Corina mission was timed to pass over Kamchatka at the favorable sun angles, so it was not optimized for Cuba at all), and lack of retaskability (KH-4 shot what it was preprogrammed to shoot, and could not be redirected on the go).

U-2 Vs Corona: why KH-4 satellite failed to provide photographic intelligence during Cuban Missile Crisis while U-2 provided useful Time-critical intelligence

Why Corona satellite failed to provide photographic intelligence during Cuban Missile Crisis while U-2 provided Time-critical intelligence

theaviationgeekclub.com

And if I'm not mistaken, there wasn't even a KH-4 on orbit during the Crisis proper. One KH-5 was up at the beginning of the blockade, but KH-5 was a survey camera, not suitable to this kind of intelligence collection.

Thanks for the link, never had bothered to check spysats in orbit during the Cuban missile crisis, for reasons I mentionned up thread (and yes KH-5 was a piece of junk).

 

[Scott Kenny]

Satellite photos of the time were probably incomparable to U-2 photos, ignoring the low altitude RF-8s imagery that was probably even more detailed.

Can only imagine the pucker factor those photo Crusader drivers had... "Vne is what? yeah, I was flying at about 30knots above that..."

 

[Archibald]

Can only imagine the pucker factor those photo Crusader drivers had... "Vne is what? yeah, I was flying at about 30knots above that..."

Watch the movie "Thirteen days" (2000, with Kevin Costner). It features one such Crusader mission, three minutes of awesomeness. The movie itself is very good.

 

[Josh_TN]

Watch the movie "Thirteen days" (2000, with Kevin Costner). It features one such Crusader mission, three minutes of awesomeness. The movie itself is very good.

If I remember correctly (saw it in the theaters once at the time), didn't someone talk to the RF-8 pilot and say he had a series of (23mm) "bird strikes"? Given the tensions of the time, I can seriously believe something like that conversation happened. In fact I would surprised if it didn't. I think in another scene one of the cabinet charaters chastises a USN admiral for one of his destroyers shooting star shells at a Russian ship, and says something along the lines of "don't you see what is happening here? Kennedy is talking to Khrushchev", referring to all the military back and forth. I remember it being a well put together and fairly historically accurate film, but I was super young then.

 

[TomcatViP]

@Josh_TN : the scene comes from a Kevin Costner movie, Thirteen days.

Wiki:

While the film carries the same title as the 1969 book Thirteen Days by former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, it is in fact based on the 1997 book, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. It is the second docudrama made about the crisis, the first being 1974's The Missiles of October, which was based on Kennedy's book. The 2000 film contains some newly declassified information not available to the earlier production, but takes greater dramatic license, particularly in its choice of O'Donnell as protagonist. It received generally positive reviews from critics who praised the screenplay and performances of the cast but was a box-office bomb grossing $66.6 million against its $80 million budget.

I would greatly recommend watching for anyone that hasn't.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Watch the movie "Thirteen days" (2000, with Kevin Costner). It features one such Crusader mission, three minutes of awesomeness. The movie itself is very good.

All hail some kind soul on YT, that scene is available to watch without renting the whole movie.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSNLeC-eMUQ

 

[Josh_TN]

All hail some kind soul on YT, that scene is available to watch without renting the whole movie.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSNLeC-eMUQ

That was great, but they are missing the debrief scene where the pilots are told "you were not shot at".

 

[Archibald]

I remember Kevin Costner phoning the reco pilots before their flights, telling them "Don't get shot down, please don't get shot down." As if to not tempt fate.
And of course poor Rudolph Anderson in his U-2 gets blown out of the sky on October 27, 1962 - worst day in the crisis. Also the day when the B-59 Soviet sub almost fired a nuclear torpedo into USS Randolph carrier.

 

[Mark Nankivil]

All hail some kind soul on YT, that scene is available to watch without renting the whole movie.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSNLeC-eMUQ

Retired Phillipine AF F-8s were used with the F8U-1Ps being mocked up with a couple of the airframes. You see some PAF F-5 tails in the scene where they are taxiing out.

Can't forget the RF-101s did the low level work too.....

Enjoy the Day! Mark

 

[Scott Kenny]

That was great, but they are missing the debrief scene where the pilots are told "you were not shot at".

Fair point.

Those were some UGLY bird strikes...

 

[Flyaway]

KH-11 or something else?

That really doesn’t look like a KH-11, look at the size of the solar panel for a start.

New (July 20) observations of USA-290 (NROL-71), which might be a KH-11 type satellite, but - like USA-338 - is in an unusual i=73.6 deg orbit.

USA 290 (NROL-71) -20 july 2024

An astrophotograph by SomeAstroStuff - Felix Schöfbänker on AstroBin

www.astrobin.com

https://twitter.com/x/status/1822731202807185583

View: https://twitter.com/someastrostuff/status/1822731202807185583

 

[NMaude]

And of course poor Rudolph Anderson in his U-2 gets blown out of the sky on October 27, 1962 - worst day in the crisis.

The SA-2 battery that shot him down should've been attacked and destroyed in a retaliatory air raid.

 

[Arjen]

Instead, President Kennedy sent his brother Robert to meet Soviet ambassador Dobrynin. What Kennedy had suspected: Khrushchev didn't authorise the shootdown, it later transpired a Soviet Lieutenant General had decided. A deal was made for the Soviets to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba, the USA to withdraw IRBMs from Turkey, and skip on invading Cuba.

Crisis defused.

In my opinion, Kennedy made the right call. I'm not sure I would have lived to reach the tender age of four otherwise. YMMV.

 

[MistyProwler]

KH-11 or something else?

That really doesn’t look like a KH-11, look at the size of the solar panel for a start.

USA 290 (NROL-71) -20 july 2024

An astrophotograph by SomeAstroStuff - Felix Schöfbänker on AstroBin

www.astrobin.com

https://twitter.com/x/status/1822731202807185583

View: https://twitter.com/someastrostuff/status/1822731202807185583

Both the USA-290 images, and previous ones, to me, bear a resemblance to a model of a satellite in the George HW Bush Presidential Museum's CIA exhibit, as photographed by Charles P Vick, I believe. The webpage with the photos is here: https://premium.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/kh-12-pics.htm
The model in the museum has details that line up with other sources of information that seem to tie to the KH-11, such as the following NASA document with information on the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company Bus-1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19940006353/downloads/19940006353.pdf
On specifically page 34 onward of the PDF. This document also agrees with a couple of scanned photos, captioned as a Bus-1, also on the linked webpage from GlobalSecurity.org
Whilst this is speculative to a degree, it would be understandable if previous images tended to capture a more side-on and front or back view of KH-11 satellites, with the USA-290 images showing it at a more unique angle, showing the parallel solar panels flanking either side of the presumable optical tube of the satellite that were typically not very distinguishable from the central tube in previous imagery. I've attached a couple images of the satellite model in the museum to this post.

 

[MistyProwler]

To clarify, I believe the images taken may agree with each other and the attached documents, all pointing towards USA-290 and the other identified KH-11s as being identified correctly. I've attached to this reply the two scanned photos I mentioned, and a page from the NASA document, that appear to align with the model in the museum, and, in my opinion, the imaged satellite.

 

[Flyaway]

As it says at the end most other countries probably have better ground setups for imaging US reconnaissance satellites than he has so he’s not really giving away anything much. It appears to confirm that the KH-11 has change from a 2.4m mirror to a 3m mirror.

NSF:

At some point around 10cm atmospheric turbulence limits your resolution, using a larger mirror just makes it possible to achieve this resolution from a higher altitude, so you have more frequent revisits.

Also covers the FIA Topaz radar imaging satellites and the NRO’s seeming love of giant umbrella antennas.

Caught on camera: Satellite tracker photographs secret spacecraft

"My images have certainly revealed a few things that either were not known, or only were speculated before."

www.space.com