So I'm happy to speculate about this. I'll even throw down a few data points. 1) I watched the last KH-11 Block IV go up from Vandenberg. It was the one they used to keep an eye on Osama Bin Laden's compound. The patch is here: That's "The Devil You Know" in Latin - NROL-49 got delayed and delayed and delayed because the KH-11s were going to be replaced by Future Imagery Architecture, which was so astoundingly over budget and behind schedule that Congress killed it. So the most skookum optical satellite we've ever launched is pretty much the exact same optical block we've been using since this image was taken in 1986: That was a leak, by the way. The guy who gave that to Jane's went to jail. Chances are good it represents what the optics are capable of, not the sensor - there are limits to atmospheric perturbation. So based on the glass that's up there, we've got a pretty good idea what the resolution is. 2) The resolution you're talking about would have had an optical block like this: Definitely wider angle. Remember those two spare satellites the NRO gave to NASA? Yeah. The NRO will neither confirm nor deny that they were FIA birds. Which might well have used motion sensing or who knows what else, but they aren't in the sky. 3) From an intelligence gathering standpoint, it may be more practical to have your superwide angle lens somewhere you can deploy it quickly and without having its path mapped by your pet physics grads. DARPA has already demonstrated this. There's even an obvious platform for it: And a less obvious platform for it: Even then, you've got to have it pointed at something, and it sure looks like this particular plane is dead over the Indian Ocean. Something to consider about gigapixel surveillance - processing it is a bitch. One of the best ways to deal with it is to pare away the shit you aren't using and not even process it. Like, you know, jetliners in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It's also worth noting that while FIA got cancelled, FIA-R is steaming ahead (watched a couple of those go up, too - one in person, one on TV). These are, by all accounts, big impressive SIGINT birds from hell... which tends to demonstrate a shift in NRO intelligence gathering from IMINT to ELINT/COMINT. After all, when Lockheed decided to pump their stock with the announcement of the SR-72, they bragged about its ability to get optical over any theater at Mach 6: In short, I think you make cogent arguments, but I don't think the data supports them. Still, a fun conversation to have, so long as you ignore the missing bodies. And hey - if you know something I don't know, tell the guys at Jalama Beach it's cool to let me through the barricade, 'k? ;-) * BTW, got this from Jonathan's Space Report last night: MH370
----- The search for the lost Malaysian airliner, flight MH370, has involved
several satellites. It has been reported that US infrared assets (i.e.
DSP and its relatives) did not see any infrared event that could be
associated with an inflight explosion. Australian
Geospatial-Intelligence Organization analysis of Worldview-2 commercial satellite
imagery led to candidate debris in the Indian Ocean on Mar 20; successive
candidate debris fields have been seen in images from China's Gao Fen 1,
France's Spot-6 and Thailand's Thaichote/THEOS satellite. As of Mar 27
none of these leads have panned out. One constraint on the plane's location was obtained by measuring the
light-travel-time of two-way data communication between the Inmarsat 3F1
satellite in GEO at 64.5E and equipment aboard the plane - this gives a
distance but not a direction, leading to a wide arc-shaped search locus.
Additional analysis using the Doppler shift of the frequency gave the
component of relative speed of satellite and plane along the line
joining them; combining the information allowed analysts to narrow the
search zone to an ocean region 2300 km southwest of Australia.
