Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
kleinbl00 · 1688 days ago · link · · parent · post: Image from Trump tweet identified as imagery by USA 224, a classified KH-11 ENHANCED CRYSTAL satellite
Nobody read that, but it talks about how the Gulf War was kind of a clusterfuck in no small part because we had permanently lost our ability to do wide-area surveillance with the loss of the last KH-9 on the pad in '86: We've got seismometers all over south Asia. Considering the KH-11 got the shot of the facility after it had passed overhead, it's likely that we knew the launch was imminent (OSINT nerds on Twitter noticed that we had ELINT planes up ahead of the launch), detected the explosion on the seismic network and got the shot as soon as the information made it to the NRO. By the bye, Spaceflight Now has this awesome comparison between a Planet cubesat, World 2 and the USA-224 image on the right.