KH-7 GAMBIT-1 / KH-8 GAMBIT-3 / KH-9 HEXAGON

Processing declassified spy satellite imagery of New York from 1979

Streamed live on Sep 5, 2024
Come join me and chat as I process some declassified spy satellites images live! ️

We georeference a KH-9 HEXAGON image of New York from 1979, and upload a KH-9 HEXAGON image of Saint Petersburg to my website.

The images processed in this livestream will be freely available for anyone to view and share.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/live/7H8dRg2kwf4
 
I recall Space Daily having an article a decade or two back about a “Monster satellite” of 9 tons or so to give video of Earth from geosynchronous orbit.

Geo-eye 3S or something…

EDIT:

Astrium Looks To Asia For GO-3S GEO Sat Partner | Aviation Week Network

With no takers among cash-strapped European governments, EADS Astrium is talking to Singapore about partnering on the GO-3S space surveillance system, a geostationary satellite that promises to be the first to transmit real-time video resolving objects as small as 3 meters (10 ft.) across.
aviationweek.com aviationweek.com
 
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Satellite reconnaissance and the Falklands War
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, November 4, 2024

On June 8, 1982, Lieutenant Carlos Cachon was leading a flight of A-4 Skyhawk jets at low level over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Argentine forces had invaded the islands in April, prompting the United Kingdom to send a naval and amphibious force to retake them. The war had gotten bloody in May, with significant troop and ship losses on both sides. Now it was about to get even worse for the British.

According to Skyhawks Over the South Atlantic, by Santiago Rivas, Cachon and his fellow pilots crossed into and out of clouds and rain that hampered their visibility, then flew over a large number of British troops on the ground. Another pilot suddenly yelled “There are the ships!” and Cachon saw “two grey silhouettes” against the coast. He began his attack and released his bombs, which hit the center of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Sir Galahad. Another pair of pilots hit the RFA Sir Tristram.

In total, 43 Welsh Guards and seven ship’s crew were killed in what became known to the British as “the darkest day of the fleet.” Sir Galahad burned and kept burning for days. Sir Tristram was less heavily damaged.
Falklands

On June 13, a HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite overflew the islands. The weather was usually bad for overhead reconnaissance during the war, but on this day portions of the islands were clear. The HEXAGON photographed broad swaths of the islands. The HEXAGON could cover immense amounts of territory in a single image. Five days after the two ships had been successfully attacked, Sir Galahad was still burning, its smoke plume visible in one of the satellite’s images. But the downside of HEXAGON’s impressive capabilities was that it achieved them using film, and that film sat inside the satellite until the reentry vehicle that carried it was ejected on June 15 and recovered over the North Pacific. Then it had to be recovered, transported to Rochester, New York for development, and sent to Washington for imagery interpretation. The war ended on June 14; by the time the film showing the burning Sir Galahad reached an interpreter’s desk on June 24, the war had been over for ten days.
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Archibald said:
The KH-9 history and its complicated relationship with the Space Shuttle. By @blackstar






I wanted all the articles to be at the same place and in the right order.
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I wrote a long paper that encompasses all of this history for AIAA's SciTech conference a few years ago. It has more details and all the footnotes.

I had hoped that by now I could have done something similar about the GAMBIT and the shuttle. However, although there are hints that they studied putting GAMBIT on the shuttle, possibly on a pallet in the shuttle bay (i.e. not a deployed version), we don't have any details on those studies.
 
Archibald said:
Maybe I will list more of that stuff.
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I don't know how many articles I have written for TSR over 20 years, but it has to be over 300 of them. I wrote about 20 last year, at least 20 the year before, and in many previous years I was averaging about 40 a year. Not all of them were on reconnaissance topics. I wrote a lot about Apollo as well as space solar power, the shuttle, astronauts, etc. (Admittedly, some of them were also rewrites of earlier articles.) I've never compiled them all into a single place like a blog.
 
blackstar said:
I don't know how many articles I have written for TSR over 20 years, but it has to be over 300 of them. I wrote about 20 last year, at least 20 the year before, and in many previous years I was averaging about 40 a year. Not all of them were on reconnaissance topics. I wrote a lot about Apollo as well as space solar power, the shuttle, astronauts, etc. (Admittedly, some of them were also rewrites of earlier articles.) I've never compiled them all into a single place like a blog.
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You should buddy, you should....
 
archipeppe said:
You should buddy, you should....
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I have lots of "shoulds" in my life. But my day job keeps getting in the way of my hobbies.

Next couple of articles are on the Defense Support Program satellites. That will be followed with something about a Program 989 signals intelligence satellite and something about lunar sample return (which is a surprise). Then maybe something about "Moonraker." Then maybe I'll get around to the interesting information I have about the relationship between the KH-11 and the Hubble Space Telescope...
 
Certainly sounds like you have enough for a book, maybe have a chat with Scott (Orionblamblam) about the ins and outs of publishing?
 
blackstar said:
I have lots of "shoulds" in my life. But my day job keeps getting in the way of my hobbies.

Next couple of articles are on the Defense Support Program satellites. That will be followed with something about a Program 989 signals intelligence satellite and something about lunar sample return (which is a surprise). Then maybe something about "Moonraker." Then maybe I'll get around to the interesting information I have about the relationship between the KH-11 and the Hubble Space Telescope...
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About both Moonraker (if you are referring to the 007's movie) and KH-11/HST relationship I think can help you.
Let me know it via e-mail.
 
archipeppe said:
About both Moonraker (if you are referring to the 007's movie) and KH-11/HST relationship I think can help you.
Let me know it via e-mail.
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I just received the new La-La Land CD with the Moonraker soundtrack. Much better quality recording, more tracks (unreleased music), and some alternate versions of the Moonraker song. The latter is a bit odd (not good). There was also a Moonraker photobook that was produced in the past year with a lot of behind-the-scenes photos. Moonraker is not a good movie, but I thought the space shuttle scenes were incredible. I might write a short article mentioning these new releases.
 
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Footnote about FROG (Lew Allen letter to Eugene Fubini, 1970)

Seems that initially (1966) they hoped they could build FRO KH-8s - by just changing the classic KH-8 front end. Crisis reconnaissance would have obtained as "just a kit on the KH-8 production line".

Capture d’écran 2025-01-19 133046.png
 

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Power lifting: Cold War satellite reconnaissance and the Buran space shuttle
by Dwayne A. Day and Harry Stranger
Monday, February 17, 2025

The Soviet Union developed the N1 rocket to race the United States to the Moon but by 1972, after the fourth N1 launch failure, the Soviets mothballed the launch site and discontinued the program. American satellites regularly flew over the sprawling Baikonur launch complex in Kazakhstan, and by 1974 intelligence analysts determined that the heavy-lift rocket had been abandoned.

Four years later, American satellites detected new construction and modification of existing facilities at Baikonur, determining that the Soviet Union was beginning work on a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, and soon concluding that the Soviet Union was also developing a space shuttle equivalent to NASA’s shuttle. Now, recently declassified satellite imagery from the 1980s provides some indications of what the CIA was detecting and how this may have informed their conclusions about the pace of the Soviet space shuttle program.
[/quote]

 
Eyes on Earth Episode 133 – Vietnam War Bomb Craters

Apr 17, 2025 Eyes on Earth
Declassified spy satellite imagery, distributed by the USGS EROS Center, is finding fascinating uses since being made available to the public starting in the 1990s. In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk with Philipp Barthelme from the University of Edinburgh, who used imagery from the declassified HEXAGON and CORONA satellites to map bomb craters and herbicide spray lines from the Vietnam War. These features appear in the black and white photos quite clearly, so Barthelme worked out machine learning methods to automatically detect them. This method can help narrow down where to search for unexploded weapons and focus on the areas that are most contaminated.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aliHzSZmrxE
 
Codename Keyhole Part 1: Corona's "Eye In The Sky"

Apr 17, 2025
In this debut episode of my Codename Keyhole documentary series, we go in-depth into the spacecraft that started it all, the very first spy satellite, Corona!


Note: Some of the camera photo documentation is conflicting compared to the CIA's own files, don't mind it and the specs are all good :)

Photo Credits:
"Eye in the Sky - The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites" by Dwayne A. Day
Drew Ex Machina: https://www.drewexmachina.com/2019/04...
Heroicrelics
The Aviationist
Associated Press
CIA
NRO (Naval Reconnaissance Office)
Wikipedia
Public Domain

Video Footage Credits:
Retro Space HD (Youtube)
DroneScapes (Youtube)
Eighties Seeker (Youtube)
IEEE Spectrum (Rotary Converter Footage) (Youtube)
Computer History Archives Project "CHAP" (Youtube)
CIA
NRO (Naval Reconnaissance Office)
National Archives
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Documentation/Sources:






KH-1 CORONA System

www.globalsecurity.org www.globalsecurity.org



military-history.fandom.com

Corona (satellite)

The Corona program was a series of American strategic reconnaissance satellites produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology with substantial assistance from the U.S. Air Force. The Corona satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the...
military-history.fandom.com military-history.fandom.com


Music Credits:
Song: Diamond Eyes - Worship [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Free Download/Stream: http://ncs.io/Worship
Watch: http://ncs.lnk.to/WorshipAT/youtube

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:13 History
09:17 The Satellites
26:53 Cameras & Capsules
40:54 The Venezuelan Incident
45:11 "Corona Calibration Targets"
49:06 Closing
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tESg4VV_zb4
 
Here it is.

A Point In Time remastered upscaled in HD online:

Restored CIA documentary from 1972 about the Corona program, showing some launches, imagery and reentry capsules.

The video was remasted to improve color balance and stability. AI upscale (Topaz AI) was used to resample the video to full HD resolution. While it works in most cases, some artifacts are present in some sequences.

Sound and image cleanup, AI upscale and color restoration by RetroSpace HD.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2hnYFBzM1M&t=3s
 

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