Hexagon KH-9 satellite
It was declassified in 2011, but just stumbled on it.

Spy Museum interview with Phil Presser, designer of the camera system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmWlw8Ufo6Q (40 minutes)

The prototype satellite used to debug working ones was sent to Wright
Patterson Air Force Museum:web page for hexagon:

> https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/195921/hexagon-kh-9-reconnaissance-satellite/

Phil Presser presenting in front of the satellite : (1 hour)

https://youtu.be/GtmtYlcPYYA

The film was 16.6cm wide , and rolls contained 32,000 metres of filk at
first and later increateed to 48,000 metres (that is 30 US miles of
film) Made by Kodak. There were 2 cameras each with their own supply
of film. Film was fed from huge wheels onto rotating cameras (so they
could do a panorama spanning 120° angle onto very wide stereo picture)
About 600km * 16km of ground was photographed in each shot.

Exposed film was spooled into one of 4 returning capsules which when
full, would be commanded to detach, deorbit and deploy parachute. And
they were able to succesfully capture the dropping capsuled with planes
before they reached ground. 75 of the 76 returning capsules were
succesfully captured in flight by the planes (one failed to deploy
parachurte and was recovered from bottom of Pacific Ocean (though no
usable imagery)

SpaceX had tried to recover fairings as I recall and abandonned it. This
was "routine" back in the 1970s and early 1980s while this program lasted.

JF Mezei pounded on thar keyboard to tell us

> SpaceX had tried to recover fairings as I recall and abandonned it.

SpaceX routinely reflies recovered fairings. It does not use airplanes
to catch the fairings in the air.

> This
> was "routine" back in the 1970s and early 1980s while this program lasted.

You may be amused to know that Rocket Labs has caught a booster with a
helicopter (once for a booster that had just launched and then
separated from the second stage). Electron is smaller than a Falcon 9,
but still gave the copter crew problems with flight dynamics. Turns
out to be cheaper and just about as effective to pluck the booster out
of the water.

/dps

--
"Maintaining a really good conspiracy requires far more intelligent
application, by a large number of people, than the world can readily
supply."

Sam Plusnet

JF Mezei noted that:
> Hexagon KH-9 satellite
> It was declassified in 2011, but just stumbled on it.

ISTR recall a lot of discussion of these satellites in SS* in the past,
and I'm pretty sure that was how I got my links to variours web pages
with varying amounts of detail.

/dps

--
"Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself
is a good thing to do, You may be a fool but you're the fool in
charge." -- Carl Reiner

JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> wrote:
>Exposed film was spooled into one of 4 returning capsules which when
>full, would be commanded to detach, deorbit and deploy parachute. And
>they were able to succesfully capture the dropping capsuled with planes
>before they reached ground. 75 of the 76 returning capsules were
>succesfully captured in flight by the planes (one failed to deploy
>parachurte and was recovered from bottom of Pacific Ocean (though no
>usable imagery)
>
>SpaceX had tried to recover fairings as I recall and abandonned it. This
>was "routine" back in the 1970s and early 1980s while this program lasted.

IIRC a recent flight they mentioned that it was the first time a
fairing half was on on it's 10th flight! Some of the early ones were
in fact caught in nets before they switched to exclusively "wet"
recovery. They were fairly good at catching them by the end.

Fairings are pretty much very large sails so it's VERY different from
catching a dedicated recover capsule. Yes, they gave up on dry
recovery because even with the additional refurbishment it was cheaper
to just do a wet recovery (especially since they needed two boats, one
for each fairing half).

AFAIK no one else has even tried recovering a fairing yet? and the
ones that plan to try are all pretty far in the future.

Likewise many are planning to TRY to recover their booster sometime in
the future, Electron will likely be first (and soon) but that is a
MUCH smaller rocket, IE 300kg to LEO vs 22800kg to LEO, both
fully-expended/non-recover numbers. Or 549T vs 12.5T at launch.

And while they initially wanted to catch it with a helicopter and did
even catch one but had to release it for safety reasons, they've now
switched to a similar "let it splash down in water and we'll recover
and refurbish".

Rocket Lab could of course change their mind later (though propulsive
landing is never going to be possible for a rocket that small) but
AFAIK most of their plans beyond this is centered around their
significantly larger Neutron rocket (slightly smaller than Falcon 9,
15000kg LEO expended).

Rocket Lab Neutron rocket is notable in this context for how it
handles the fairing, it's the only rocket proposal I can think of
where the fairing is actually integrated into the first stage,
basically the second stage "fly out" of the first stage & fairing
assembly. And they plan to recover booster with fairing similar to how
SpaceX recovers the Falcon 9 booster (IE, downrange landing with some
payload loss, return-to-launchsite with larger payload hit)

Meanwhile SpaceX has one Falcon 9 booster that has done 15 successful
landings and several others are not far behind.

204 landings out of 215 attemps (both are higher now) is an
astonishing record for something pretty much every expert said
couldn't be done when they announce their plan. And almost all these
failures are early failures, it was a while since the blew past 100
successfull *successive* landings. For a secondary, non-mission
critical step...

Yes, a lot of SpaceX's development times ended up being on "Elon time"
(IE ~3x early on, the factor goes down as it's get closer to launch).

But lets be fair, are there even one entirely new rocket in the last
two decades that WASN'T massively behind the schedule? It's not even
restricted to the US, Europe, Russia, India and China is just as bad.