Larry J said:

>The Hubble has no propulsion system of any kind. Reconnaissance
>satellites do have propulsion systems that allow them to adjust their >orbits, change tasking, and do some other things that I'm not going
>to discuss.....
>
>Don't read too much into the shipping container being the same.
>There are a lot of factors, such as booster attach points, that are
>the same without necessarily implying a lot of commonality
>between the HST and imagery satellites.

Larry caught me in an error. I said that both the KH-11 and KH-12 used the same shipping container as the Hubble. I should have said only the KH-11 used the same shipping container (not the KH-12). The KH-12 was a suped up version of the KH-11 with a propulsion module.

>I asked some people I know who have years of experience with
>those satellites what they thought of the writeups at FAS. They
>all laughed and said Pike got most things wrong.

On the FAS website there once were these very cool artist's conceptions done by Charles P. Vick. The FAS website seems(?) to have been scrubed clean of Vick's drawings. A million years ago in another life, I did a little bit of a low altitude satellite work. The work I did was super compartmentalized (I only saw a tiny bit and the names of everything was changed depending on what part of the vehicle people had access to). All hardware that I worked with became obsolete decades ago and I was out of that line-of-work before KH-11 appeared. Anyway, I found Vick's drawings very interesting. I'm surprised they didn't land him in jail.

Larry also said:

>taking an image while staring at almost infinitely distant objects
>is a very different task from taking an image of the ground
>passing a couple hundred miles below you. To do its job, the
>Hubble uses 2D CCD arrays. Most imaging satellites use
>1D CCDs for strip imagery.

Vick's drawing showed a flat mirror that could pivot in front of the KH-11's aperture. This pivoting mirror was supposed to take care of ground track.

Lee said:

>an idiot believes that Hubble IS a spy satellite and that it was the
>prototype for the KH-12s.

The idiot has it backwards. Hubble is based upon the KH-11. (Lee: don't waste your time arguing with idiots). Lockheed was the prime contractor for both vehicles while Perkin-Elmer subcontracted to Lockheed to make the prime optics. The Hubble space telescope is completely non-military even though it was derived from military technology (like everything else in aerospace).

Gary

p.s. To let Larry off the hook. Treat this post as the thread's closing comment. Assume everything written above is nonsense gossip and incorrect.