Military Intelligence Satellites
Looking down and out (as from a mountain) to survey the battlefield for information useful to military leaders goes back to ancient times. In Napoleonic times, the French used observation balloons to scan their foes before and during battles. This technique was often a factor in the U.S. Civil War. By the First World War, airplanes and dirigibles were employed over enemy lines and their staging areas and cities as platforms from which aerial photography provided reconnaissance and intelligence pertinent to the content of battle. This approach was much expanded during the Second World War, as for example the follow-ups to a bombing raid to assess damage to the target. With the advent of rockets and then satellites, observations of both military and political activities on the ground became possible, ushering in the so-called Age of Spy Satellites. Besides surveillance of a wide variety of targets of interest to military intelligence units (in the United States, these include the Department of Defense, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and Homeland Defense), satellites can now assist in areas other than simply observing features on the ground - this includes communications, meteorology, oceanography, location (Global Position Systems [GPS]), and Early Warning Systems (none of these latter applications will be discussed on this page). In addition to satellites, manned aircraft continue to be platforms and in recent years UAV's (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) such as drones have assumed some of the intelligence-gathering tasks.
As one would suspect, there is extensive coverage of "spy satellites" on the Internet, although much information remains classified and thus not released to the public. On this page, only the broadest outline of the history of military intelligence operations from the air and space in the last 50 years will be treated, along with some representative image examples that are now declassified into the public domain. The reader is offered these five Internet sites as among the best found by the writer. Two top the list: 1) An overview (click on that link) prepared by Federation of American Scientists, with an offshoot or link from the same organization that shows specific imagery; and 2) this site, with an information history supported by good imagery, produced by a group at George Washington University. Also worth a visit: SpySat. It's your choice, either visit these first or read further on this page (most images come from these Web pages just cited) and then check out the above sites.
Before moving through this page, we suggest going to one more Web site that specifically includes the effects of spatial resolution in military satellite surveillance. This is again two of the links on the FAS Imint site (1)and (2). The single idea to draw from these illustrations is that military observations work best and reveal the desired intelligence when resolution is a few meters or better. Note what can be found and, more importantly, identified at each resolution level. For nearly four decades the military had high resolution systems that could not be matched by non-military earth observation systems (i.e., there were imposed limits of resolution below which (namely, towards greater/better resolution [picking out smaller objects]) no civilian space agency or private group were permitted to design into the sensors on the satellites they operated). All this changed in the 1990s when the Russians began to sell high resolution (~2 meters) imagery from their SPIN-2 on the open world market. After that the U.S. placed more than 800,000 of its earlier military space photos into the public domain.
Now to some specifics: When one thinks of any postwar spy from the sky incidents, the first and most famous case that many recall was the U-2 high altitude airplane that was shot down over the Soviet Union during President Eisenhower's second term in which the pilot, Gary Powers, was captured and held for many months. Here is an example of a U-2 photo (from another mission) over a military air base.
 
Military Intelligence Satellites
Looking down and out (as from a mountain) to survey the battlefield for information useful to military leaders goes back to ancient times. In Napoleonic times, the French used observation balloons to scan their foes before and during battles. This technique was often a factor in the U.S. Civil War. By the First World War, airplanes and dirigibles were employed over enemy lines and their staging areas and cities as platforms from which aerial photography provided reconnaissance and intelligence pertinent to the content of battle. This approach was much expanded during the Second World War, as for example the follow-ups to a bombing raid to assess damage to the target. With the advent of rockets and then satellites, observations of both military and political activities on the ground became possible, ushering in the so-called Age of Spy Satellites. Besides surveillance of a wide variety of targets of interest to military intelligence units (in the United States, these include the Department of Defense, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and Homeland Defense), satellites can now assist in areas other than simply observing features on the ground - this includes communications, meteorology, oceanography, location (Global Position Systems [GPS]), and Early Warning Systems (none of these latter applications will be discussed on this page). In addition to satellites, manned aircraft continue to be platforms and in recent years UAV's (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) such as drones have assumed some of the intelligence-gathering tasks.
As one would suspect, there is extensive coverage of "spy satellites" on the Internet, although much information remains classified and thus not released to the public. On this page, only the broadest outline of the history of military intelligence operations from the air and space in the last 50 years will be treated, along with some representative image examples that are now declassified into the public domain. The reader is offered these five Internet sites as among the best found by the writer. Two top the list: 1) An overview (click on that link) prepared by Federation of American Scientists, with an offshoot or link from the same organization that shows specific imagery; and 2) this site, with an information history supported by good imagery, produced by a group at George Washington University. Also worth a visit: SpySat. It's your choice, either visit these first or read further on this page (most images come from these Web pages just cited) and then check out the above sites.
Before moving through this page, we suggest going to one more Web site that specifically includes the effects of spatial resolution in military satellite surveillance. This is again two of the links on the FAS Imint site (1)and (2). The single idea to draw from these illustrations is that military observations work best and reveal the desired intelligence when resolution is a few meters or better. Note what can be found and, more importantly, identified at each resolution level. For nearly four decades the military had high resolution systems that could not be matched by non-military earth observation systems (i.e., there were imposed limits of resolution below which (namely, towards greater/better resolution [picking out smaller objects]) no civilian space agency or private group were permitted to design into the sensors on the satellites they operated). All this changed in the 1990s when the Russians began to sell high resolution (~2 meters) imagery from their SPIN-2 on the open world market. After that the U.S. placed more than 800,000 of its earlier military space photos into the public domain.
Now to some specifics: When one thinks of any postwar spy from the sky incidents, the first and most famous case that many recall was the U-2 high altitude airplane that was shot down over the Soviet Union during President Eisenhower's second term in which the pilot, Gary Powers, was captured and held for many months. Here is an example of a U-2 photo (from another mission) over a military air base.
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