David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's the first obvious mapping of earth from Space. It's this first stereo optical data from space. It's the first reconnaissance program to fly a hundred missions at all, let alone one in space. This thing operated for 12 years. Yeah, crazy. Corona would then lead to three follow-up programs that we know of, I'm sure many, many more. But there are three follow-on ones that LMSC did that have been declassified so far, some of these only very recently. The strategy of the program evolution over time, followed the four stages that we know of. First, it was what they called See it. That was Corona just period. Can we see the Soviet Union from space? Corona proved that. The next phase was, Can we see it well? Then the phase after that was, Can we see it all? And then the last phase, which is a lot of the last phase is still classified, is see it now. Let's talk about all of these. Corona, like we said, was just see it, get photos. But the photos were at a worse resolution than what the U-2 was able to achieve. In 1963, only three years after the first Corona satellite goes up, LMSC and the government launch the Gambit program. This is the see it well. Gambit's max resolution still has not been declassified. We don't know how sharp it was. This thing launched in 1963, and it is still classified how good it was. But it has been confirmed that the resolution was under two feet, which was better than the U-2 cameras, less than two feet from space in 1963. Next was Hexagon. Hexagon was the "See it all program." This is starting to eclipse my technical knowledge a little bit, and I think there's also just less known about this because a lot of this is still classified, too. I believe the hexagon satellites had longer orbit lifespans and had more film capacity before they decayed. I think they were able to see more longer, I think, is what Hexagon was. You basically would need a larger format film with a wider angle lens if you don't want to increase your number of satellites.…

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