Hexagon spy satellite program finally revealed

[Doppel]

Interesting stuff. During the cold war 19 satellites went up into space with many miles of film and they'd take pics of the soviet union and jettison them in parachuted buckets back to earth to get picked up and examined.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/12/26/decades-later-cold-war-secret-is-revealed/

 

[PottedMeat]

perkin-elmer in danbury 1971-86?


NASA: why u no use best optics engineers on hubble?!?
Perkin-Elmer: they're uh.. busy

 

[drinkmorejava]

Programs like this are one of the few things that I would let hold up my career ambitions. As an aerospace engineer it's just too irresistible.

 

[cybrsage]

Pretty sweet!

 

[Lemon law]

Yes a real cool story. An incredibly innovative group who helped avoid international incidents during the cold war.

Glad they are now free to discuss their achievements now.

The invention of the digital Camera makes their work obsolete, but they were still incredibly innovative and I salute them.

 

[ichy]

perkin-elmer in danbury 1971-86?


NASA: why u no use best optics engineers on hubble?!?
Perkin-Elmer: they're uh.. busy

Lol!

 

[Zargon]

wow.

 

[Whiskey16]

Not quite news, as this was declassified in mid-September.

Fox News ('Decades Later, a Cold War Secret Is Revealed', 25 December, 2011) is apparently late to the party. Even from within their posted news article, that was scoured from the Associated Press:

Hexagon was declassified in September.

 

[dfuze]

Amazing story, and it happened only an hour from here.

Makes you wonder how many other projects like this are going on that people you may know are part of.

 

[JTsyo]

The satellites had 60 miles of tape that would be ejected and then recovered while it fell back. Pretty crazy stuff.