I wonder if they can tell me what this tiny spot is on my shoulder.

If the government doesn't want the spy 'scopes, they must have something better. Much better. These discarded satellites are apparently the ones they bragged could read a license plate from space, so what must the new ones be able to do?

Still, it's a good day for science.

Less atmospheric interference mucking with the optics, throwaway costs (relatively), no problem with "clouds" getting in the way.

Gotta wonder about the optics and resolution the NRO has now, along with the ground-penetrating radar and the three-dimensional imaging of the inside of most structures. They may have gotten it to the point where they can recognize who they're looking at inside buildings.

Why did it take so long to "find" Osama, for instance?

Keith Cowing will live blog it on twitter http://twitter.com/#!/nasawatch

All the precision in the world does you no good if you're pointing it in the wrong place.

they can map out large swatches of just about anywhere, until they find what they're looking for. Yes?

I tried anyway.

I understand they had to hire some new analists because they had some die laughing.

And the CIA bumped them off.

Are these an example of "black budget" items, then? Just wondering.

Thanks to anyone with an opinion/info!

PB

...whose very existence, let alone budget, could not be acknowledged.

Back at the beginning, before there were photo-electronics and high bandwidth communications, the NRO satellites would take pictures on a large spool of film. The film canister was then ejected from the satellite and actually CAUGHT in mid air by a team of fighter jets over the Pacific before it splashed down

the New York Times version of this story where it says: "A spokeswoman for the National Reconnaissance Office confirmed that it had transferred equipment it no longer had any use for, but would not elaborate. 'This is not something we’re going to talk about,' said the spokeswoman, Loretta Desio, adding, 'We’re hoping this becomes a NASA story.'"

Like the other person said, I wonder what the heck are they're replacing these with.

And BY THE WAY, why didn't we have better photos of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction"?
I.e., cr*ppy photos claimed to show something incriminating may have been or be used precisely because better photos would show there's nothing there.

...but if there was something in the cr*ppy photos, there would be the same something in the good photos. The cr*ppy photos were probably made from the best photos they had, by artificially decreasing the resolution. The full resolution photos would not be made public because they would reveal our capabilities.

which will hopefully lead to the first fusion reactor. The funding was just extended another two years, so obviously they see something there.

That's research into a whole new era for humanity, right there. If it's successful, we can expect a stampede to it.

Which is likely.

....the NRO didn't offer the two telescopes to one of their favorite corporations for privatization and exploitation....there could be a lot of money to be made spying on everyone for fun and profit with old taxpayer surplus....

....offering them to NASA will now keep those telescopes in the inferior unprofit world of government and science....what a corporate disappointment....

Who knows, NASA might give one to them to put into orbit anyway since they don't have any budget to do anything with them right now.

It's just a damn shame the instrumentation on these is going to be probably limited to visual spectrum and possibly IR and are probably not calibrated to any significant extent. The pictures should be nice.

named Andromeda has ever worked out well in the movies.

NASA will need a team of mission scientists, engineers and technicians before getting the NRO telescopes into orbit, which would require more money. NASA will also have to pay for the telescopes to be launched into space.

The NRO telescopes’ short length means its camera would have the wild field view necessary to investigate large areas of the sky for supernova. The telescopes’ diameter is twice as big as the nixed $1.5 billion Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope that was being built to study dark energy, giving it four times the light-gathering power.

...

However, a cost analysis for what the budget would be to get these telescopes into orbit has not been done, so it is yet to be seen as to whether they will be used in the near future.

Neither of the telescopes are likely to see low-orbit Earth until 2020 at the earliest.

Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/1do68)