The Truman's satellite.

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by truth is life

Look at the trouble they had OTL with recon satellites a decade later, with much better (= more powerful) rockets. I'm not sure that that was a terribly plausible target for them in the late '40s.

Remember you need 1) a pretty big and decent camera, and 2) that film has to be returned to Earth for the first generations.

[truth is life]

Originally Posted by Dathi THorfinnsson

Remember you need 1) a pretty big and decent camera, and 2) that film has to be returned to Earth for the first generations.

Yeah, exactly. Need a good camera + optics (supposedly, the KH-11 optics are similar to the HST's) and, initially at least, film return. I was referring to the amount of trouble the Discoverer program went through; of the first ~13 or so launches, weren't all but one or two of them failures?