As a side-note, I enjoyed the Babylon 5 references that Dwayne used to work into his article titles for The Space Review.I hope it would be possible to continue that theme, if the author desires?Just a thought.
Sometime in late 1977 I was at a social event in Honolulu that was mostly astronomers - except for one obviously military guy whose shirt said "6594th Test Group" in big letters, and the unit's (unofficial) insignia. I remember someone asked him "Are there 6,593 other Test Groups?". The only thing covert about these units was that they didn't have a press officer cranking out releases about every minor event. Since Hickham AFB and Honolulu International Airport share the same runways and taxiways, their aircraft were taking off and landing in plain view of thousands of tourists all the time. And the big tracking antenna radome on top made it clear that they weren't ordinary Hercs. These planes should have been located at NAS Barbers Point alongside the Navy's secret units, but of course interservice rivalry prevented that.
No, but the HC-130s used to refuel the Jolly's did.
The insignia was official.Radomes?. JC-130 didn't have them.
Quote from: Jim on 08/12/2017 01:20 amThe insignia was official.Radomes?. JC-130 didn't have them.some did.http://6594thtestgroup.org/images/57-0526.jpg
This idea that a polar-orbit launch over the North Pole could be mistaken for an ICBM attack crops up all the time, but it is completely mistaken. The ICBM minimum-energy trajectory is about 600 miles up as it crosses the pole and can't be mistaken for a LEO launch that will be less than 150 miles up. The ICBM will pop up over the radar horizon at a much longer range, and a short tracking arc quickly determines the impact point. The orbital target, of course, has no predicted impact point. The only confusion might arise with a depressed-trajectory or fractional-orbit system. The only such system was the Soviet 9K69 "R-36O" Global Rocket which was deployed in 18 silos at Baikonur from 1969 to 1983. This put its 5MT warhead into a very low orbit over the SOUTH pole, and brought it down on target with a retro-rocket. Its location at Baikonur suggest that its designers actually did hope that its launches would be misidentified as an orbital launch -- but I have never seen this claim in print.
You are using sane deduction free from paranoia, thinking that wasn't always used during the Cold War.
Geologist Nicholas M. Short had authored an introduction to remote sensing. He did include the attached postage stamp sized image, stating "There aren't many pictures or sketches of spy satellites on the Internet. Here's one - as you might predict, it is not named; the black surroundings suggest it was actually photographed while in space (...)"https://gpsr.ars.usda.gov/short_remotesensing/Intro/Part2_26e.htmlAnyone wants to venture a guess on what might be shown in the image? And if this is an actual image taken during a shuttle mission, which mission this might have been?
LM-700 Iridium