WWTBAM Bored

With the Bored being down, I have had to wait several days to pick the brain of our resident Bored expert on satellites and surveillance technology about a disturbing paragraph in a book I just finished reading.

As a reminder, SSS informed us in the main "Balloon" thread that the Chinese (and us) get everything we want from satellites so they would have no need for any supplemental surveillance technologies like balloons. I inferred he was telling us that the Chinese (and the US) have 100% real-time global satellite coverage of all possible bands to be sensed.

Anyway, the relevant paragraph is in "The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age" by David Sanger. Sanger is (or was) a NYT reporter on national security issues with the data for the paragraph appearing to be from 2017 story by the author(per the notes.)

>>>>"The urgency arose from the fact that the American coverage of North Korea from space was (and remains) terrible--the United States had eyes on the country less than 30% of the time. (The exact figure is classified.) William Perry, the the former defense secretary, told me that if the North Koreans rolled out one of their new missiles, "there's a good chance we'd never see it."<<<<<

Now to get to my question. Assuming the story is at least partially true and we didn't have eyes on a geopolitical flashpoint like North Korea all the time (as of 2017).

Question for SSS-How is it possible that the Chinese Satellite program (as of early 2023) is exponentially better than ours was in 2017? To the extent, that according to you, they have 100% real-time, global satellite coverage? What are your sources?

Spock wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 11, 2023 9:15 pm

Question for SSS-How is it possible that the Chinese Satellite program (as of early 2023) is exponentially better than ours was in 2017? To the extent, that according to you, they have 100% real-time, global satellite coverage? What are your sources?

This is what I said, which you continue to exaggerate way beyond my words:

You do realize they've had spy satellites in place for years (as do we) with much more equipment onboard than the balloon did. Since the balloon had no steering or redirection capacity, most of what it could have captured was shots of empty land.

And here's what our Defense Department said about the satellite:

Despite the latest revelations about the capabilities of the spy balloon, the Pentagon has insisted since the vessel was first acknowledged publicly that it does not give China capabilities above and beyond what they already have from spy satellites or other means. “We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actionable technical means from the Chinese,” said Gen. Glenn VanHerck, the commander of US Northern Command and NORAD, on Monday.

For what it's worth, we do keep launching spy satellites, so our capabilities have improved in six years, as, I'm sure have the Chinese. Spy satellites fly in low earth orbits about 100 miles above ground, about the level of the Mercury astronaut orbital flights. At that height, it takes around 90 minutes to orbit the earth. And unlike the Mercury flights, we can move our spy satellites around somewhat to increase coverage in certain areas. So we have spy satellites that cover almost every strategic location on earth, but they aren't covering all of them all the time. And that's far better than the capability of one slow-moving balloon whose location and movements are known (unlike the spy satellites, many of whose locations are secret).