[antognini]

I'm assuming this is all pretty well classified, but I would be shocked if the US government hasn't had the ability to do that for a long time. Consider that back in 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office donated two surplus telescopes to NASA that were substantially better than the Hubble telescope. If those are the sort of telescopes that the government has no need of anymore, imagine what the state-of-the-art is!

As an aside, that donation has actually put NASA in a bit of a bind. For political reasons they can't very well turn down the offer. But the telescope itself is only about one third of the total cost of space telescope, with the rest being due to the cost of the instruments and the launch itself. Unlike the US military, NASA does not have an unlimited budget so this unexpected expense threw a wrench into their long-term plans. Furthermore, the telescopes were designed to look down instead of up, so they're not optimized for astronomical observations.

[ceejayoz]

Not sure why you're being downvoted for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

[palunon]

Hubble was launched in 1990, is it surprising that 22 years later, NRO telescopes are substantially better ?

[dasmoth]

The donated telescopes were build for the Future Imagery Architecture project:

   http://www.space.com/16077-nasa-space-telescopes-failed-nro-program.html

They're substantially newer technology than Hubble (which is older than the 1990 launch date suggests -- it was delayed several years after the Challenger disaster).

That said, I don't think they'll give an appreciably better resolution -- given good fabrication techniques, optically a 2.4m mirror is a 2.4m mirror, and everything I've read suggests that US IMINT satellites have been (in good seeing conditions) close to diffraction-limited for a long time now.

I'm sure the capabilities of the satellites have improved a great deal, but in other directions than resolution. More communications bandwidth? Faster repointing (giving more flexibility about which targets get imaged on a given pass? Better multi-spectral imaging? I'm sure there will be some surprises when the program is eventually declassified. (And I'm optimistic it will be -- there's lots you can read now about the film-return satellites).

[njharman]

The point is they were giving them away. Meaning the sats they kept are even better than better than bubble.

[Jtsummers]

The satellites would've been near contemporaries of Hubble, not 22 years junior. NRO didn't need them anymore.