If anyone ever finds a book that documents the imaging development efforts of early film based satellites, I would love to have a chance to hear about those experiences.
The NASA camera in the article obviously was neat, but it sounds like a sort of 'off the shelf' product being given a new job.
What I am interested in is the story of what was behind putting it on the shelf in the first place.
There is a book out on the development of the US air forces' global weather forecasting service that hints about the money being spent on early reconaisance birds.
The weather office wanted a more powerful computer, sometime in the mid 60's I recall. There was not enough money in their budget to buy it.
So they went to the air force intel/operations guys, and made a deal that they would get the savings if they could forecast when there would be clouds in an area, so the birds did not use up a fixed commodity, the film in them, taking pictures of clouds when they were 'over target'.
I think I remenber that the intel guys renegged on that deal after less than a year, since they were handing gobs of funding over to the weather guys, the savings were so great.
would
