Re: China Launch - Something New?

Allen Thomson <thomsona@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Ed Kyle wrote:
>
>> China performed its third space launch in less
>> than two months on August 29 when a CZ-2D orbited
>> recoverable satellite FSW-22 from Jiaquan. This

> If that's what's going on, it's interesting that the
> PRC continues to develop a KH-4/KH-8 type of film-
> return capability rather than go exclusively with
> longer-lived electro-optical systems. An advantageous
> side-effect of that is that it develops and maintains

I wonder if they'd be using film only.

Interestingly I notice that hard drives are at the moment about a gram a
gigabyte at the moment.

Flash will give you a hair more specific capacity, but not much, unless
you go to bare die.

A 10Kg package buys you maybe 20*500G hard drives, or 10T.
At 10cm resolution and 8 bit pixels, that's about a complete image of the
earths land surface at 4.5m resolution, or 30*30Km at 10cm resolution.

I'd expect compression to boost this to conservatively 100Km*100Km
Completely omitting the capability to downlink data is silly.
But the ability to have a spysat with several of these pods, that you can
download selected portions of the data you gather onto, and ship it all
home might indeed be nice.
10T of data, over a 622mbit optical link down to earth would take
5 hours...

What is the fastest datalink from earth-space?

.

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