Boats, but from Space!

The fine folks at The Space Review have a series that retells the history of the rise of the aircraft carrier and the twilight of the battleship through photos from space.

The United States developed several generations of reconnaissance satellites during the Cold War. CORONA was the first in 1960, and although its cameras were relatively low resolution, they covered a substantial amount of territory in each image. CORONA was joined by GAMBIT in 1963. GAMBIT had a more powerful camera system but covered less territory; an upgraded version began operating in 1966. In 1971, CORONA was phased out in favor of HEXAGON, a massive reconnaissance satellite the size of a school bus that photographed a huge amount of territory at resolution equivalent to the first GAMBIT system. All these early satellites used film, which provided a means of recording large amounts of data quickly but had to be returned to the ground and processed before the images could be seen, resulting in a delay of a few days to possibly weeks from when an image was taken until it was seen by a photo-interpreter in Washington.

Recently, Harry Stranger, who regularly purchases and analyzes commercial and historical satellite imagery, acquired many images of American naval bases photographed by American reconnaissance satellites. The Soviet Union was certainly taking similar photos at the same time, although their satellites were not nearly as good as the American ones, and their imagery has never been released.

Here are previous entries… Also see the entries on the Admiral Nakhimov and the history of the Kirovs. Also, I love this understatement…

Oriskany sat slowly rusting at several piers from 1976 until 2006, when she was finally towed out to sea and sunk off the coast of Florida as a diving attraction. She can no longer be seen from space.

Photo Credit: A HEXAGON satellite took this photo of Bremerton, Washington, in June 1982. At far left the battleship USS Missouri is pierside. She would be towed to a drydock and modernized in the next few years. This was in response to the perceived increased Soviet Navy threat. USS Oriskany is also docked. After a long period of inactivity, she was later towed to Florida and sunk as an artificial reef. (credit: Harry Stranger)