On Aug 27, 2012, at 05:29 , Doug Franklin wrote: > TK?
Talent Keyhole Wikipedia posting re: Sensitive Compartmented Information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Information Which has a section on TK. Designations I recall from my years are TS/SSBI when I was secluded for ten+ months in "the colony" as suits with dark glasses searched out everyone I played with from age 10 to age 33, including my parents, girlfriends, relatives, neighbors (and the Haight too!). I was read into TSC/UMBRA/TK/BYEMAN/. I had no knowledge of what it meant other than TK refers to the compartment were in, KH-11 and it's modern equivalents (12? 13?) the satelittes we were controlling/using. Basically Hubbels pointed down. Hubbel could be pointed down if needed, as the KH series probably could be pointed out, if the scientific community had the dollars to take them away from their primary mission, an unlikely thing. In barcode and printed code as part of the border of every image (if I still had one I'd look to see) were the restrictions afforded to the image, plus the LAT/LONG of the aim point or aim strip, the angle from verticle, the exact UT, and a bunch of other stuff. The cover sheet illustrated in the article looks quite familiar. One thing that was kept from us worker bees was who we were doing this work for, other than the US of course. Our paychecks came from one place, our location was a cover, all materials we used arrived in plain white tractor-trailers or on military planes into Andrews AFB, neither method came directly from it's point of origin. The movement, care and feeding of the birds was handled by the Air Force. Other services were seen in the hallway from time to time. Long after I had left that all behind me, working, we thought, for the CIA, it was revealed we worked for an unknown at the time department now known as the NRO. The unusual thing about our facility was it was built to be one big compartment. Nothing could get in or out as far as sound or signal. Two cutouts were for the front doors (common security looking guards 24/7) and the loading dock, both of which were actually outside of the concrete and multi layered copper core of the building. Over time, locks started growing on some areas or rooms, cyber and card swipe types as newer more restricted parts of the system were folded in. Innitially, we were only taking pictures. After 4 or 5 years, signal intel was incorporated into the body of the satellites. Now I'm confident they are decoding my keystrokes as I type this. Well, maybe decyphering it as it whizzes through the Internet. Google searching these days tells you more about what TK was all about than I ever knew, including the KH series of imaging satellites. I was there for the first KH-11 launch in '76, moved on after "-90A" launch in '87. Note on this Wikipage the sharp increase in on-orbit life these tanks had starting in 1984. Don't know why. It may have orbited unuse for some years (these things were frequently lost by going into "safe mode", taking weeks sometimes to get them talking again. But ten years! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennan Like the Hubbell, these things were manuevered by braking 4 spinning gyroscopes, each on a different plane. I think it used a small disk brake or two on each gyro. There were one or two spares for each plane. There was fuel onboard, but I don't know if used for gross changes in direction or as pressure to form the air bearings of the gyros. I do know that these were very nimble, capable of changing by quite a few degrees of pointing angle and settling to 100% stability in just a few seconds. All using the gyros. When they ran out of usable gyros (for whatever reason) they were junk. Note that as soon as the NRO laid claim to ownership in 1996 the de-orbits were never again mentioned. Harumph. A highly degraded sample image from 400-500 miles away taken in 1999. Really, you could see whether a person was wearing a jacket or not, long sleaves or short, shoes, sandals, or barefoot - in 1987. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Zhawar_Kili_Al-Badr_Camp.jpg -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
