You don't need something a tenth the size of the Shuttle to be an effective manned camera platform, even an effective manned camera platform with extreme cross-

You don't need something a tenth the size of the Shuttle to be an effective manned camera platform, even an effective manned camera platform with extreme cross-range. We had effective unmanned film camera platforms in space long before we had CCDs, long before the Shuttle was contemplated. > During the 1950s, a Soviet hoax had led to American fears of a bomber gap. In 1968, after gaining satellite photography, the United States' intelligence agencies were able to state with certainty that "No new ICBM complexes have been established in the USSR during the past year."[10] President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering in 1967: >> I wouldn't want to be quoted on this ... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.[10]