The purpose of this is to go the other way, from orbital sensor platforms that aren't intending to ever return intact. To do it your way, you'd need to send a d

The purpose of this is to go the other way, from orbital sensor platforms that aren't intending to ever return intact. To do it your way, you'd need to send a disk-carrying vehicle into orbit, dock with the satellite, download onto the disk, and then return. Since the satellites don't exactly have USB ports on them, you couldn't do that anyway, and in practice, would still need to retrofit them with some form of high-speed data transfer mechanism to get the data onto your disks. The best option would very likely still be optical transmission, as trying to insert a cable into a USB port on something moving between 7000 to 17000 MPH is not exactly trivial. At that point, what advantage is there in sending a rocket to receive the transmission and then carry the data back when you can just use the exact same link to send the data straight to Earth? Theoretically, they could carry some number of disks into orbit, fill them, and then drop them back on parachutes. Something like that is actually what the earliest surveillance satellites did. They dropped film from orbit that the military retrieved and developed.