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Can't they be using bigger telescopes? The James Webb Space Telescope is declassified technology and has a self-assembling 6.5m mirror. I'm not sure how atmosp

• excuse-me 14y ago
  You could use a bigger mirror, although a 6.5m mirror in low earth orbit is going to have a very short lifetime due to drag. The atmosphere has much less optical effect looking down, simply because all the phase tilts are close to the target and so don't have much angular effect. It's like laying frosted glass on top of a document and looking at - compared to putting the frosted glass upto your eye and looking at a distant object. Really there is a limited return from higher and higher resolution imaging. Once you have vehicles, roads, missile batteries etc spotted there isn't much point being able to see which of the operators are bald. With modern wars photo-recon is even more limited, you could have mm accurate imaging from a drone of an Afghan tribesman but it wouldn't tell you what he thinks of your politics.