Hexagon Program - gone but not forgotten

The film-based intelligence satellite, KH-9 HEXAGON, was overshadowed by the KH-11 KENNEN electro-optical intelligence machine. One thing that iced the transfer to digital was the long time it took for critical intelligence to arrive at the end user. With KH-9 on-orbit duration times reaching up to 9 months, the 60-miles of film in the spools had to be allocated into the 4 buckets gingerly. The film had to last until the mission was completed.  If there were more buckets (there was discussion of mounting 6), the frequency of drops would have increased….and analysts could see events in denied areas closer to when they occurred.

By the time a bucket was commanded to be ejected, caught, flown to Kodak in Rochester to be developed, then to analysts in DC, the photos taken could be moot. Too much time had passed from the capture of the image until it was able to be viewed Time moves on and intelligence gets stale.

“Near” real-time analysis of developing events was a much better idea, from that perspective. However, the BIG advantage of using film in the first place was that wet-film can be enlarged many times and retain resolution.  Keep zooming in and the photo gets larger and does not become blurry.   Digital is pixels and while you can blow the image up…you’re really just making the pixels further apart. This without revealing any more information.

Hexagon and Kennen flew together for 10 years until the 1986 loss of the final KH-9 vehicle 20 – a victim of the launch gremlins. While Kennen is “kinda” declassified, the program is believed to still be alive and is a primary IMINT collector. Details are still classified.