Achieving qualitative breakthroughs in the U.S. military's ability to identify, understand, and address emerging security challenges would require a much more extensive program. Because satellites cannot see inside buildings, efforts to dramatically improve the utility of space-based imagery for finding and neutralizing chemical or biological agents would most likely involve taking much more frequent pictures throughout the construction of anything that might one day become a suspect site, then frequently checking for external signs of suspicious activity. The notion of an "unblinking eye in the sky" scanning the entire global for evidence of suspicious activity that requires closer scrutiny would also require vastly expanded capabilities. If satellites with one-meter resolution were used and could image both day and night, then roughly 200 satellites would be required for a six hour revisit time, assuming that every spot on the Earth would be imaged at least once every six hours. As many as 1,200 satellites would be needed to be able to image every spot on the Earth at least once an hour. Hundreds of terabytes (1012) of raw data would be collected on the six-hour schedule, while petabytes (1015) would be collected on the one-hour schedule, creating downlink bandwidth bottlenecks and requiring ten- to fifty-fold increases over current U.S. imagery data processing and storage capabilities.200 If a mix of U.S. and foreign government and commercial imagery satellites were used, lack of com- mon standards would create potential compatibility problems. As the number of different sources of imagery data increase, integrating the information into a single coherent picture or measuring changes at the same location over time becomes more and more difficult. Finally, mountains of archived and fresh satellite data would be of little value without a comparable investment in highly skilled imagery analysts, a perennial problem in the intelligence community.

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Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 70 ]