i emailed someone I know about this, and got this as a response, keep in mind this particular person use to work at the Satelite Test Center(The Blue Cube), so they know what they are talking about.
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about your comments, the ground track is not a sine wave but I can see where you would think it is. Perhaps if the orbit was perfectly circular and the earth was a isotropic solid you might then get a perfect sine wave.
Now I read most of the article, it started getting boring, at the end there was a statement about misty 2 that made me really mad. Something about putting up a debris field to hide the location of the satellite. At the rate they are going, it will become impossible to put up a satellite without a near certainty that it will suffer midair collisions with dead birds, boosters, etc.
30 years ago we had telescopes ( used to track Apollo launches, etc ) that could take pictures of satellites in orbit. It is pretty hard to hide form a telescope.
Now if you wish to change your orbit there are two changes you can make
1) eccentricity - which is related to apogee and perigee - this would also change your period and ground track.
2) inclination - of course this one changes your ground track while leaving the other orbital elements alone. This allows you to visit more norther and souther latitudes.
Cost, changing your inclination is very expensive. For example, to change it 60 degrees costs as much fuel as it did to launch the bird in the first place. Not practical at all. Changing your altitude is possible but why, the idea was always to fly as close to the ground as possible so as to get more detail.
Now, instead of putting up any satellite, the more intelligent thing is to use unmanned drones which would transmit their data to a geosynchronous relay satellite. They were working on a solar powered plane that could stay up 24/7 at about 100000 feet. Since the wing covering is plastic and transparent it would be very stealthy. Since it is so cheap you could put up 100000 of these things and spy on everybody and everything 24/7. Then the problem would be finding enough people to look at the data. Of course the whole operation would fail because that is not possible without artificial intelligence to do the job for you. There are some very smart people behind the scenes, this whole thing could be just a cover story to hide what they are really doing. Then again with bush in there, it could be just another ripoff for his buddies. Or both.
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