With all the satellite coverage I assume the US military has I’m surprised they don’t have anything.
Edit: Like this example. Granted it is probably very narrowly focused
There is a difference between having satellite coverage and having satellite imagery.
Yes, the US military has very good global satellite coverage. And not just the US either; there are a huge number of commercial surveillance satellites up there. If you want, you can get pictures of anywhere on earth, at one-metre resolution, every fifteen minutes or so. You can get radar imagery - lower resolution, but it sees through cloud and works at night - every half an hour or so. On its final flight, MH370 was probably overflown by twenty or thirty surveillance satellites.
But you can only get it once you’ve asked in advance. You can go to a commercial imaging company like Digital Globe and say “get me a photo of downtown Pittsburgh tomorrow” and they’ll do it. But if you ask for a photo of downtown Pittsburgh last week, they’ll probably just tell you they haven’t got one.
The reason is that imaging satellites are not taking pictures all the time. They only have limited onboard storage, downloading is expensive, and even taking the pictures requires power. So they take pictures when they’ve been tasked to do so, and the rest of the time they don’t. The only surveillance satellites the US military has that are always observing are the early warning satellites of the Defense Support Program, which watch for the heat blooms of a ballistic missile launch (and which also pick up other large heat blooms like explosions).
Now, you might be lucky. If someone else had already asked for the photo you wanted, then Digital Globe would have tasked one of its satellites to take it, they would have it on file, and they’d happily sell it to you. Or they might have taken the picture themselves on spec, on the grounds that it was the sort of thing someone might come and ask for. And the same thing applies to the US government; if you’re an intelligence type and you suddenly realise you want a satellite picture of central Iran from six months ago, chances are they’ll have that on file.
Neither of those are going to apply to pictures of a remote strip of the southern Indian ocean; Digital Globe would not have tasked any of its satellites on that. Neither would the US military. Because why would they?
You may be completely correct, but I’m willing to believe our military has a lot better satellite, imagery, and other coverage than we know or they admit to. And if they do have a clue to what happened to this plane they may not want to tells us thinking it would reveal too much, with no real change in the outcome of events.
They definitely have better coverage than they admit to in terms of resolution and so on. But, as I said, they don’t have every satellite taking imagery all the time, for perfectly good practical reasons, and the finest spy camera in the world is useless if you don’t turn it on and point it at something. They only take imagery of stuff they are interested in, or stuff that they think they might one day be interested in. And the southern Indian ocean is pretty much the least interesting part of the planet from the point of view of the US national security establishment (and virtually everyone else).
Note also that the search for MH370 was conducted by Australia. Australia is one of the Five Eyes; they get to see US satellite imagery.
What possible secret could be jeopardised if the US were to say “one of our spy satellites saw the crash site, here’s the latitude and longitude”? They wouldn’t have to give the photos out, just announce the grid. Everyone who is worried about being a subject of US satellite surveillance already assumes that the US is imaging them from orbit!
Don’t argue with any of that but I’m still guessing they could tell us more than they have. In a similar vein, we didn’t hear much about Donald’s campaign being watched and even infiltrated to check for collusion until after it became apparent that there was some and it was relative to Muller’s investigation. Another guess is that if it had turned up nothing we’d never have known about the infiltration. No our government agencies don’t watch everything because they can’t, but I believe they do a lot more than they let us know or we have found out about.
So your argument is literally “because there are some things about some topics that the government does not tell us, I deduce that there are important things about this topic that the government is not telling us”?
Not an argument so much as a belief that it’s a good strategy to keeping the enemy guessing and not reveal your hand. And along those line if they did happen to pick up some info they’d have found a way to reveal the it without revealing how they had the info.
So going back to my initial post, I’m surprised they have nothing but assume if they do have something it shows nothing or they released it but it didn’t help find anything more or at least yet.
To me it’s similar to space observations taken from say Hubbell, there’s a lot and it can take years to sort through it and sometime if put it through newer analyzers later can reveal more.