Noah Schachtman - my arm is long and my vengeance is certain - has tagged me in the Blog 1-2-3 meme. Rules. Grab nearest book, find page 123, go to fifth sentence, copy next three sentences.

I cheated.

The nearest book was Knott & Shaeffer's Radar Cross Section and I really did not want to try to copy out half a page of equations that I don't understand. Equidistant was Jeffrey Richelson's The Wizards of Langley.

McMillan's emphasis on improving CORONA was also based on the findings of the reconnaissance panel. The report had noted that the KH-4 system operated at its ultimate photographic capacity only about 10 per cent of the time, partly because of recognized factors. The panel observed that "it seems entirely feasible to bring most of these factors under control so that one could count on peak resolution from the system on 90 per cent of the exposed film."

Those were the days when satellite reconnaissance photos dropped out of the sky in blunt-body GE re-entry vehicles and were snagged in mid-air by C-119 transports, as they dangled on their parachutes. They also worked at least 10 per cent of the time, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for the Future Imagery Architecture program.

By the way, the RCS book has the closest thing to humor I've ever seen in an AIAA publication, in a reference to 1960s research into the RCS of birds:

By starting with very young birds, the RCS could be measured periodically as they grew...This would also reduce the cost of acquiring subjects of different sizes, The authors further suggest that at the end of the test program the advice of Rombauer and Becker [20] is "especially interesting and useful."

Engineering humor and other oxymorons...