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Comment by alexeisadeski3 | Hacker News Reader

Why would the US deploy such satellites to view the southern Indian Ocean? I could understand deployment in potential areas of interest, but that particular area is about as boring as it gets.

My point is that even if those capabilities exist, it's not clear that they would be able to help in this particular case.

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It's quite likely that the people in charge of military surveillance will prefer, and succeed, in getting continuous coverage of the entire Earth. Really want to avoid a "Sorry, Mr. President, we don't have coverage there" situation. And anyway, it's State-funded; cost is rarely a key constraint for these systems.

I would think nuclear submarines can just pop up anywhere in the ocean.

Unless the satellites are in geosync, it's likely they are orbiting and could just randomly come across the correct area at that time.

If not, I'm wondering why people like Skybox [1] didn't deploy resources immediately to start covering ground. It seems like that approach would be much more effective than ships in the ocean?

[1] http://skyboximaging.com/

There is a protocol to task satellites to cover emergencies which was used in this case

http://www.disasterscharter.org/web/charter/activation_detai...

Skybox is also contributing and has this visualisation of the Search Efforts with Satellites to date including those that are needed to cover the expanded search area http://www.skyboximaging.com/news/in-search-of-malaysia-airl...

> Why would the US deploy such satellites to view the southern Indian Ocean? I could understand deployment in potential areas of interest, but that particular area is about as boring as it gets.

China has been venturing in the Indian Ocean, and the United States probably wants to keep an eye on their activities.

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