That was the entire point of my Sci Fi techothriller I never finished writing where the plot was the HST was a declassified KH-11 and to F the Soviets over we released the declassified HST with an intentional fault so the Soviet clone would be faulty. Its a win-win because the service mission to fix the HST made the right people on our side extra money, but the Soviets didn't have a working-enough space-truck to fix their clones of the HST/KH-11, and we were certainly not going to volunteer to fix their KH-11 clone for them LOL.
It was never going to be a good book plot so I gave up on it. Unrealistic that they'd steal "everything" including the intentional mistake. The idea of a double agent plot where "their guy" was actually "our guy" who made sure they stole the entire lot including the intentional grinding error was, um, cringy. In defense of my bad novel plot, I was young at the time, and I've read worse books.
I always thought that Hubble in fact was a declassified KH-11. And indeed the NRO declassified and donated a couple more obsolete Keyholes to NASA in 2012 [1], one of which is now being used as the chassis (and optics?) of the NGRST [2].
Well, it wasn’t. This is pretty well documented. It has pretty much the same design requirements and even some of the same contractors, but it also differed in key ways. It had a totally different instrumentation board, optical packages, and was built for servicing which KH wasn’t.
The fact that it was the same form factor is not an accident, as Hubble was sized to fit in the shuttle payload bay, which was itself sized based on keyhole.
Well, there's been a LOT of KH-11 satellites over the years, so unlike with Hubble the NRO has had the opportunity to just put up an updated satellite instead of trying to fix an existing one.
https://space.stackexchange.com/a/58290 lays out some evidence that Kodak built similar mirrors for the KH-11 spy satellites, while Perkin-Elmer was selected for Hubble (and had built smaller mirrors for other spy satellites).
Early spy satelites even used film; I remember reading about one design that took a film picture, developed, and then used a CCD to scan it and send it back to earth, which is a bit mind boggling to me.
The ones my father worked on used film, too. But I do not think they were developed in space. All I know is a canister was dropped and intercepted (caught) by a passing jet. I don’t see why it would be developed or scanned in space. Just drop the can of exposed film and develop on the ground. Scanners in the 60s? Film chemistry in space? Why?
Maybe I'm misremembering the spy satellites using this (keeping the images secret is harder is you transmit them), but Lunar Orbiter 5 worked this way, so we had the technology in the 60's
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The lunar Orbiter used an adapted E-1 camera from SAMOS. The E-2 and (canceled) E-3 also used the semi-dry development process and photomultiplier readout method.
It would be interesting to know about the scan out piece here.
The idea makes sense to me, generally, in that film is high res, high speed, can have a fadt shutter. Given where digital computers & imaging were, the idea of turning digitization into a batch slow process decoupled from capture makes all the sense in the world.
I read somewhere that the mirror defect was specific to Hubble, because it was designed to focus at infinity while the Keyhole mirrors focused at 400 miles or whatever is orbital height. So it had a different curvature but the custom grind rig for that modified curvature was constructed erroneously. There is definitely public discussion of such details if you dig.
Hubble was fixed by the costar addition. I wonder if there's missions to fix keyhole we don't know about.