alt Hacker News> Way longer than that. The first KH-11 satellites that Hubble shares its design with were in orbit in the late 1970s.
I'm not sure if it actually "shares its design" with KH-11, but has a more indirect connection, e.g.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23150092:
> My favorite KH-11/Hubble story is that during the design of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA originally wanted a 3 meter mirror. However when they began to design and budget the satellite they were quietly told they should reconsider and use a 2.4 meter mirror, as this would be significantly cheaper since they would be able to leverage existed machinery capable of created mirrors of that size and precision. That infrastructure and manufacturing process had already been created a decade earlier for Keyhole.
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Except that's not the only connection. Which is why a lot of the pictures in the wiki page I posted are actually of Hubble.
The mirror/sensor package is just the payload. The rest of the bird, from power and communications to navigation and pointing, could have been lifted directly from a spysat program.
If the manufacturing for the 2.4 meter mirrors existed a decade earlier, and Hubble used the existing processes, does that mean all the KH-11 satellites also have the spherical aberration problem that Hubble has?