EOS-CA Notes.txt

The idea of the EOS program (Earth Observation Science) is to model on a bunch of the early scientific (and could-have-been-scientific) spaceflights. Completion criteria would be a combination of launching new probes to orbital parameters, and having X amount of Y science collected. Here are some example missions and the instruments involved (h/t to @Pap for much of this!)

Explorer 6 - Early TV Camera and Cosmic Ray 1 in space high
Corona - KH-1 era film camera (needs the camera rework PR probably). Max alt 200km, max ecc 0.035, polar. Requires the First Orbit Recovery contract (make it shared with Early Crewed like how Uncrewed Karman is shared between both starter programs). Objective is, like, 50% biome coverage for require, and an optional contract to get to 100%.
Explorer 11 - A new earth-only Cosmic Ray 1.5 experiment that's  (and requires min alt 450km, min ecc 0.085, max ecc 0.2) - Cherenkov detector
TIROS-1 - IR Rad, alt > 500km, < 1000km, ecc < 0.005, full (nearly full?) spacelow early TV camera
IMP-A - Early Magnetometer of space low and space high
ANNA 1B - Grav sensor, but need to fix its params so you can't just spam it (tbd, we need to figure out how to modify the experiment.). Real mission was 1000km circular at 50 deg.

Optional contracts would be getting more of the science (only makes sense for biome-dependent experiments, you'd be dumb to not get full data from the regular experiments), or higher-tier science collection, or launching more missions.

The new Cherenkov detector would be in a science node after IR Rad but before the one that has Cosmic 2, so it doesn't need Adv Capsules bluesky. We could also stick some other earth-only experiments there to encourage launching more earth missions. 

EOS II would be a similar program but aimed to start at mid-late 60s tech--lunar era science and later. In both cases, EOS I and EOS II, the aim would be to make use of smaller LVs--Thor-Able / Thor-Agena / Kosmos on the first EOS program, and TAID/Thorad/something like that for EOS II.

The commercial applications programs would be similarly placed and take over the old commsat and navsat missions, culminating in LEO comm and nav constellations (the early Transit/NAVSAT birds are a good model for the latter, while Telstar works for the fomer). @itsRyan is doing work on the payload side for these. Commerical II would be a similar late-60s deal, culminating in a GEO comm network (with optional Molniya network, maybe?) and maybe some proto-GPS constellation if the perf of that contract can be solved.