Keyholes for science?

Well, who would have guessed this?  The U.S. military-industrial complex is giving away spy telescopes to be used for astronomical science.


But there are a few things missing:
"First, they don’t have instruments. There are no cameras, spectrographs or other  instruments that a space telescope typically needs. Second, they don’t have a  program, a mission or a staff behind them. They’re just hardware."

Where have we heard that before?  Oh yeah, the ESA's Sentinel program.   They can get the instrumented Earth observing satellites to the launch pad, but they don't have the money to run them in orbit.

How stupid is this state of affairs?   NASA will work it out in a decade or so, and there isn't a pressing national/international interest to get these scopes launched in a hurry.  But with the loss of Envisat still hurting, ESA needs to get the Sentinel series into space.  Now.