While I have no first hand knowledge of this, having been a tool of the spooks way back when, I think I can give you some informed speculation.

Technological "leakage" from the military is actually more prolific than you'd think. The Intel 8080 prcessor was being used in Viet Nam in 74' (first hand knowledge) yet it's in the early commercial PC's by 80'.

It would seem that the builders of the HST would be stupid to try to re-invent the optics, imager, guidence, data compression, data transmission and image processing that was developed for the Key Hole series of spy satalite. I agree the spooks would have kept this collaberation quiet but they probably would do it just to "kick the bear" (irritate the Russians).

I would expect that the only thing they'd really have to change is the size and how they ground the optics. HST would be looking at nothing closer than 300K klicks away and the KH's nothing further away than 300 klicks.

I had a little personal history story about resolution and timeliness of some KH photos all typed in, but have decided to keep my mouth shut. No sense in kicking the eagle.

__________________
It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker