Focus or perspective, pick one. So you've got a big-ass telescope. It's in space, pointed at the ground. It's not exactly a zoom lens - it's pretty much optimized to make the ground look really good from its orbit. How wide it'll go is not exactly public knowledge. However, here's a pretty-well zoomed out shot: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB13/7.jpg How tight it'll go isn't supposed to be public knowledge, but there are leaks. Here's an undegraded (to the best of my knowledge) KH-11 shot of a bomber a little smaller than a 777: You can infer that the imaging target of a KH-11 isn't more than a mile or so wide, depending on what it's pointed at. We could probably do some math and figure it out. Let's go ahead and go with that. Now go back and look at this page. And the hope - and it's quite a hope - is that at some point, recording data for no reason, in the middle of the ocean, a path 1 square wide managed to intersect the flight of an airplane. Do you understand?