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Budget Issues Force Spy Satellites Into The Open
Korsair25 points out this article about a U.S. spy satellite program. "Quote: 'Over the decades, spying from space has always earned super-secret status. They are the black projects, fulfilling dark tasks and often bankrolled by blank check.' It also talks about some of the technology used to disguise or camouflage some of the operational satellites."
Original poster used Yahoo's version of the article. It originally is from Space.com. Here is the original URL with pictures.
lexbaby
"Be Brave, Be Loyal, Be True." -- Hawkeye Pierce
However, these meetings are classified, for obvious reasons (if there was a real CARDINAL in the Kremlin during the cold war, I don't think the the CIA would want the KGB knowing he was there, because then they'd try to find him, and if he was really, really lucky, they'd just shoot him in the head and be done with him).
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
It's called "Kepler's laws of motion." If you're in orbit with little (if any) resources available for course correction, your location is pretty much 100% predictable. If you do a series of small, quick movements timed right to avoid the satellites, you won't be caught. It's the large movements that satellites are essentially meant to watch for (and, because of their presence, essentially eliminate); there are hopes of catching small movements with one, but for that your enemy musn't know what's where when. Once somebody knows where a satellite was at what time, the cat's out of the bag.
Having grown up well after the first space launches, it can be easy to take for granted just how much these satellites do for us. Radar only goes out to the horizon, and planes can only do so much before they need to be refuelled in friendly airspace. Satellites are about the only thing preventing large-scale sneak attacks like Pearl Harbor from happening again.
They can be effective. We've just seen that they can also mislead you into starting an expensive war by mistake.
There's a great book by Ben R. Rich called "Skunkworks" -- and in it, he describes having to keep a detailed watch of when Russian satellites passed over. As an aside, sheilding one's self from spy satellites is not so hard either -- you can go to http://www.govliquidation.com/ and purchase camouflage support systems which are designed to effectively hide one from satellites (I swear I only know this from browsing the site when I was bored :P)
here's an example:
http://cgi.govliquidation.com/auction/view?id=5020 82&convertTo=USD
You want to see how our budget works and where the money goes? Here's a visual examination.
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
Interesting. Sen. Jay Rockefeller's comments were extraordinary. Why is the media now spinning this into a stealth-in-space story when the real story is a weapons-in-space story? I find it hard to believe that a stealth satellite program would be inherently dangerous to national security. A satellite that had weapons on board, however, would be a different story altogether. If true, this would be an obvious next step after BMD (ballistic missle defense).
Article I, Section 9, Clause 7:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
This doesn't mean that details have to be published. You don't need to know how much John Smith the office manager in HUD makes, though you may be interested in the overall monies going to HUD in general, which would satisfy this clause.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
1) They could use laser or microwave or some other tight beam to communicate their data back to friendly earth stations, or even hand it off to other satellites.
Microwaves are nondirectional. A laser transmission is intriguing but I doubt that it's technological viable quite yet.
2) They don't have to communicate all of the time, they could just wait until over friendly territory and do scrambled high speed bursts of data.
True, but the people monitoring satellites will also be aware of this ahead of time. I cited SETI for a reason because the same technical details are applicable: we have no idea when the signal is coming, what frequency it's on, or what the code for the signal is. At least, in the industry of mapping satellites, one knows that eventually a signal will show up in particular regions with at least some earthly form of tranmission technology.
I think if we can make a bomber stealthy, with a few billion here and there we can probably make spy sats that are damn near invisible too.
A good part of a bomber being stealthy is the element of surprise and speed. Bombers are fast they typically only take a particular route once. Satellites are slow and in a regular orbit. Heck, if nothing else, we could track it like they track asteroids or pieces of space junk--just another hunk of physical object. I hear they can track pieces of space junk as small as a tennis ball. Yet, this particular physical object seems to emit a burst of radiation every once in a while.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
There are resolution limits in classical optics, even before you include a turbulent atmosphere. These are limitations based on the appature of the optics and the wavelength of light. IIRC that gives you a minimal resolution of 6-12" for a Hubble-class telescope in a low polar orbit -- far too coarse to read your license plate, much less your watch.
Of course these aren't classical telescopes - if I were designing one I might focus a very narrow band onto a linear sensor and let the motion of the satellite provide the second axis. That would give you a 'stripe' but you couldn't maintain focus on a particular object of interest.
The other thing to remember is that too much detail can be as crippling as too little detail. Increase the resolution by an order of magnitude and you'll increase the amount of data you must search by two orders of magnitude. Either you toss more analysts on the problem or your turnaround time suffers. You'll still want high resolution when you're specifically looking at something, but if you're scanning the desert for tanks it may be sufficient to have relatively low resolution on multiple frequencies so you can distinguish tanks from decoys.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
You're wrong. The only mention of Congress publishing anything is:
So Congress does have the power to declare that some things are secret and refuse to publish them. It's right there in the Constitution.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.