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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."
Yea, those super secret spy satellites did us a whole lot of good in Iraq...a desert, no trees, little clouds. Yea, alot of good.
Sorry, just being cynical.
One need only maintaine a venear of Republic in order to form an Autocracy. Re: Augustus. He was not a king, merely he held the Consulship, Tribunition, Censorship, and Pontificate perpetually and all at the same time. Personally, if I were President I wouldn't appoint any cabinate officals. The constitutions says I can, not that I have to. I'd just be me and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I'd probbaly wear a Class A military uniform instead of a suite. I would be Commander in Chief, after all. That essentailly makes me like, a 6-star general.
This is indeed a fine line that the article discusses:
There is now a delicate dance underway between issues of national security and open public scrutiny about taxpayer dollars being spent wisely or squandered. Meanwhile, the swirl of secrecy seems to be revolving around a top secret "stealthy" satellite project, codenamed MISTY.
I had the good fortune to read Michael Ignatieff's new book The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror during the winter holidays. It discusses this issue in depth, and it helped bring a lot of the issues into focus. At least in this case, it seems that the lawmakers are given this information - even if it is only in a 'closed' environment. Of course, the Bush admin should not be threatening lawmakers that are speaking out at all.
Now, some secrecy is needed; but really, there is both a pro and con to liberal democracy - I would say that in this case, the Bush admin should be as open as possible. The 'clear and present' danger at this time is 'terrorism', and is their knowledge of spy satellites really going to change things? Perhaps, I'm not an expert, but unless this can be demonstrated openness is required.
I'm going to try to pre-empt another claim, that of the People's Republic of China. In my opinion, they are not yet a threat, and policy can not be planned around hostilities - that's when you get a new cold war planned. Secrecy is a great debate for public policy - in this case, I'd say given the current situation, the prudent move would be to move towards openness.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
It seems to me that this is a replacement for a project we (The United States) used to have but ditched for parochial political reasons.
One of the major problems with satellites, as everyone knows, is that they're relatively predictable. An opponent with a minor degree of sophistication can figure out when the satellite is going to be overhead, and if his project is small enough that he can hide it at that time, he will. It wasn't such a problem when one was dealing with the Soviets, who liked to build big things that were difficult to hide, but now that the major opponents are organizations like al-Qaida or the various factions fighting the U.S. in Iraq it's not so easy; they don't build aircraft carriers or industrial complexes very often, to say the least.
Traditionally the solution to this problem has been to fly over with an airplane. It's not so easy to predict when an airplane is going to fly over, so you're more likely to see the things that the opposition would hide if they knew you were looking. Right now, we're using the U-2 and the Predator drone for this task, and it seems to be working pretty well.
Should the U.S. find itself up against a more sophisticated opponent, one who has the ability to shoot down a U-2 or a low-speed/altitude drone, we've got a problem. There is, theoretically, a weapons system in the U.S. inventory which would be much less vulnerable to even a sophisticated opponent, the SR-71, but that program was permenantly cancelled in 1998.
MISTY would be a way of compensating for this loss. A stealth spy satellite would provide an aerial intelligence capability against an opponent sophisticated to shoot down a U-2 or a predator.
(It should be noted that FAS seems to think we have a plane to replace the SR-17, and they have some pretty good evidence, especially about unexplained sonic booms, but their conclusions are by no means certain. http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/aurora.htm Besides, why would Uncle Sam want one system when he could have two for the price of two?)
Rule #3 is that governments lie about any and everything. Consider that it might not be a spy satellite at all, but that the "stealth" attributes described in the Yahoo News article might belong to some category of offensive orbital weapons system. That the Pentagon's Space Command has publicly stated its intention to deploy orbital nuclear powered weapons in the near future to "deny" space to other nations is public record. You can find links to lots of original documentation to this effect at http://www.space4peace.org/ For those who like audio, the director of that outfit is a guy named Bruce Gagnon, and you can find a number of interviews and speeches by him at http://www.radio4all.net, all downloadable free MP3 audio. My favorite one, a general discussion of the Space Command and our country's offensive military posture in space, is at http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=6827
Powell sat in front of the UN and showed slide after slide of satellite photos of Iraq's WMDs.
I think this is more what the original poster was referring to rather than spotting troops for the actual war.
Since there is a Constitutional requirement that the knowledge needs to be public, this may be re-written as the public having a "need to know". However, if you then re-write this to say that those who have a "need to know" are the public, you can comply with the Constitution and omit 99.999% of the citizens of the US.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I always get a big chuckle when I see publicly disseminated satellite images of land and buildings. The resolutions are relatively poor and give the impression that satellites can give rough photographs of terrain etc but can't see too much.
The reality is that satellite photography can read your watch if it's left outdoors - oh and visible light isn't the half of it.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Spending money on the CIA that Congress appropriated to Air Force procurement clearly violates the requirement that money be drawn from the treasury only according to appropriations made by law. Similarly, the intentional false reporting of CIA spending as something else clearly violates the requirement of a "regular Statement and Account."
Futher nit-picking here.
Hubble orbits at an altitude of about 550km. Its optical system is optimized to give the highest resultion at 280nm (which is useless for a spy satellite, but that's not the point), giving about 0.04 arcsecond resolution. At visible and near IR, the resolution degrades down to 0.06 -- 0.1 arcseconds. In more sensible term, the latter translates to about 25cm of spatial resolution from the orbital altitude.
Of course, atmosphere is very turbulent (like looking thru turbulent air generated by the wing of an airplane). To beat that, one needs to perform serious optical image reconstruction. NRO can probably do that well (astronomers learned the gut of it from them back in 1990s).
782 billion for the discretionary budget. That adds up to what, about 6% of the GDP? But if the governments take 35% of my paycheck, plus another 6% of what I can keep when I spend it, that's at least 41%. I don't think my income is as heavily taxed as some, so the average figure may be closer to 50%. I would expect that the the GDP can't be much greater than the sum of everyone's salaries. It seems logical that the two numbers should be fairly well correlated. Companies can't sell more than we can buy and I think we're running a trade deficit so the GDP may even be less than the sum of everyone's salaries. Savings are all reinvested by banks at some point so even savings would eventually in good part be counted in GDP. The sum of everyone's yearly paycheck should be close to GDP + trade deficit ... total expenditures.
Given a little room for accounting ledger shenanigns it's reasonable to say that the anyone who defends taxes by citing roads and defense isn't watching their money very closely.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
No 'secret' revealed in the Washington Times or on C-span is worth anything.
The real secrets are the ones people have been trained to not believe in even if they hear them.
How do I know?
You wouldn't believe me if I told you.
-FL
Go read Chaisson's book _The Hubble Wars_. Many of the technical problems that the Hubble Space Telescope had (wiggling solar masts, various areas of electromagnetic interference) had already been encountered by some of the black satellite programs, only the people in those programs couldn't say anything because their projects were classified. Not even a hint of "you might want to beef up those struts." Took a shuttle mission to fix that.
HST science was delayed *years* and costs skyrocketed because of this bogosity. This attitude of the military "blank check" projects really pisses me off and makes me want to stop paying for their projects. (Thus, letters to my senators and representatives).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
As far as terrorists go, they're not going to be shooting satellites out of orbit any time soon, and I doubt they'll be tracking them without help from a nation-state. For dealing with terrorists, it would make more sense to spend your money on launching more conventional sats, so you had 24-hour coverage of the entire globe.
Unless 24-hour coverage is impossible, the only reason to have stealthy spy satellites is if you think somebody's going to try and take them down in a conflict. Or, alternatively, the company that's got the contract is a big campaign doner.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
These things have to be kept secret to avoid
embarrassing questions about their cost effectiveness.
If, for example, the Iranians want to avoid detection from spy satellites all they have to do is invest in a large number of large pieces of black plastic sheeting. Spread them around the country and then build whatever they want under a few of the pieces. Now if they don't do anything but just move the plastic sheeting around, they can cause the US government to go broke at a minimal cost to themselves as our hawkish Congress falls all over themselves to build more satellites.
We need to spend $100 billion for a single satellite and they only have to spend a few thousand bucks for plastic sheeting. The North Koreans are not quite as smart, they think they actually need to dig tunnels to keep our satellites from seeing anything on the 40-60% of the days that are clear enough to see the ground anyway.
But hey, its all about the kickbacks that ensue when these things are built in various congressional districts anyway. It has little to do with actual security. Do you really feel safer that $100 billion has been spent on a satellite rather than say to fix potholes in the road you drive to and from work every day, to upgrade the air traffic control system, or to ensure that the over-the-counter medications you take are actually safe? What is more hazaradous? You figure the probabilities.
Gosh, I love the silly notions of our constitution requiring a detailed ledger of expenditures. Good for a real laugh. Even if it were true, much of the constitution has been de facto repealed for quite some time now anyway. Its become largely a show document, mostly to impress visitors to the National Archives and others with our righteousness. Like Christianity, its not taken too seriously nowadays, even by its most ardent supporters.
P.T. Barnum didn't really have it right when he said "There's a sucker born every minute". Actually, its closer to 10 suckers/minute.
Let me get this straight, you would have pulled money out of antiterrorism bugets, despite the recent, major attacks you mentioned? These were serious attacks. The Cole almost sunk. You fail to mention the deadly embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and don't forget Tim McVeigh, who enlightened us with a horrific demonstration that a serious domestic terrorist attack was possible. You would ignore enemies who had proven to be dedicated to and capable of causing deadly and disruptive attacks against American targets, both abroad and in the US? And focus on what?? Funding the M109A6 Paladin?
If you're being sarcastic, sorry I didn't get it, because from where I'm standing your comment looks as serious as it does ludicrous.
My favorite story to recall is when in the late 80's or so, the Russian government called the US authorities and told them a plane crashed in a Wisconsin lake and that those people probably needed help. Not bad if they really did find out from satellites.
total Federal Dept. of Education's budget is about twice the total defence budget (I remember numbers of $B800 vs. $B400
Actually, the *Federal* government spends very little on education despite GWB increasing it by 67%. Why? Because guess what: education is considered a local issue. *State* governments combined spend upwards of 800B/year. So when you see some liberal whining that "the goverment" only spends a small fraction of the defense budget on education, keep in mind that's Federal. Total spending on education in the USA dwarfs defense spending, it just isn't spend by the Feds.