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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
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?)
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.