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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."
I click "read more" and up pops.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
I for one welcome my old NSA overlords.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I've been wearing my tinfoil hat all these years, it's finally paid off!
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
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the constituttion mandate that congress make publicly available a DETAILED ledger of expenses? Oh well, it's not like the US government cares about little things like their founding charter any more. After all, who needs a pretense of legitimacy?
The all-seeing eye controls a lot of these satellites. They're used for missions such as the illuminati's plot to blow up Houston, TX on December 27 (which was aborted due to the tsunami/earthquake overshadowing any media circus this would have attracted) in order to justify invading Iran.
9 2)
At least, that's what my friendly local conspiracy nut tells me, so it must be true.
(reference: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=25
You're doing it wrong.
Do NOT talk about Spy Satellites!
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
As we see in the movie "Spies Like Us" (Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd), all spy satellites have a little sign on them that says
"This is not a spy satellite"
Easy.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
But the moon is actually a giant spy sattelite. There was no actual moon before 1954.
Military spy satellites have always been superior in both resolution, contrast-to-noise-ratio and magnification to their non-military counterparts.
Now these previously secret optics technology are partially out in the open, what will be done with them?
I'm sure they could be used to greatly improve the imaging resolution of space probes for example.
(After an elusive secret society of slashdot users uses it for a frikkin earth-blasting-laser that is)
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
Now that the top secret data from these spy sattelites is being released, other crucial details of the US Government black-ops orbital-projects are being revealed.
Apparently most of the governments secret high-optical resolution sattelites were curiously locked in geo-synchronous orbits above St. Tropez, Copacabana and other great beaches of the world.
It was also revealed that image data from these locations while still 'classified and unreleased' was stored in a black-ops folder mysteriously titled "My Cleave Shotz". No further information is currently available.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
This "We don't need spy satalites in the current climate so we shouldn't develop them" is EXACTLY the kind of "get what we need for right now" thinking that got us in trouble with 9/11 in the first place.
We can't just react to the situation we're in now. We need a broad base of capabilities to address needs we have now, AND needs we may have in the future, AND needs we have no idea we'll have in the future.
We got burned on 9/11 because our entire system was still moving from being extremely focused on fighting the cold war to being extremely focused on being able to fight two regional conflicts. So we got hit where we were vulnerable - global terrorist conflict.
Just as ignoring that threat was a mistake in the past, deciding to scrap any equipment related to threats not currently present would be just as grave of an error, one we should hopefully avoid discovering in hindsight.
paintball
...how useful they are/were? The US intelligence agencies are not likely to tell folks where they got what information if they don't have to. For example, if information concerning the locations and orientations of anti-aircraft weaponry was obtained via satellite, the information would likely be passed to on-scene commanders, but not to CNN or such, so the average person is not going to know how effective the satellites are.
Yes, especially if you happen to be a "defense" contractor...
"Thank you, Congressman, for your stauch advocacy of this worthy project. The $11 billion you allocated for the fiscal year will fund additional research in order to get this system fielded. Um, by the way, we noticed that you are retiring soon. Perhaps you would like to lend your national security expertise as a consultant to our "advisory board," in exchange for a modest stipend, of course." *wink*
"Why, I think that I might be able to set aside a few hours a week with your fine company. After all, it's a matter of national security." *wink*
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
FTA: "The reason why, Aftergood explained, is because congressional appropriators are free to spend the money without being held accountable for their actions."
One central problem in our American government is the pursuit of necessarily secret projects, while our government is controlled by a system of oversight for accountability. Some projects are kept secret from the oversight, and at least some of those get out of control. Reagan's Iran/Contra operation violated several laws, as well as conflicting with several foreign policies regarding both Iran and South American drug cartels. And these satellites apparently violate any sensible cost:benefit*risk analysis. Just as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so does extraordinary secrecy require extraordinary legitimacy. We can't know about the essential secret operations that succeed despite lack of oversight. But the repeated abuse of secrecy, merely to cover up "enormous boondoggles" as reported in the article, threatens the specific project goals, as well as the ability to run *any* government project without oversight. It's now an open secret that the Federal Government is collapsing under its own weight, along fault lines of abuse huge enough to be seen from space for generations.
--
make install -not war
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).
If you do the math, the theoretical resolving limit for a 2.4m mirror (Hubble's size, which is about the same as the KH-11 and KH-12 spy satellites since they're all launched from the space shuttle) works out to about 5cm in the visible spectrum at a 90 mile altitude. That's under optimal conditions. They might be able to see if you're wearing a watch, but there's no way they can read the time unless the government has figured out some way to bypass the laws of physics.
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
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?)
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.