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United States Space

Budget Issues Force Spy Satellites Into The Open 370

Posted by timothy from the pretty-soon-we're-talking-real-money dept.
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."
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Budget Issues Force Spy Satellites Into The Open More

Budget Issues Force Spy Satellites Into The Open

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  • Freaky (Score:5, Funny)

    by aengblom ( 123492 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @06:53PM (#11249633) Homepage
    I click "read more" and up pops.

    Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

    I for one welcome my old NSA overlords.

  • Good thing (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Analog Kid ( 565327 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @06:54PM (#11249638)
    I've been wearing my tinfoil hat all these years, it's finally paid off!

  • Correct URL (Score:5, Informative)

    by lexbaby ( 88257 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @06:57PM (#11249667) Homepage
    Original poster used Yahoo's version of the article. It originally is from Space.com. Here [space.com] is the original URL with pictures.

  • Did us a lot of good... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rmdyer ( 267137 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @06:57PM (#11249671)
    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.

    • Re:Did us a lot of good... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:27PM (#11249897)
      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.

      • Re:Did us a lot of good... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:38PM (#11249990)
        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
      • this reminds me, during the first indian nuclear crisis in 1996, Bill clinton gave the indian PM with pictures of a nuclear test attempt. Having been caught, the halted preparations. However, having the photos, let them calculate when the sats came above. this helped in hiding nuclear tests a few year later until it was too late.
      • The article is not about discontinuing all spy satelites. It's about discontinuing the incredibly expensive stealth satelites, which our enemies *shouldn't* be able to identify the orbits of.

      • Once somebody knows where a satellite was at what time, the cat's out of the bag.

        The GPS constellation places everywhere on earth within the constant view of, what, 5 to 7 satellites?

        Since being in view of only 1 spy satellite poses the threat of being watched, maybe we should just launch enough spy satellites to be within view of one everywhere, at all times.

        Mind you, it's obviously infeasible to have enough satellites to actually watch everyplace on earth at once (not even close), but presumably "t

        • yummm nope will not work. Think about got get a clear picture you want the the satellite as close to the target as you can get it. The bigger the angle the longer the slant range the worse the picture.
      • I guess all those nukes are usless. Really the statment that Satellites are about the only think preventing a large scale sneak attack is really a bit over board.
        They do help keep the peace and helps to verify treaties and to give us an advantage in combat but prevents a new Pearl Harbor... Not really
      • What? Really, I think the nuclear deterrent is much more responsible for the current level of protection from hostile nations than are spy sattelites.

    • How would most people know... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wasted ( 94866 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:30PM (#11249924)
      ...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.
    • A recurring conspiracy of mine is that the 1990 debacle with the Hubble Space Telescope mirror being out of focus was intended. It was out of focus for astronomical observations, but was probably perfect for ground observations. This would allow the government to take the highest resolution pics available for the three years it was up there until they repaired the mirror.

      Any takers on this idea?

      When they went up to repair it, not only did they take "the fix", but they probably returned with some photogr

  • Appropriations disclosure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dark_requiem ( 806308 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @06:57PM (#11249673)
    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?
    • 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

      • You're blinding me! (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        After reading your post, I'm struck by two things:

        a) You are relatively well-read.
        b) Your spelling and grammar make me want to claw out my fucking eyes.

        No offense.
      • Re: Augustus. He was not a king, merely he held the Consulship, Tribunition, Censorship, and Pontificate perpetually and all at the same time.

        Sweet jumpin' Jehosaphat -- a Classics scholar on SlashDot!

        Excellent example, very applicable. Keep up the good work.

        -kgj
      • Condensed from Wikipedia:

        Only been two Six Stars (General of the Armies), and it isn't exactly an official rank, the original George W and John "Black Jack" Pershing. George Dewey is the only person to hold the equivalent navy rank (Admiral of the Navies)
    • Everything is accounted for. But when it comes to National Security you have to look in different places or under vague terms like "General Defense Expenses" or "Golden toilets x 20".
      Regards,
      Steve

      • Re:Appropriations disclosure (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Custard ( 587661 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:49PM (#11250097) Homepage Journal
        Everything is accounted for. But when it comes to National Security you have to look in different places or under vague terms like "General Defense Expenses" or "Golden toilets x 20".

        I used to be a spy and to launder the money I got paid in golden toilets. I'm running low on cash, so check e-bay in a few days if you want one at a good price.

        They offered to pay me in golden showers but I refused. No way I was gonna fall for that again.

    • Re:Appropriations disclosure (Score:5, Insightful)

      by temojen ( 678985 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:11PM (#11249765) Journal
      According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one's plans.

      All warfare is based on deception.
      Sun Tzu

    • Re:Appropriations disclosure (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ctr2sprt ( 574731 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:14PM (#11249792)
      Congress makes available a detailed ledger of expenses. Of course, you don't expect it to list names of all our spies abroad, right? (They're still getting paid.) And you don't expect it to list every component going into our spy satellites. (Then enemies could get a better idea of how to build them.) And so on. So the "detail" is usually stuff like "$157 million for CIA payroll," but doesn't break down exactly who gets what. Similarly, we have "$3.2 billion for space-related defense projects."

      Most of the "secrecy" really comes about by obscurity: our government spends over $1 trillion a year on various projects, all detailed on several thousand pages of a budget law. (Actually, on many, many individual bills, each of which are hundreds or thousands of pages long.) Remember that we first learned about these mysterious spy satellites because (a) they are in the budget; and (b) some Congresscritters noticed and started wondering. Remember the uproar about politicians being able to look at our tax returns? No great conspiracy (maybe a small one), it was just so buried in everything else that nobody noticed until it was (almost) too late.

      I have a hard time keeping track of my own damn budget, and I spend less than 1/10 millionth what the government does. Think about the magnitude here. There's a reason that Congress typically hands out huge checks to various agencies instead of individual projects: it's simply not possible for 300-odd people, even with 100-person staffs, to micromanage every aspect of government.

      Good argument for dramatically reducing the size of the government, isn't it? Although I doubt it will ever be possible to reduce ours to something which can be effectively supervised.

      • Re:Appropriations disclosure (Score:5, Informative)

        by Autumnmist ( 80543 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:50PM (#11250112)
        You want to see how our budget works and where the money goes? Here's a visual examination [deviantart.com].
        • 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 bu
        • I think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend away non-discretionary federal spending. 3/4 of federal spending is in Welfare, Medicare, Medicade, Social Security and similar socialist programs. To ignore those and make a graph that appears to show more than half of federal spending is military in nature is outright fraudulent. Sorry but Congress CAN effect non-discretionary spending: by repealing or reforming those programs, duh! Meanwhile, count that spending as spending.

          • Re:Appropriations disclosure (Score:5, Insightful)

            by DM9290 ( 797337 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @02:22AM (#11251922) Journal
            I think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend away non-discretionary federal spending. 3/4 of federal spending is in Welfare, Medicare, Medicade, Social Security and similar socialist programs. To ignore those and make a graph that appears to show more than half of federal spending is military in nature is outright fraudulent. Sorry but Congress CAN effect non-discretionary spending: by repealing or reforming those programs, duh! Meanwhile, count that spending as spending.

            Stop being a sore winner. Republicans control congress. The deficit is not the fault of congress it is the fault of the political party in control at this time and unprecedented tax cuts for which the 10% most wealthy americans are getting 80% of the dollars! There isn't a shortage of money. There is a shortage of honesty.

            The creator of that chart you are complaining about specifically explained what the chart shows, and says it excludes medicare or social security and explains why the author believes it should be excluded.

      • Can't follow the money (Score:3, Insightful)

        by chiph ( 523845 )
        it's simply not possible for 300-odd people, even with 100-person staffs, to micromanage every aspect of government.

        Maybe that's a sign that we have too much goverment?

        Chip H.
        • Increase the size of the House of Reps, decrease lobbyists, and make it illegal for any non-citizen of the USA to donate to a politician/political party/etc.

          ==

          Get a more diverse group, remove people who are payed to swing their vote, and don't let companies bribe them.

          Makes sense to me. "300-odd people" governing over 300 million? That doesn't seem right to me.
      • Good argument for dramatically reducing the size of the government, isn't it? Although I doubt it will ever be possible to reduce ours to something which can be effectively supervised.

        Ummm ... government, "effectively supervised"?

        Supervised by what? other than ... more government.

        -kgj
    • There's a House Committee (or sub-committee or something like that) on Intelligence. The CIA and various intelligence groups have to come to them to justify their spending. There are somethings they don't have to disclose (identities of agents), but otherwise they basically have to tell the Committee what they're doing with the tax-payers dollars.

      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

    • which section of the constitution are you referring to?

      • Re:Appropriations disclosure (Score:5, Informative)

        by Martin Blank ( 154261 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:59PM (#11250191) Homepage Journal
        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.

      • which section of the constitution are you referring to?

        I can only assume that the original poster was referring to 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.

        The intelligence budget is hidden [fas.org] within the budgets for other government operations, primarily in the defense department budget. In the

    • 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.

    • You're wrong. The only mention of Congress publishing anything is:

      Article 1, Section 5. 3. Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House, on any question, shall, at the desire of one-fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.

      So Congress does have the power to declare that some things are secret and refuse to publish them. It's righ

  • Novus Ordo Seclorum (Score:5, Funny)

    by Michael Hunt ( 585391 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:02PM (#11249701) Homepage
    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.

    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=259 2 [thetruthseeker.co.uk])

  • Rule #1 about Spy Satellites (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:03PM (#11249705)
    Do NOT talk about Spy Satellites!

  • A fine line (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Staplerh ( 806722 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:04PM (#11249715) Homepage
    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.

  • Camouflage is easy (Score:5, Funny)

    by _Hellfire_ ( 170113 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:05PM (#11249722)
    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.
    • How do you know that that 6-ton communications satellite is just a communications satellite?
      • How do you know that that 6-ton communications satellite is just a communications satellite?

        Reporter: "I would like to ask you some questions about this satellite from your firm we photographed from a Spaceship 2 tourist flight. What is this meter-wide telescopic lens?"

        Technician: "Why that's not a meter-wide telescopic lens, thats a....um.....uh....new kind of......solar panel! Yeah, it focuses light like a magnifier burning an ant so that we make one small strong cell instead of many weaker ones."

        Re
    • Actually, spy satellites are labeled as property of Major League Baseball [snpp.com]

  • Dont you know ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:06PM (#11249729)
    I mean like didnt yall see Enemy of the State ?

    Spy satelites are most usefull chasing guys around whos kids toys get swapped at the store for some digital movie of a top level spook killing a senator, happens all the time

    and they of course can see right through wall and stuff.

  • Don't tell anyone I told you... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:10PM (#11249760)
    But the moon is actually a giant spy sattelite. There was no actual moon before 1954.

  • Interesting technology (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theufo ( 575732 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:12PM (#11249777) Homepage
    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)

  • Replacement for a project we used to have (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:19PM (#11249832)
    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?)

  • Maybe it's not even a spy satellite -- rule #3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zumbi ( 246226 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:24PM (#11249872)
    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

  • The Truth is Out There (Score:5, Funny)

    by popo ( 107611 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:26PM (#11249889) Homepage
    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.
  • 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.
    • see parent post's sig. nuff said.
    • On the other hand, we should certainly commit resources to the fights we are fighting now. While spy satellites could spot Soviet tank divisions and missile silos, they can't pinpoint terrorists in caves. It may well be that spysats will be useful in the future, but right now it could be argued that the CIA and other American intelligence agencies need to move resources from electronic to human intelligence.

      While it's not ever a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, it can be a bad idea to give all projects equal weight. Spysats have served well, and will continue to serve well, in large-scale conflicts. They may even be useful on a limited scale in guerrila wars. However, spies are useful in all conflicts. It therefore makes sense to concentrate more resources in human intelligence. While abandoning spysats entirely would be folly, we can't always implement every idea we want to; it would be wise to balance our methods' means with their effectiveness in a variety of situations.

      • While spy satellites could spot Soviet tank divisions and missile silos, they can't pinpoint terrorists in caves

        They may not see the terrorists in the caves, but they can see the terrorists entering and leaving the caves, and they can see trails leading to caves, and they can find the caves themselves byt their thermal signature, and they can find smoke emanating from caves (sure sign of human occupancy).

        I don't have any special knowlege of spy satellites, but I know what you can see from an airplane.

        • ...terrorists entering and leaving the caves...

          Are you calling the White House a cave?

        • Normal spy satellites can do this... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Goonie ( 8651 ) <robert.merkel@NOsPAm.benambra.org> on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @12:32AM (#11251586) Homepage
          The point of this article was that the US government is spending a lot of money to deploy stealthy spy satellites. The idea is that nobody but the US knows where these are, so the "bad guys" can't time their activities to avoid the spysat passes. It was also designed to make it more difficult for the bad guys to shoot spy satellites down.

          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.

    • dude, come back when you have proof for your opinion. Until then, go karma whoring somewhere else.

    • Re:We don't need them, until we need them. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JohnnyCannuk ( 19863 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @08:18PM (#11250308)
      Funny, I thought 9/11 was indirectly caused by decades of US government support of brutal regimes throughout the Middle East.

      More directly, it was caused by Dubya ignoing Richard Clarke for 8 months, by initially cutting the FBI's funding for anti-terrorism activities and by ignoring an NSA briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in America" in August 2001 while he was on vacation.

      Clinton shares some blame for 9/11, but remember, the same people who are now blaming him for NOT going after him back in 96-99 are the ones who said that, when he TRIED going after Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 96, he was shooting cruise missles as a diversion away from the Monica Lewinsky affair!

      Can't have it both ways: either he tried to go for it and the Republicans slammed his efforts as a diversion or he didn't go after him enough, according to Republicans. Well?

      Bin Laden escaped and 9\11 happened because of internal US partisan politics rather than ANY "focus on fighting the cold war". The warning and urging were there, but politicians, especially GWB, didn't listen.

      THAT is the problem, not any military navel gazing. The military is one of those few organizations that is actually designed to change quickly when ordered to do so...no politician had the guts to give the order.

      • Funny, I thought 9/11 was indirectly caused by decades of US government support of brutal regimes throughout the Middle East.

        Ah yes, here we go again. I am really tired of people using this argument. What are we to do? Just sit on our hands and hope for the best? Instead of being like the UN which just sits there and hopes for the best, we stepped in. Gee, lets see side with Iran or Iraq. The problem is that ALL governments over there are BRUTAL regimes!!!
        The best part of this whole Afghanistan/Iraq situ

      • 9\11 happened because of internal US partisan politics

        Sorry to take your quote slightly out of context, but I've got to respond to this.

        9/11 happened because there are people who like to kill civilians during peacetime as a method of getting their message out, and because those people made use of their resources more effectively than the US made use of its. Partisan politics alone does not a terrorist attack make. One of the key components is a "terrorist" and an "attacker". Frankly, they're murderers, a

        • Re:We don't need them, until we need them. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Headw1nd ( 829599 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @12:40AM (#11251620)
          Wait. What?

          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.

    • Re:We don't need them, until we need them. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by demachina ( 71715 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @08:20PM (#11250323)
      A key reason the U.S. was blindsided by 9/11 was becausing it was squandering such vast sums on spy satellites. The imaging satellites are really only good for monitoring nation states with large conventional and strategic military assets or maybe really obvious weapons installations like nuclear reactors or processing facilities. They are nearly worthless against insurgencies like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan and even more worthless against terrorists like Al Qaida (well they were good for taking pictures of their training camps and mud huts which were occassionally bombed in to being just mud. Not sure Al Qaida even has mud hut camps now or if they do they probably aren't obvious about it). Not sure you couldn't be far better served now by RPV's doing tactical reconnaisance since theater commanders have a lot more control over them, and they can fly over whenever you want. Spy satellites have predictable orbits and any nation with something to hide can figure out when they are overhead. Wound't be suprised if RPV's will take over strategic reconnaisance too. There is a stealth variant of Global Hawk you can probably fly over any country you fell like without detection being developed.

      The electronic eavesdropping efforts might be somewhat more useful again terrorists but I imagine most of them have figured out by now its not a good idea to use cell phones, phones in general or radios. I'm pretty sure Al Qaida is mostly using concealed and encrypted traffic on the internet. Spy satellites are also not much value as more and more traffic goes in to fiber optics, though I assume the NSA is tapping most of the world's fiber too.

      I'm willing to bet a lot of people at the CIA, Pentagon and NSA, George Tenet in particular, are kicking themselves that they let traditional intelligence methodologies(i.e. spys) wither away in favor of spy satellites. They kind of obviously have a problem because they don't even have the people to translate most of the non english intercepts, especially those in Arabic, the current electronic intelligence spying yields.
    • Simply put, the article explains that the congressmen oppose it because we don't need more stealth spy satellites than we already have, especially not one that costs this much.
    • While I agree with the sentiment of your post, I want to correct something. We got burned by 9/11, not because we were in a Cold War mentality. The Cold War has been long over by then. What burned us was that we thought that terrorism has to be state sponsored like it was in the past. Al Qaeda was a "grass root" movement. It's goal is to facilitate terrorist activities without being directly involved in all of them. Think of them as a terrorist enterpenuer[sp?]. The 9/11 plan wasn't even Bin Laden or

  • High resolution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Magickcat ( 768797 ) * on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:34PM (#11249961)
    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.
    • I'm not sure that it's quite that good, but it is almost certainly much better than what we can get from commercial feeds. Example: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave [microsoft.com] in color at (IIRC) 25cm resolution. This is from 2002, and it's my understanding that 5cm resolutions are available commercially now (if you want to pay for them). Figure the government can probably, if they need to, pick up 1cm or so resolution, maybe down to 5mm in exceptionally clear weather with no significant wind. If you have a very large analog

      • That's an aerial photograph (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @08:31PM (#11250381)
        That picture was shot from a plane. Terraserver uses both satellite and aerial photographs. The satellite photos are typically about 25m-2m resolution. Aerial photos are used for higher resolutions.

        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.

        • 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 gen

    • Re:High resolution (Score:5, Informative)

      by coyote-san ( 38515 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @08:33PM (#11250400)
      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.
    • oh and visible light isn't the half of it.

      I assume you just mean the birds have sensors for other frequencies like IR...

      I'd guess that they're not big into illumination from space. I don't care what frequencies you're using -- painting your target kinda defeats the purpose of spying, since your target can't help but know when you're looking.

  • Stealth Satellites (Score:3, Funny)

    by sciop101 ( 583286 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:37PM (#11249978)
    "I knew about the Stealth Satellites. That was before I did not know about them."

    An excerpt from "My Life From All My Veiwpoints: An Anthology" by John Kerry.

  • Stealth Accounting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:50PM (#11250107) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • OHMG (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gremlins ( 588904 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:50PM (#11250110)
    I thought it was just pretty much assumed we did this kind of stuff. Not really a shocker to me.

  • New Game Show (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Journalist ( 844669 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:54PM (#11250152)
    "Who Wants to Flip Off the Government" I'm your host, Porter J. Goss. This week, contestants try to flip off the government's spy satellites while a team of CIA agents hunts them down and arrests them for seditious behavior.

  • Weapons in space (Score:5, Informative)

    by PingXao ( 153057 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @07:55PM (#11250157)
    Interesting. Sen. Jay Rockefeller's comments [globalsecurity.org] 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 [globalsecurity.org]? 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).
    • Interesting article, saying how they think offensive & defensive satellites are a danger to national security. Also fears of a satellite arms race.

      I mean, people have been devising ways to destroy and capture satellites ever since we started putting them up in the first place. This is nothing new.

      Lets not overlook how much we have benefited from space related programs. I do agree something should be done to ensure spending is done responsibly.

      As a side note, I do recall reading about satellite kineti

  • The Hubble Wars (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kabdib ( 81955 ) on Monday January 03, 2005 @11:30PM (#11251288) Homepage
    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).
    • Frankly any information given to the Hubble scientists is published in peer reviewed journals that are available to all of our "opponents" in various arms races.

      If a scientist develops a fix for a certain problem in space that's one thing. If our spooks hand a cookbook for best practices in spysat development to said scientist they are basically giving away any advantage our stuff has.

      Besides, the hubble would then have been a civilianized model of an American spy satellite. Better for it to have been a

  • right place / right time (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PW2 ( 410411 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @01:00AM (#11251701)
    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.

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