Pat Flannery wrote:
Ed Kyle wrote:

XSS-11, a similar DoD project that apparently hasn't
failed, is more likely to be that step than DART,
which is a NASA program. It would be amazingly
hard, if not impossible, to hide a secret project
via. NASA.


Read "The Corona Project" sometime...hide in plain site. Once the
taped-on craft paper comes off of the Canaveral launched Discover
satellites camera aperture, they amazingly transform into recon sats
during first stage burn.

As others have pointed out, Discoverer was advertised
as a Pentagon science program (as a cover for Corona).
The rocket was an Air Force Thor-Agena. The launch
pads were at Vandenberg AFB. NASA had nothing to do
with it. Several other DoD science programs have
been used as cover for classified satellite efforts,
but I'm not aware of a NASA program ever having been
used that way. There is probably a law or code that
outlaws such activity. A scandal involving the
discovery of such an effort could do serious harm to
NASA.

In theory, a NASA project could be a good cover for
a secret space effort, but in practice it is very
difficult for an open agency like NASA to keep the
deepest secrets. (It is hard enough for the secret
defense organizations to keep secrets. Remember
that it was they who gave away our deepest cypto
secrets with the capture of the Pueblo and the
sale of info to the Soviets by John Walker. The
Soviets read our most secret coded messages for
years.)

The Air Force hated having to launch some satellites
on shuttle so much that it started planning a new
Titan production run even before the Challenger
accident. This was when national policy was to
move everything to shuttle.

- Ed Kyle