First Falcon start delayed

Andi Kleen wrote:

From http://spacex.com/index.html?section...om/updates.php

[June 24: We were just informed that the Titan IV flight will launch
no earlier than September and may very well be delayed until October
or November, depending upon what issues arise (due to overflight
concerns, Falcon I is required to launch after Titan IV). As a
result, you can expect that our first launch will now be from our
island launch complex in the Kwajalein Atoll. Nominal launch date is
late September.]

They must be pretty annoyed to be hold up by a dinosaur like this.


This, The Very Last Titan IV Flight, is looking to be at
least mildly interesting, as it has a modified long shroud of
a sort not seen before.

A WAG, on which I will bet one dime in American money, backed
by the full faith and credit of the US Government, is that it
might be a resurrected 8X modification of a CRYSTAL/KH-11 pulled
off the shelf to serve as a gap-filler until the FIA mess gets
resolved.

Watching the launch azimuth and subsequent orbit will be
instructive. A vanilla sun-synch near-circular orbit at 1000 km
altitude would indicate a normal imaging mission. A fairly
elliptical near-sun-synch orbit in the 116-117 degree inclination
range would be really interesting, as well as gratifying.

We wait and, with luck, we see.

Andi Kleen wrote:
"Allen Thomson" writes:
instructive. A vanilla sun-synch near-circular orbit at 1000 km
altitude would indicate a normal imaging mission. A fairly
elliptical near-sun-synch orbit in the 116-117 degree inclination
range would be really interesting, as well as gratifying.

In what way would it be interesting

It's consistent with the objectives of the 8X system
as stated back in the early-mid 1990s, whereas a more
standard spysat orbit isn't. Also, AFAIK, such an orbit
has never been used before by any satellite. Note that
an 8X, being a modification of the standard KH-11 design,
could operate in a standard orbit, but then it wouldn't
meet the original objectives.

and gratifying?

I stumbled on the properties of such orbits about ten
years ago while trying to figure out how the various
things that had been said about 8X could be reconciled
with orbitological constraints.

Andi Kleen wrote:
"Allen Thomson" writes:
instructive. A vanilla sun-synch near-circular orbit at 1000 km
altitude would indicate a normal imaging mission. A fairly
elliptical near-sun-synch orbit in the 116-117 degree inclination
range would be really interesting, as well as gratifying.

In what way would it be interesting and gratifying?

-Andi

That way Allen can get his puerile rocks off about helping foreign
countries to figure out what our national assets are. He'll be able to
say "See, I was right!" as a new wave of Chinese military capabilities
successfully hidden from US spy satellites rapidly takes apart Tawain.
Congratulations Allen. Good free consulting work done for the middle
kingdom today. Maybe they'll put you in the little red book.

Tom Cuddihy wrote:
That way Allen can get his puerile rocks off about helping foreign
countries to figure out what our national assets are. He'll be able to
say "See, I was right!" as a new wave of Chinese military capabilities
successfully hidden from US spy satellites rapidly takes apart Tawain.
Congratulations Allen. Good free consulting work done for the middle
kingdom today. Maybe they'll put you in the little red book.

The other way of looking at is that the Chinese (for example) will know
very soon after launch where the satellite is, and that our contractors
are trying to keep the whole program a secret to conceal the degree to
which they're fleecing the American public.

I'm not entirely sure what the MISTY experience has to tell us about
this - you'd think that whatever a bunch of amateurs in Europe could do
in terms of satellite observation the Soviets could do too, but I also
thought that MISTY *did* catch the Soviets cheating on arms control
treaties, which if they knew about, you'd think it wouldn't, unless
they were trying to pretend like they didn't know about it to keep
their intelligence sources secret...

My take is that anything that one or a handful of people can derive
from publicly available sources must be presumed to be common
knowledge, and that the average cost of disclosing it when it wasn't
public knowledge is less that the average cost of discovering at
exactly the wrong time that it's not as secret as you thought.

-jake

"Andi Kleen" wrote in message
news

From
http://spacex.com/index.html?section...3A//spacex.com
/updates.php

[June 24: We were just informed that the Titan IV
flight will launch no earlier than September and may
very well be delayed until October or November,
depending upon what issues arise (due to overflight
concerns, Falcon I is required to launch after Titan
IV). As a result, you can expect that our first launch
will now be from our island launch complex in the
Kwajalein Atoll. Nominal launch date is late
September.]

They must be pretty annoyed to be hold up by a
dinosaur like this.

I expect this will hurt. Kwajalein is hardly going to be cheap, quick
or convenient either.

The direct breakeven point for air launch is probably somewhere around
$2 and $5 million for the Falcon I and V respectively, (payload increase
and launch pad cost avoidance). Given the increasingly demonstrated
indirect costs of conventional launch, air launch is starting to look
very attractive.

The Falcon V would require the likes of a modified 747 for air transport
and launch. If such a carrier vehicle were commercially available, it
might ease a great many woes for a number of developers. It might also
significantly decrease the start up capital required for such space
transport developments.

Unfortunately a single company does not seem able to justify the extra
one off cost of modifying such an aircraft. Nor the willingness to make
it commercially available. An independent specialist air launch company
is probably desired.

Pete.

Jake McGuire wrote:

I'm not entirely sure what the MISTY experience has to tell
us about this - you'd think that whatever a bunch of amateurs
in Europe could do in terms of satellite observation the
Soviets could do too,

"Bunch" is order of a dozen to 18 part-time amateurs of
varying degrees of activity, roughly one FTE. Clearly
the Russians, PRC etc. can't equal such expertise and
must depend on reading Usenet for intelligence about
such matters. (I did the 8X orbit study using the DOS
TrakSat 2.80 shareware prediction program running on
a mid-1990s PC.)

See http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/at_sp.htm for a slightly
elderly (written in December of 1992) discussion of such
matters and
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/prog...ideography.pdf
for the distribution of the amateur community.

For modern TrakSat versions, see http://home.hiwaay.net/~wintrak/

but I also thought that MISTY *did* catch the Soviets cheating
on arms control treaties,

You may be thinking of the first KH-11 in 1976; there are
conflicting stories and opinions as to whether it caught
the Soviets by surprise. Perhaps someday we'll know, but
the posting by Ted Molczan concerning the question is
interesting: http://tinyurl.com/9ot5h

Allen Thomson wrote:
"Bunch" is order of a dozen to 18 part-time amateurs of
varying degrees of activity, roughly one FTE. Clearly
the Russians, PRC etc. can't equal such expertise and
must depend on reading Usenet for intelligence about
such matters. (I did the 8X orbit study using the DOS
TrakSat 2.80 shareware prediction program running on
a mid-1990s PC.)

With the provision that the human capacity for self-deception is
limitless, you'd think that the Soviets would certainly put together a
dispersed optical observing network, and get all the orbital
information about satellites available in that manner. The Chinese
also could, and the Indians and Pakistanis apparently did. Surely the
effort was not huge, but at the same time, it wasn't zero - one might
claim that it's worthwhile to make them jump through the hoops on
general principles.

And of course, this is visible tracking. As an intelligent man, I'm
sure that you can think of various bits of sneakery that one might
perpetrate on someone with a widespread visible tracking network. And
if you were responsible for such sneakery, you'd be grossly negligent
to not engage in much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how visible
tracking was compromising your security efforts and making it
impossible to hide spy satellites like in the good old days in the
hopes of dissuading people from branching out into long-wave IR or
radar tracking or something.

In fact, you might even want to shut down NAVSPASUR...

-jake

I'm surprised no conspiracy theories are being published. Perhaps the
dinosaur will stay grounded till the mammal rusts away.

Maybe its empty. Maybe it's just there to keep Falcon 1 from launching.
Once SpaceX runs out of money, they'll cancel the Titan launch.

Allen Thomson wrote:
Jake McGuire wrote:

I'm not entirely sure what the MISTY experience has to tell
us about this - you'd think that whatever a bunch of amateurs
in Europe could do in terms of satellite observation the
Soviets could do too,

"Bunch" is order of a dozen to 18 part-time amateurs of
varying degrees of activity, roughly one FTE. Clearly
the Russians, PRC etc. can't equal such expertise and
must depend on reading Usenet for intelligence about
such matters. (I did the 8X orbit study using the DOS
TrakSat 2.80 shareware prediction program running on
a mid-1990s PC.)

See http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/at_sp.htm for a slightly
elderly (written in December of 1992) discussion of such
matters and
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/prog...ideography.pdf
for the distribution of the amateur community.

For modern TrakSat versions, see http://home.hiwaay.net/~wintrak/

but I also thought that MISTY *did* catch the Soviets cheating
on arms control treaties,

You may be thinking of the first KH-11 in 1976; there are
conflicting stories and opinions as to whether it caught
the Soviets by surprise. Perhaps someday we'll know, but
the posting by Ted Molczan concerning the question is
interesting: http://tinyurl.com/9ot5h

I don't think you get it. Even if PRC has the capability, the fact that
there are Americans willing to do it publicly, for free, gives them
access to a large, well organized global network that they therefore
don't have to develop on their own. That way money that they would
otherwise have to spend finding out our assets gets instead spent on
countering them. The PRC's assets are not unlimited--and when it comes
to well-educated, technically savvy, and experienced in space systems,
their best source for checking their own estimates is probably people
like--you!

Yes, your interests may make Congress more aware of how easy it is to
find out what our capabilities are. Just like releasing Ebola into a
large population may make it easier to find out who's immune to Ebola.
But you kill a lot of people in the process. think about that.