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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
In addition to the newsbit that Boeing is asking $5e8 termination fees
for FIA, there was an additional story last week that kind of bears on the matter of future spysats: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020102215.html Some Lawmakers Doubt DNI Has Taken Intelligence Reins By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 2, 2006; Page A09 [vast snippage] Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he sees cause for concern. "I knew there was some settling time needed and he has hired good people," Rockefeller said. "But I am disappointed that he failed on his first test in wresting control of national intelligence programs from the Pentagon . . . and you only get one or two such shots to show your independence and after that you are just part of the administration." Rockefeller said classification prevents him from describing the Pentagon issue he calls a "first test." But it has been widely reported that Rockefeller and others pressed Negroponte to direct money away from a multibillion-dollar intelligence satellite program, a Pentagon-operated program whose usefulness has been challenged on Capitol Hill. Now, this needs to be approached very, very gingerly, as the identification of the mulitgigabuck program with a satellite program, in particular a stealthy optical spysat program, is far from nailed down. IMO, it's not implausible, but nothing to bet your 401K on. However, if one accepts both this story and the FIA termination fees story as being more or less true, there are interesting things to think about. To review the situation, FIA was given to Boeing about five years ago with the expectation that they would deliver both optical and radar spysats sometime in the second half of this decade. LockMart got a contract to build a new-generation stealthy optical spysat with delivery sometime late in the decade. But now the optical part of FIA has been taken from Boeing and reportedly has been/is going to be given to LM. So NRO now has two optical spysat contracts at LockMart, one of which (FIA) is at least way behind the expected schedule and the other of which (the stealthsat) is under fire for being too expensive, over budget, and redundant. How to resolve this? RUMINT says that Lockheed may build at least one more of the previous KH-11ish series as a gapfiller, but what after that? - More KH-11 clones forever? - Revive LockMart's original FIA optical design? - Converge the FIA optical and the stealthsat programs into a single product line, perhaps with stealthy and nonstealthy variants? Or what? |
#2
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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
In article .com,
Allen Thomson wrote: - More KH-11 clones forever? - Revive LockMart's original FIA optical design? - Converge the FIA optical and the stealthsat programs into a single product line, perhaps with stealthy and nonstealthy variants? Or what? That nasty word: "competition". Some options: Allow in some new contractors -- Ball and Northrop Grumman come to mind as possibilities -- rather than automatically giving everything to Boeing and LockMart. Back off on the specs, to get reliable operational systems rather than hand-tuned bleeding-edge experimental hardware. Experiments to push the level of technology should be done separately, not as part of attempts to deploy operational systems. Fund at least three fast-track low-budget demonstrators all the way to orbital test, instead of trying to pick the winner from viewgraphs. They should be required to demonstrate some approximation to the desired results, rather than meeting every detail of a 400-page spec. Production contracts go *only* to systems successfully demonstrated in orbit. Break up the NRO. The CIA gets its own spysats, as does the military. It's cheaper (and provides more reliable service) to let them compete than to enforce a centralized monopoly which has no incentive to be efficient. -- spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | |
#3
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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
"Allen Thomson" wrote:
How to resolve this? RUMINT says that Lockheed may build at least one more of the previous KH-11ish series as a gapfiller, but what after that? For those of us just tuning in - does the FIA provide significant intelligence capabilities above and beyond KH-11? (Real world capabilites, not buzzword enhancement generator specifications.) D. -- Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh. -Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings. Oct 5th, 2004 JDL |
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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
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#5
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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
Derek Lyons wrote:
For those of us just tuning in - does the FIA provide significant intelligence capabilities above and beyond KH-11? (Real world capabilites, not buzzword enhancement generator specifications.) As originally conceived, it was supposed to address the two big deficiencies identified during Desert Storm: frequency/latency of access and dwell time. There were two ways that might have been done: increase the number of LEO spysats or go to higher, slower orbits (the "Magic" orbits mentioned previously looked particularly attractive). It's hard to be sure because of the secrecy, but the FIA that developed post-1995 looked it was going with the more-numerous LEO option using satellites smaller than the KH-11. What was intended for the new-generation stealthy sats and what course is now going be pursued for FIA optical is totally unclear. |
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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
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#7
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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
In article ,
Derek Lyons wrote: Allow in some new contractors -- Ball and Northrop Grumman come to mind... I wonder if classification issues arise here? The government really doesn't like giving clearances to new folks. (Or more accurately new accesses.) Ball and NorGrum have been involved in plenty of highly classified stuff already, so it should be feasible... although since they haven't (as far as I know) done major spysat work, they probably don't have the exact clearances needed, which *would* mean extra effort and paperwork, and wider dissemination of some information. Yeah, could be an issue. ...required to demonstrate some approximation to the desired results, rather than meeting every detail of a 400-page spec. Production contracts go *only* to systems successfully demonstrated in orbit. Successfully demonstrated to the level of 'some approximation' or 'every detail of 400 page spec'? Mostly the former. The idea is to get close to desired performance -- it's not as if there haven't been performance shortfalls even on programs with 400-page specs! -- while greatly reducing the overhead of getting there. After working with the prototypes, you might well want to ask for modest improvements in some areas, provided it can be done without major redesign. Giving them a *one*-page spec might be reasonable. "The password needed to download the RFP for the production contract has been spelled out in one-meter letters on the ground at coordinates thus-and-such in Area 51. If your satellite can't read it, you can't bid." :-) Break up the NRO. The CIA gets its own spysats, as does the military. It's cheaper (and provides more reliable service) to let them compete than to enforce a centralized monopoly which has no incentive to be efficient. The problem is - they don't compete, not at the tech level. They don't want exactly the same things, and so wouldn't build exactly the same satellites, but there *is* considerable overlap in the capabilities that they'd like to have. This is good and should be encouraged, rather than stamped out in the name of efficiency. It's both cheaper and safer to have three or four different systems in orbit than to insist that one system must meet everyone's needs. If one branch fumbles its next-generation system, somebody else can fill the gap, at least as a partial stopgap... and the potential for embarrassment of that sort will make such fumbles less likely. You'd still need some overall organization and discipline, mind you, so they don't *all* start building multi-billion-dollar goldplatesats. Where they compete is in intercine NIH and political maneuvering. Avoiding this was one of the reasons NRO was founded in the first place. The price -- not all of it measured in dollars -- has been too high. -- spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | |
#8
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Stealthsat survives (apparently)
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