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?

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. |

"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

(Henry Spencer) wrote:

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.

I wonder if classification issues arise here? The government really
doesn't like giving clearances to new folks. (Or more accurately new
accesses.)

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.

Successfully demonstrated to the level of 'some approximation' or
'every detail of 400 page spec'?

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. Where
they compete is in intercine NIH and political maneuvering. Avoiding
this was one of the reasons NRO was founded in the first place.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

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.

(Derek Lyons) wrote:

(Real world
capabilites, not buzzword enhancement generator specifications.)

By the latter I assume you mean those outlined in rev 3 of
BEGS-2005-19.221.

We can email the Powerpoint if you like (87 MB)...

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. |

(Derek Lyons) wrote:

:"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.)

No one who would know the real answer to that is allowed to tell you,
Derek....

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw