Pentagon moves to declassify some secret space programs and technologies
space.com
space.com
I remember back in school one student got called in front of the program CO and threatened with jail time for removing "classified material" from the school building after barracks inspectors found nuclear-related paperwork in the student's bedroom. (This was years before the student was assigned to an actual ship where they could learn the half dozen actually important secret numbers.) The student pointed out that they did not remove any paperwork from the school; the papers in their bedroom were printouts from wikipedia. The student was ordered in writing to not read about nuclear engineering outside of the school building, regardless of the source. Even though it's all publicly available information that is taught in any undergrad engineering program.
What do you actually mean by numbers in this context?
E.g. if you exactly know reactor XY was assigned to Z submarine, and you see it in the boneyard, you could assume Z was decommissioned. And if you are e.g. China you could estimate how many submarines are deployed in your vicinity.
We got called not long after by the site's compliance officer asking why classified data was being accessed by non-ITAR-compliant personnel. It was explainable and we got through it just by implementing and adhering to an additional deployment control, but I still remember him telling us that the products being built don't become classified until the serial number label is applied to the board. That label is what ultimately identifies the product and the program ... so if we had a way of testing things without labeling them (for example, by creating dummy labels that didn't mean anything but could still be UUIDs), it was no problem. So then we adapted our software to allow for these dummy serials for testing purposes ... and we also created a classified compliance trigger in our BI tools to prevent manufacturing history for any classified unit from being visible to an non-compliant personnel after the manufacturing step where the real SN label was applied.
Speaking of naval nuclear, I grew up in Lynchburg, VA, home of BWXT, and my dad is a [retired] naval officer & nuclear engineer who spent his career at B&W (commercial). I had several friends who went to work at BWXT and they took data controls extremely seriously. No computers (including cell phones) allowed through the gate. No paper allowed back out, and any new hire who didn't already have a security clearance had to work in a physically airgapped (trailers, enclosed in razor wire fencing) office on not much of anything until they got cleared. For some it took 6-9 months after they were hired.
that in particular seems extreme, but I know someone who worked on nuclear reactors for the DOD and they were told to not comment on/confirm anything related to nuclear as a CYA, even if it was widely available public info.
Also when classifying things you do have to portion mark but you don't need to justify any of the portion markings so you don't have to actually know if/why something is classified to mark it and that causes markings to perpetuate.
> The CIA started feeding flawed shuttle designs — NASA rejects — to the Soviet spies, which they passed off as new “improvements.” It worked. Included in the phonies were outdated heat shield designs that could have risked the spacecraft burning up on reentry.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...
Unfortunately, the nuclear scientist patsy they used, who was supposed to just deliver the designs, noticed some flaws. So he corrected them.
So they now have the real designs.
They could have just given them the updated designs. Those risked burning up on reentry too (and of course did in the case of Columbia).
Somewhere I read about an early space capsule that had ablative shielding made of hardwood, oak or something several inches thick. "Carbon fiber composite", right? The way I remember it, it was said to work well because the wood was dense and didn't just burn up; instead it slowly carbonized. If you've ever made a fire with a large log, it makes sense. It has to get really hot to catch, and then it lasts a long time.
But I remember it as being attributed to the USSR, and when I search the internet now, I get hits saying it was a story about the Chinese space program that might be apocryphal.
Sort of.
So hopefully this means that we'll see some previously exotic space capabilities trickle down into more pedestrian use cases.
As it stands, I recall seeing at least a few images of objects in space in the news attributed to sources I know for an absolute fact were not the real sources and no one I'm aware of ever questioned it. So at least some of this stuff is already getting disseminated to the public. It's pretty rare for the content of an image to be classified. More often, it's specifics of the collection capability, i.e. collection angles, occlusion, weather conditions, or in many cases the fact that something can be collected from space at all, but if you tell the viewer it came from a ground telescope, or a collection of the ground was from aircraft rather than satellite, they'll believe it. They have no way of telling otherwise without collection metadata.
Hopefully, this effort can further enhance the way files get portion-marked to make it easier to release content when metadata has been redacted, though. My still favorite anecdote is analying test data in which the file was literally just plain ASCII text of the preamble to the US Constitution but it was marked TS/TK/NF because the collection capability was sensitive enough that every file it generated automatically got marked as such even though it had no metadata at all. It was just text. The metadata was in a completely separate file.
among the many forces at work, one is the pressure resulting from the recent intense push for UAP disclosure. Among the specific actionable allegations that have brought by whistleblowers (notably David Grusch) is that there is an exceptional and unwarranted amount of money finding its way to defense and aerospace companies for secret programs which are not subject to congressional oversight; and that one of the conditions for this state of affairs is the out of control evolved intensely siloed classification system.
Independent of any allegations about e.g. NHI, numerous Reps have clearly been motivated into action in this specific area—following the money, which might better have been spent in say their own districts—by what they have been told, e.g. in a much-publicized SCIF briefing a week or so ago. And specifically by being repeatedly stonewalled.
If there's one way to attract Congress' attention, it's to make it clear that money they should have discretion over is being spent in ways that are intentionally hidden from them.
Related: the estimated $1T the Pentagon has not been able to account for in repeated audits.
Presumably Space-X wasn't willing to take an entire chunk of staff and dedicate them to military-only missions and/or had staff that couldn't even pass the stringent security clearance requirements. The US government still wants to utilize them for missions, especially with starship and its payload capacity on the near horizon.
It's good to see the changes happening to help better support our R&D capacity.
The old method of having a single contractor monopolize an entire SKU was slowing down innovation and procurement.
BDS and BCA are both essentially independent of each other.
If this is a move to give Boeing's competitors (eg: Lockheed Martin, SpaceX) more bidding power, I welcome it.
Where do you get this? KC46 problem is not because it can’t refuel.
> F-15EX Eagle II and its failing to deliver on marketing promises
Which promises? It’s supposed to be a missile truck, working in conjunction with F35, and it works well in that role.
> V-22 Osprey and its many crashes including the most recent in November that led to a grounding across the services
It’s called Bell Boeing V22 for a reason. Bell is the lead vendor and Boeing is the secondary. It was a Bell’s design. Bell Valor 280 which is a new tilt rotor design won FLRAA contract last year.
Boeing make Chinook helicopter, well known for its reliability.
It has had constant problems with its digital camera system for the refueling boom, which effectively means the tanker can't refuel.
>Which promises? It’s supposed to be a missile truck,
The F-15EX was touted to carry 22 (or was it 21?) missiles. However, nearly half of that is dependent on pylons located on the conformal fuel tanks. Guess what happened? Boeing can't figure out how to install the conformal fuel tanks. Fuel tanks that the F-15E has been using for literally decades.
>It’s called Bell Boeing V22 for a reason.
So? It's Boeing. It crashes. It's grounded. Entire flight crews have died, emphasis on plural.
And as a Plan B - any satellites filled with secret sauce could easily be babysat (while in SpaceX's hands) by trusty USSF TSgt Top-Secret, who's been trained in what to do if things go horribly wrong.
Tell me that and I'll tell you what the bird is going to do. Specific orbits have very specific purposes, usually. And knowing the size and mass of a satellite gives a lot of information, especially if I can look at it or even just a blurry photograph of it.
But it also culturally leads to the default behavior being "don't share information." Which in turn leads to things being more highly classified than they really need to be, which in turn is a huge bureaucratic drag on getting things done beyond just what may involve SpaceX or Boeing. This reads to be as much or more an effort to make sure things are classified at a sane level, and that the right information is sharable to allies and partners who have the proper clearances. Foreign disclosure of classified and managing information sharing between allied governments is already a huge administrative PITA that gets worse the more closely held the information is. So this seems to be an effort to take a step back and say "OK, let's not go round the bend with secrecy, let's balance protecting our interests with sharing what our allies and partners need to know."
Can attest to this.
That and our messed up procurement process has caused too much info getting siloed, and slowing down development [0]
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-we...
Government/governance runs on public trust, which is maintained by governments doing things. If the government won't talk about & share what it does, if everything is secret, people will not believe in that government.
The government can generate belief in itself by talking about & sharing the cool stuff it does. I'm excited for that to happen more.
It was so so cool & weirdly motivational seeing KH-9 Hexagon unveiled at Air and Space in 2011! I dropped everything last minute to go see it. So cool. Hexagon was 40 year old film-bssed satellite, but still so amazing to see, huge & wildly ambitious. I hope this kind of reveal can happen again, can increase in frequency, decrease in number of decades kept cloaked.
Exactly. The default should be "everything is shared unless there's a very good reason for it to be secret", and overclassification leads to the opposite mindset, "everything is (top) secret unless someone goes to a great deal of effort to declassify it".
There is only a very small number of people at SpaceX that need secret clearances for DOD or AF missions, and it’s mostly mission managers, not even most engineers. There’s a point of contact regarding the payload adapter (how the satellite hooks and talks to the launch vehicle). But again, that is a very minor thing.
There’s maybe engineers with secret clearances working on military projects, but those are isolated projects.
And if you need secret clearances they government will happily screen your employees, or you poach people who have them. They are most definitely not a hindrance in the big scheme of things.
is this... propaganda for internal and/or external consumption?
So if it's declassified down it's unlikely more than maybe 50k people will ever know about it.
But then again it could be some super secret thing where previously only 500 people knew about it, or had the full picture, so that would represent a substantial loosening of restrictions.
Most common thing I saw that was TS:SCI were future or active deployment orders (as foreknowledge could have disastrous consequences).
The really important stuff is under codeword programs. Even if cleared, if knowledge isn't directly needed, then you don't get regardless of clearance.
https://www.dodig.mil/components/administrative-investigatio...