Subject: House, Senate debate small spysats From: thomsona@netcom.com (Allen Thomson) Date: 1995/11/15 Message-Id: <thomsonaDI344B.Io5@netcom.com> Newsgroups: sci.space.policy,alt.politics.org.cia,alt.war House, Senate at Odds over Intel Smallsats by John C. Anselmo Aviation Week and Space Technology, November 13, 1995, pp.24-25 [excerpts and paraphrase] The House and Senate Intelligence committees are at an impasse over a House plan to order the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to begin construction of a small satellite to demonstrate emerging technologies. The issue pits those who believe the NRO should follow NASA's example of moving toward smaller and cheaper satellites against the intelligence community and its traditional suppliers, who want to take several more years to prove smallsat technologies. Proponents of smallsats say the satellites would be significantly cheaper than the NRO's traditional spacecraft and could be developed faster. That would allow the U.S. intelligence satellite constellation to be upgraded with new technologies more quickly. "You're getting a technology freeze point that's only maybe 24- 48 months [before the satellite reaches orbit] compared to anywhere from five to 10 years for the big systems." [An industry official said.] He maintains that a satellite in the 4,000 - 5,000 range (with fuel) could be "suitable for all missions that the government typically does," including surveillance, navigation, targeting and communications. [The official said a smallsat would cost ca. $250M to develop with unit costs about half that, in contrast to the present $1G NRO satellites.] But NRO's traditional suppliers are arguing that it's still too early to begin construction of a smallsat prototype. They say smallsats may never be the optimum choice for some activities, such as large aperture imaging. [Marty Faga, former D/NRO, said that customers' willingness to accept lower levels of performance will be a key factor in deciding on smallsats vs bigsats.] [The NRO is in the midst of a multiyear consolidation of its satellite architecture, but apparently is going to emphasize large, high performance satellites in order to achieve a lower overall system cost.] ---------------------------------------------------------------- It's encouraging to see this question being debated more-or- less openly, but a couple of things about the above story strike me as worthy of note. First, the two points cited in favor of small spysats -- reduced technology insertion times and cost -- are indeed very important. Cutting down technology lag is a consideration that often gets overlooked, but is likely to become ever more significant as the pace of technological advancement continues to increase. Second and however, there's a very obvious omission in the list of factors favoring smallsats: system robustness and survivability in time of war, a quality bigsats lack. If one is to believe numerous official statements about the way the U.S. spysat system is evolving (and John Pike is skeptical of these for reasons I'm sure he's about to explain :-) ), the officially blessed Wave of the Future is toward: a few, big, very expensive satellites served by a few, big, very expensive ground stations and launched by a few, big, very expensive launchers out of a few, big, very expensive launch facilities. Does this spell opportunity for the bad guys? The answer is left to the reader's imagination. Smallsat systems can do a good deal to get around the pernicious adjectives (few, expensive, big) in the list above. Although I don't think there is a reliable way to protect any satellite from detection, tracking, identification, attack and destruction within a few days by a reasonably competent enemy, systems incorporating several smallsats at least have the virtue of graceful degradation and, potentially, rapid replenishment. Given the pace of modern war, that could make all the difference. To ramble on a bit further, why isn't such an obvious point mentioned as having entered into the oversight committees' discussions? Beats me, but some logical possibilities come to mind, and it would be interesting to get comments on them: - The Senate and House committees don't know about the vulnerability issue. (Considering the many books and papers that have been written on the topic over the last three decades, this seems unlikely.) - They know about it but have been persuaded that it isn't actually important. This could be because they think future enemies wouldn't attempt an attack against the planned U.S. spysat system, or because they have been convinced that the problem is being taken care of in the system design. (Maybe. I doubt that the problem really is in hand, but it's possible the NRO has conned the Congress into believing contrafactual assertions; it wouldn't be the first time. Or perhaps there really is a magic solution that will keep overhead systems safe for the next two decades.) - They know about it, believe it's important, but think that if they keep quiet no one else in the rest of the world will recognize that the U.S. has a significant vulnerability. (This seems silly given the obviousness of the problem, but there is a very strong and persistent tendency in the U.S. to view the ROW as being mired in the mud-hut era.) - ? (Fill in the blank)
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