[HN Gopher] Pentagon moves to declassify some secret space progr...
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Pentagon moves to declassify some secret space programs and
technologies
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 129 points
Date : 2024-01-24 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.space.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.space.com)
| dgrin91 wrote:
| I wonder if this will lead to any more info about the X-37
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Not likely. This seems to be about moving things from very very
| top secret to only very top secret, low enough to share with
| more civilian contractors but still far away from public
| knowledge... until someone with a high-mobility cubesat starts
| puttering around taking pictures up there.
| facialwipe wrote:
| Riiight because a "high-mobility cubesat" (whatever that is)
| could ever intercept an orbiting X-37.
| tw04 wrote:
| This is essentially about letting Space-X in on more military
| missions that today they can only pass through Boeing and co.
|
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It will also help Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other military
| contractors as well.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It'll only help Boeing if they can pull their head out of
| their backside. To me, this is DoD realizing the Boeing can't
| do what they claim they can and need a new vendor. It's just
| that new vendor needs to have the rules modified a bit so
| they can qualify.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS) is still fairly
| competitive. The issues with Boeing are occurring in Boeing
| Commercial Airplanes (BCA), which is basically just
| McDonnell Douglas.
|
| BDS and BCA are both essentially independent of each other.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Well, you're not reassuring me since Starliner cannot get
| off the ground.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Or keep its doors attached.
| dylan604 wrote:
| When has Starliner not kept its doors attached? Following
| the content of a thread is a pretty basic expectation.
| Derailing it onto other subjects is not helpful nor
| appreciated.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Maybe it was one of the scripts talking instead of Alex
| felixhandte wrote:
| Probably referring to this: https://futurism.com/the-
| byte/piece-falls-off-boeing-starlin...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The DoD (or at least the US Air Force) has been _very_
| aware Boeing can 't deliver for a long time, between the
| KC-46 tanker and its inability to refuel, the F-15EX Eagle
| II and its failing to deliver on marketing promises, the
| V-22 Osprey and its _many_ crashes including the most
| recent in November that led to a grounding across the
| services, and more.
|
| If this is a move to give Boeing's competitors (eg:
| Lockheed Martin, SpaceX) more bidding power, I welcome it.
| tomcam wrote:
| How can these failures happen so routinely? Whenever I
| think about the billions of dollars to go into these
| programs I always imagine that they go through multiple
| iterative prototypes so that they have something working
| at all times. It seems to me that would be a way to
| improve the chances of success at a likely higher cost to
| start with. But the department of defense does not ever
| seem to care about cost anyway.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There are plenty of examples of military leadership _not_
| wanting a program, but Congress shoves it down their
| throats. So it 's not always as simple as it seems with
| an appearance of DoD not caring. It is a consequence of
| design by committee.
| tomcam wrote:
| Crap, I did forget about that. Thanks
| signatoremo wrote:
| > KC-46 tanker and its inability to refuel
|
| 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.
| TravisCooper wrote:
| Agreed. Glad to see the "opening up" of Aerospace/Military that
| SpaceX has enabled by simply being extremely competent. Anduril
| is also making great plays in the Military contractor space.
| They don't do "cost plus" projects, but design and build the
| entire POC themselves then offer it to US Armed Forces.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I think this is above anything spacex would need to be told
| about. Spacex is the delivery driver. They need to know where
| the sat is going, how much it weighs, and a bit about its
| needs. They dont need to know what the sat is actually doing,
| let alone how that function ties into any larger programs.
| tintor wrote:
| But they need to know if sat is hazardous and/or radioactive,
| or what risks it posses to their vehicle.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Sats are sats. They all have thrusters, antennas and solar
| panels. They have a center of mass, various g limits and
| have to fit inside the rocket. Everything else can be
| hidden from the launch provider.
| bell-cot wrote:
| No they don't. Pre-launch satellites do not normally leak
| toxic chemicals, nor emit noteworthy radiation, nor have
| dangerous voltages on exposed surfaces, nor ...
|
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > They need to know where the sat is going, how much it
| weighs
|
| 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.
| scottyah wrote:
| Nobody is launching anything into orbit in secret: once the
| launch goes every country that cares to track it will be
| able to. They can always add extra weight if they want to
| obscure things to the launcher.
| mjevans wrote:
| Extra weight can even be propellant which provides a
| bunch of options, including just extended service
| lifetime.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| as if spacex is not capable (and does) poach cleared personnel.
| this is not uncommon
| psunavy03 wrote:
| No, this is not. This is an attempt to bring overclassification
| under control, which has been admitted in the open press to be
| an ongoing problem for DOD. No one ever got fired for being too
| careful with classified. You can lose your job and your career
| for not being careful enough. On balance this is a good thing,
| because information is generally classified for a damn good
| reason, and it's important to keep US adversaries from learning
| our capabilities and what our playbook would be in a given
| situation.
|
| 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."
| alephnerd wrote:
| > This is an attempt to bring overclassification under
| control, which has been admitted in the open press to be an
| ongoing problem for DOD
|
| 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...
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| As well as he very practical uses you've stated for
| combatting over-classification, there's one other big
| exciting reason:
|
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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".
| elteto wrote:
| It is most definitely not. SpaceX is certified to launch
| whatever they can given their launch vehicle capabilities.
|
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Adding to the points made by others, military-only missions are
| such a hard fought and profitable portion of SpaceX's launch
| manifest, it's highly unlikely they'd be unwilling to do almost
| anything to meet the security clearance requirements.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is there some evidence of that?
| igleria wrote:
| > The policy does not mean that these programs and technologies
| will now be fully unclassified and revealed to the public;
| instead, it will lower their classification levels in order to
| share some technologies and programs with private industry and
| international allies to help the U.S. build an "asymmetric
| advantage and force multiplier that neither China nor Russia
| could ever hope to match," Plumb said in a DoD statement.
|
| is this... propaganda for internal and/or external consumption?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Hard to say, the vast majority of people with 'Top Secret'
| clearances don't ever read a single actual regular 'Top Secret'
| document, even if they work at the same place for years.
|
| 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.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Top secret really isn't that uncommon of a security
| clearance. The timeliness of the information is usually what
| makes it top secret with compartmentalization a norm for all
| programs (need to know).
|
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yes, the statistic is that apparently over a million people
| have 'Top Secret' clearances of some kind.
| scottyah wrote:
| If this is somewhere you work, you need to report this to
| Fraud and Abuse. Clearances and billets cost money, if they
| are not being used they have no Need to Know. From what
| you've said, this is pretty clearly fraud.
|
| https://www.dodig.mil/components/administrative-
| investigatio...
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| It's just normal DoD puffery that's meant to get the policy
| enacted.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Nah, it's probably easier for adversaries to access information
| within DoD than people inside with a need to use it.
| BWStearns wrote:
| Aside from increasing contractor availability this has the bonus
| of increasing the access to these capabilities for actual
| operations (both ours and our allies'). If your magic satellite
| that can tell who in a crowd is running a fever is SAPed then you
| might not be able to use it to help your troops or your allies
| hunt down artillery launches (as an example). So then you need to
| either do some parallel construction to mask the actual source of
| the information or just sit by and not help at all.
|
| So hopefully this means that we'll see some previously exotic
| space capabilities trickle down into more pedestrian use cases.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Source redaction has been possible and mostly automated for a
| long time. Getting information to the front line or "tactical
| edge" as they call it these days is more about file size, as
| collections and the initial processed products carry quite a
| bit of metadata and resolution that isn't needed, in formats
| not commonly read by tablets and regular software.
|
| 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.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Idle comment,
|
| 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.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| But are they declassifying the actual documents this time?
|
| > 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...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Declassification for contractors and the CIA passing
| disinformation to enemy intelligence are very different things.
| golergka wrote:
| Is it? Wouldn't enemy intelligence see these contractors be
| the prime targets for infiltration?
| huytersd wrote:
| How cool. I wonder if we still do awesome things like this.
| nwah1 wrote:
| Clinton tried to give fake nuclear weapons designs to Iran.
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Merlin
| mjhay wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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).
| bagels wrote:
| Yeah, joke's on NASA, the whole program and all the designs
| were flawed.
| aikwerhjliawj wrote:
| It's important to note the cost savings of declassification.
| Overclassification is incredibly expensive and burdensome (though
| it also covers the asses of a lot of incompetent bureaucrats). I
| used to work in the naval nuclear community. There are honestly
| only a handful of numbers related to the nuclear power plant on
| each class of ship that actually need to be classified, but every
| single scrap of paper associated with the program is stamped
| classified and it's incredibly time consuming and exhausting to
| work with that mess.
|
| 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.
| MrDresden wrote:
| > _..only a handful of numbers related to the nuclear power
| plant on each class of ship that actually need to be
| classified.._
|
| What do you actually mean by _numbers_ in this context?
| eitally wrote:
| To tie this to the software development community, I used to
| work in electronics manufacturing for a company that provided
| services to defense contractors. The vast majority of my dev
| team (SWEs, PMs, QA, Ops) were offshore, split between Latin
| America & India mostly. The product owner & architect of one of
| our team's key software services (shop floor test
| integration/automation tools) was Brazilian. In one version of
| the code he'd set some debug flags so he could triage an
| intermittent error. Unbeknownst to everyone (I mean, we _should
| have_ known, but didn 't think to check), the version was
| deployed to prod in a factory building DoD stuff.
|
| 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.
| ender341341 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
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