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Putting on my tin foil hat. > Is is possible to create a cubesat that looks and smells like it is doing one mission but is actually doing a different mission?

• walrus01 9y ago
  Google a bit about the "misty" stealth satellite design that is apparently related to the NRO... If you wanted to "lose" a satellite by launching it into a known orbit, you could design a satellite that is matte black, physically stealthy, with a very large supply of xenon propellant and ion thruster so that over a period of many months it could totally change its orbital plane into something new. Plane change maneuvers are very expensive in terms of delta-V, but the US certainly has the money to launch things that have a thousand kg of extra propellant on board. Or some combination of plane change and movement into a highly elliptical/molniya type orbit. Thereby making it quite difficult for opposing nation-state level agencies to locate. edit: the easy way to know if spacex screwed up or not is if they receive future "national security" launch missions. If no further such missions occur, and the feds continue shoveling money at United Launch Alliance, that would be telling.
  • the8472 9y ago
    > “Based on the data available, our team did not identify any information that would change SpaceX’s Falcon 9 certification status” after “a preliminary review of telemetry that was available to us from” the Jan. 7 launch, Lieutenant General John Thompson, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, said in a statement to Bloomberg News.
    • credit_guy 9y ago
      Wow, that was quick.
    • mjevans 9y ago
      It's also entirely plausible that the SpaceX parts did their job and something the government insisted on using / was sending up didn't work as expected. Since failure is always possible, including from various forms of human error, and is often exacerbated by extreme conditions (such as launching to space) it is quite likely that we'll never know for sure. It really /would/ be nice if there was a mandatory sunset period for de-classification (which required /active/ effort to keep reviewing and punting classified status forward).
      • badwolf 9y ago
        >It's also entirely plausible that the SpaceX parts did their job and something the government insisted on using / was sending up didn't work as expected. The payload adapter was not the SpaceX built hardware SpaceX usually uses, but was built by Northrop Grumman
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • joering2 9y ago
    Musk says he fears AI. I hear that since it was invented. And still most robots that fell cannot get up. In terms of my life and future of my children, I am not afraid of AI, Mr Musk. I am afraid of you launching top secret government payloads, one after another.
    • callmeal 9y ago
      >And still most robots that fell cannot get up. They have started to[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
    • monocasa 9y ago
      I'm afraid of both.
    • ergothus 9y ago
      Your argument is one I've heard many variations of. Ive never found it very convincing. Here's why: 20ish years ago, when I started my career, Google and Facebook didn't exist. Amazon sold only books and was considered a bold experiment. No AWS. People argued about whether linux would be ever be used in production. The iPhone didn't exist. Wifi was a newish spec, but most people getting online (which wasn't most people!) relied on modems, or isdn if you happened to live in certain places. There was no "internet of things" - heck "information superhighway" metaphors were finally starting to phase out, and the average American would still talk about The World Wide Web so awkwardly you could hear the capital letters. Self driving cars were total sci fi that could never happen because it's hard, plus who would you sue? (Plus cest la change, plus cest la meme chose) (I might be off by a year or two, but the point remains) I entered the profession about 20 years ago and have seen all of this change. At my age, I can expect to be in the industry for most of the NEXT 20 years. Before I even retire. Given that the rate of change accelerates - https://ddcvqwvagfyuw.cloudfront.net/content/uploads/2015/12/adoption_of_tech_no_title.jpg https://ddcvqwvagfyuw.cloudfront.net/content/uploads/2015/12... - we have no idea what to expect by then, but can expect it to be very different, all while we are still struggling with how to deal with the impact on society that faster travel and communication introduced from before I was even born. Do I think AI will exist and turn on humanity in that time? Can't say. AI predictions have been notoriously bad. (Usually overconfident, but also in the other direction. 20 years ago it was obvious computers would be able to beat any grandmaster in chess sometime in our lives, but go was considered to be something dramatically past that. So I don't know if it will happen or even be able to happen. But I'm not convinced by anyone pointing out failures in current tech. That's like saying human flight can't happen because a lot of people failed at it, or that cars won't replace horses because they break down too much. Tech changes and it is change at a growing rate. To cite a metaphor: if you have a pond. A lily pad gets there. Next day you see there are 2. 4 the next day. Will they overgrow the pond? If you wait until the pond is half covered to worry about it (e.g. 20 days), you have only 1 day to handle it before 'maybe' is proven 'yes', not 20.
  • pocketstar 9y ago
    a "matte black" spacecraft would get very very hot, too hot for most electronics and be detectable with an IR camera. ion thrusters use significant power and would require a large and visible solar array. misty would be technically possible but a motivated adversary would probably be able to find it. stealth spacecraft are difficult.
    • tensor_rank_0 9y ago
      I think you could use black body radiators on the other 5 sides to bleed the heat from the side facing the sun.
      • pocketstar 9y ago
        those black body radiators(doesnt exist) will be visible in the IR...unless you can get them down to 3K to blend in with the background. Running a spacecraft that cold is pretty impractical because all the bus equipment uses power and any power=heat. Any power generation will be hot, rtg or solar.
        • tensor_rank_0 9y ago
          they will be IR visible, but what do you mean they don't exist? Apollo used them to bleed off excess heat.
          • pocketstar 9y ago
            "A black body is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence." [0] Black bodies are theoretical, they do not exist. Apollo had radiators, they might have been black but they were not a black body. Vantablack comes close to a black body for the visible spectrum which is p cool tho. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
            • tensor_rank_0 9y ago
  • SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    The issues were apparently with Zuma, not with the Falcon 9. So the question is if Northrop Grumman screwed up or not. The feds are unlikely to stop shoveling money at them even if they did screw up.
  • Animats 9y ago
    If you wanted to "lose" a satellite by launching it into a known orbit, you could design a satellite that is matte black, physically stealthy, with a very large supply of xenon propellant and ion thruster so that over a period of many months it could totally change its orbital plane into something new. The USAF figured out how to detect such satellites back in the 1980s.[1] The Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) looks at the sky with three 40-inch telescopes per site. This automatic system has a big star catalog, and can detect when something blocks its view of a star. The telescopes are some distance apart, and so they can see time differences between something occulting a star and compute range. The multiple telescopes allow disambiguating problems such as clouds, aircraft, and birds. If something looks interesting enough, one of the telescopes is switched to laser mode, and a laser flash is used to illuminate the target. Even black objects reflect some light. GEODSS was the first fully computerized telescope system, and it generated far more usable data than film-based systems. One of the old GEODSS sites was used to look for near-earth asteroids for years, and found most of the known ones. Now, of course, everybody has multi-megapixel imagers on telescopes and enough computer power to analyze the results. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillance_Network#Ground-based_Electro-Optical_Deep_Space_Surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...
    • psadri 9y ago
      Unless they were painted with VentaBlack? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack
      • Dylan16807 9y ago
        I wasn't aware that let stars shine through solid objects.
        • psadri 9y ago
          “If something looks interesting enough, one of the telescopes is switched to laser mode, and a laser flash is used to illuminate the target. Even black objects reflect some light.” I was referring to this part.
  • varjag 9y ago
    The stated failed element was Northrop Grumman separation module, so there's no way to tell really.