Pentagon moves to declassify some secret space programs and technologies

https://www.space.com/pentagon-us-military-declassify-secret-space-programs

by Brajeshwar • 2 years ago

174 71 2 years ago

dgrin91• 2 years ago

I wonder if this will lead to any more info about the X-37

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• 2 years ago

Riiight because a “high-mobility cubesat” (whatever that is) could ever intercept an orbiting X-37.

tw04• 2 years ago

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.

alephnerd3• 2 years ago

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.

dylan6044• 2 years ago

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.

TravisCooper• 2 years ago

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.

sandworm1013• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

But they need to know if sat is hazardous and/or radioactive, or what risks it posses to their vehicle.

dotancohen• 2 years ago

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.

sitzkrieg• 2 years ago

as if spacex is not capable (and does) poach cleared personnel. this is not uncommon

psunavy032• 2 years ago

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."

alephnerd3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

elteto• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

wolverine8762• 2 years ago

Is there some evidence of that?

igleria• 2 years ago

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?

MichaelZuo2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

scottyah2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

It's just normal DoD puffery that's meant to get the policy enacted.

Spooky23• 2 years ago

Nah, it's probably easier for adversaries to access information within DoD than people inside with a need to use it.

BWStearns• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

psunavy032• 2 years ago

The Gang of Eight has the keys to the kingdom. 4 Democrats, 4 Republicans. The Speaker of the House, House Minority Leader, Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Chair and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have full access to every classified program in the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence)

RetpolineDrama• 2 years ago

They're supposed to, but Harry Reid went on record that as a gang of 8 member he was denied access.

readyplayernull• 2 years ago

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...

wolverine8762• 2 years ago

Declassification for contractors and the CIA passing disinformation to enemy intelligence are very different things.

golergka• 2 years ago

Is it? Wouldn't enemy intelligence see these contractors be the prime targets for infiltration?

huytersd2• 2 years ago

How cool. I wonder if we still do awesome things like this.

nwah1• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Yeah, joke's on NASA, the whole program and all the designs were flawed.

vba616• 2 years ago

You've probably heard of the ceramic tiles on the Space Shuttle and how they had to inspect each one. And the story about the Soviets using a pencil instead of the US "space pen".

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.

mr_toad• 2 years ago

What do you mean by it worked? The only flight of the USSRs space shuttle was successful, it seems they either ignored or fixed any flawed designs.

aikwerhjliawj• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

..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?

ta93754829• 2 years ago

nice try Iran

danpalmer• 2 years ago

I imagine it's things like the maximum power output of the power plant, the volume it runs at, things like that. Similarly, the max depth of submarines and their audible signature are closely guarded secrets.

eitally• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

gonzo41• 2 years ago

I remember being told all the real information is out there. Confirmation is what's lacking. Especially for things like Tab data like what you pick up on the world of tanks forums.

lesuorac• 2 years ago

I think one of the big reasons for over-classification is that people often only learn things in a classified context. So if you only ever see F=MA in a classified document you'll kind of assume that it's a classified formula.

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.

sheepybloke• 2 years ago

One thing this really drives is competition in the industry as well. I've been doing some work in the industry and there is a lot work that's needed just to handle the data properly. Basically, Space Force is stuck in bed with the big DoD contractors, since they are the only ones who have access, can handle, or have the money to even bid on projects, let alone execute on them. If this lowers the bar a bit more to let smaller and more innovative companies compete, I think that's a huge win.

dsq• 2 years ago

Generally speaking, how can a reasonably informed coding entrepreneur get into the "space business" as a non specialist (i.e., not an astronaut, physicist or aerospace engineer)?

Pentagon moves to declassify some secret space programs and technologies

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