It seems a little cottage industry is forming in the area of reviews of US military space programs. The Defense Department is planning an outside review of its military space programs, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported today. The panel, the article notes, will be the third such review in five years. This panel, though, will have a broader scope than previous ones, including a review of overall space policy and the relationship between the defense and intelligence communities. The review is supposed to be complete by the end of the year although the Pentagon is still deciding who should serve on the panel.
This has been going on for years and years and years. Somebody could get a Ph.D. dissertation just out of finding the dozens of such studies and doing a modest bit of comparison among them. Likely they mostly came up with the same completely obvious recommendations.
Not, of course, that any has a discernible effect.
Speaking of milspace/intelspace programs, I’d guess that this means the FIA optical program is still several years from getting back on track, if indeed it ever does. As likely a possibility, IMO, is that the stopgap program will become the baseline.
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Ocean Recons Readied – NRO readies sea surveillance flight, optical
satellite procurement
Craig Covault/
AviationWeek.com
Sunday, April 29, 2007
[EXCERPT]
[Stuff about upcoming NOSS 3 launch deleted.]
At the same time that the NRO is readying the ocean surveillance mission, the agency is also initiating a several hundred million-dollar procurement for a new stopgap optical imaging system.
The new system is aimed at enabling the intelligence community to recover from delays in the Future Imagining Architecture (FIA) program, which has yet to launch an operational satellite.
The delays occurred because of poor Boeing performance in the optical
program that has now been given to Lockheed Martin. Boeing has
retained the imaging-radar half of the program (AW&ST Sept. 5, 2005,
p. 23).
The new spacecraft are especially needed to obtain imaging intelligence of China, Iran and North Korea as older imaging reconnaissance satellites expire. The competitors will likely be DigitalGlobe and GeoEye.