ROCKY SPYSAT MYSTERY SOLVED

Big ups to the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, for crack­ing the mys­tery of the clas­si­fied spy pro­gram that had worked Sen. Jay Rockefeller — and a nice-​​sized chunk of Washington — into a jit­ter­ing froth. The project is called MISTY. And here’s what Priest had to say about it:

The United States is build­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of spy satel­lites designed to orbit unde­tected, in a highly clas­si­fied pro­gram that has pro­voked oppo­si­tion in closed con­gres­sional ses­sions where law­mak­ers have ques­tioned its neces­sity and rapidly esca­lat­ing price, accord­ing to U.S. offi­cials.
The pre­vi­ously undis­closed effort has almost dou­bled in pro­jected cost — from $5 bil­lion to nearly $9.5 bil­lion, offi­cials said. The National Reconnaissance Office, which man­ages spy satel­lite pro­grams, has already spent hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on the pro­gram, offi­cials said.
The stealth satel­lite, which would prob­a­bly become the largest single-​​item expen­di­ture in the $40 bil­lion intel­li­gence bud­get, is to be launched in the next five years and is meant to replace an exist­ing stealth satel­lite, accord­ing to offi­cials. Non-​​stealth satel­lites can be tracked and their orbits can be pre­dicted, allow­ing coun­tries to attempt to hide weapons or troop move­ments on the ground when they are overhead.

But MISTY isn’t exactly “pre­vi­ously undis­closed,” like Priest says. The ever-​​intrepid Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, in fact, blogged about MISTY back in March:

Some indi­vid­u­als hold­ing clear­ances refer to a clas­si­fied piece of the puz­zle that might have dra­matic effect on such pro­pos­als [to pro­vide satel­lite track­ing data]. I am pretty sure the clas­si­fied piece is the exis­tence of low observ­able stealth satel­lites, which is secret only in the admin­is­tra­tive sense of the term.
The MISTY pro­gram is exten­sively cov­ered in Jeffrey Richelson (2001), The Wizards of Langley, Westview, 248–250. Richelson men­tions that a quar­tet of ama­teur astronomers were able to track the satel­lite. One of those astronomers, Ted Molczan, recently sug­gested a can­di­date for MISTY-​​2.
The abil­ity of ama­teurs (albeit highly skilled ones) to track such satel­lites sug­gests that oppo­nents of pro­vid­ing more data and ana­lytic sup­port are attempt­ing hold back the tides of transparency-​​and, in doing so, we are pass­ing up a chance to shape the legal and oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment for the pro­vi­sion of satel­lite track­ing data in ways that might legit­i­mately pre­serve US national interests. 

December 11th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.