Sayonara, Misty

CQ’s Tim Stark reports that new Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has canceled the Misty “stealth” satellite.

Patrick Radden Keefe—who wrote the awesome CHATTER—has the details over at Danger Room.

The cancellation of the Misty stealthsat—which, let’s face it, wasn’t particularly stealthy—leaves the United States dependent on the Future Imagery Architecture to replace the current generation of KH-11 imaging satellites—the last of which was launched inn 2005.

FIA, has had its own troubles and, according to Space News, has been sent back to the drawing board:

According to sources, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which buys and operates the nation’s spy satellites, is considering two main alternatives: a low-risk system relying heavily on proven technology, and a more capable system that likely would take longer and cost more to build. There also could be various combinations of the two.

The choice ultimately will depend in part on the how much funding is available in an era when many expect increased pressure on budgets for classified collection systems. Time is of the essence, because currently there is no long-term program in place for supplying the electro-optical imagery upon which the U.S. national security community so heavily relies, sources said.

[Thanks to Allen Thomson for bringing this to my attention.]

This means that the satellite gap is back. Either these geniuses get another bird up there before USA 116 or USA 129 craps out, or we start to face gaps in coverage.

The Problem With Satellites

Keefe has some great insights on the bureaucratic implications of Misty’s demise, but I think he is too sanguine about the state of our fleet of optical and radar imaging birds. With “over a hundred military and intelligence satellites in orbit,” Keefe, “it’s a safe guess that anything the Iranians or North Koreans do above ground on a sunny day is something they want us to see …”

That’s arguably true now (though I’d take the other side), but given the small number of optical and radar imaging satellites, one does have to worry about gaps opening up:

(I updated this table by John Pike and Ted Molczan.)

These satellites fly in predictable orbits, which allow states like Iran or North Korea to stop or disguise their activities when our birds are overhead.

For some sense of how easy that is, check out this description of the operational patterns by Aviation Week’s Craig Covault from May 2006:

The KH-11s … pass over Iranian nuclear facilities eight times every 24 hr. Two of them overfly Iranian facilities within an hour of each other around 10 a.m. local time, followed by two others within about an hour of 1 p.m. local time. These overflights are timed to Sun angles.

Two of the optical spacecraft then overfly the Iranian sites again in the 8:30-10:30 p.m. timeframe and twice again in the 11:30p.m. to 1:30 a.m. period local time, when the infrared sensors are more useful.

Covault doesn’t cite US officials for this information. My guess is that either he, or someone like Ted Molczan—who Covault interviewed for the story—simply derived that description from open source orbital element sets or ELSETS.

As a proof of principle—and because Sunday is my day to just wonk out—I grabbed ELSETS for the KH-11 satellites posted on the Visual Satellite Observer’s Home Page in Spring 2006, plugged them into WinOrbit, and double-checked Covault’s description.

The table below shows the four KH-11 or Lacrosse/Onyx satellites, the date of the ELSET and the local time of the next two passes over Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Of course, these times are really just illustrative—it would have been nice to have data from the same day because the precise time of the pass will vary depending on station-keeping, meteorological events and small movements in the orbits of the satellites. For example, the satellite observation community lost, then found, USA 161 more than one hour late on the previous ELSET.

But, overall, if we take these times as typical of the operational patterns of US satellites in Spring 2006, we see very good agreement with the description by Covault.

• A pair of passes at 9:58 and 10:41 am—“within an hour of each other around 10 a.m.”

• A pair of passes at 1:23 pm and 2:52 pm—“within about an hour of 1 p.m. local time”[1].

• A pair of passes at 8:53 and 9:37—“in the 8:30-10:30 p.m. timeframe.”

• A final pair of passes at 12:14 and 1:37 am—“in the 11:30p.m. to 1:30 a.m. period.”

If I can do this over the course of an afternoon, you can be the Iranians can, and do. (The Indians did it when they successfully avoided detection of preparations for their 1998 nuclear test.)

So, What?

Satellites have draw-backs: They are predictable, vulnerable to denial and deception practices and still can’t see inside buildings.

If we could develop a stealthy satellite, then we should consider it. It’s always nice to be able to alter your orbit to be able to drop in to say “hello” at an unexpected time.

But that is a pretty limited trick, one that probably isn’t worth breaking the bank. Misty seems to have failed this test by offering a pretty modest capability at an exorbitant, still increasing, price. Good on McConnell for killing it. Let’s hope that FIA gets back on track with a nice, modest program that can simply maintain current capabilities with no gaps. Nothing fancy, just something that works.

Other methods, including stealthy UAVs or, yes, arms control agreements that provide for data exchanges, environmental monitoring and surprise on-site inspections also play an important role in keeping the IC up-to-date. Moreover agreements, like START (_ahem_) can be written to include cooperation measures that ease the task of satellites, either by preventing interference or requiring that certain activities occur in the open.

¹ This is a judgement call—USA 116 could view Iranian nuclear sites on consecutive passes at 1:15 pm and 2:52 pm, although the second pass was much closer to being overhead.