[AR] Re: big shared launches (was Re: Merritt ... Falcon Heavy?
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2019 00:50:55 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 26 Jun 2019, Elliot Robert wrote:
Henry, What's the political reason to encourage hitchhikers? Tech
demonstrators as a economic catalyst or maximizing the effort to track every
object to allow certain secret payloads to slip out of view undetected?
I'd read it as mostly the former plus a large dose of Doing Good Deeds In
Hopes Of Favorable Press Coverage. As for maximizing confusion in hopes
of letting secret payloads quietly get lost, I don't say that this has
never occurred to people, but it strikes me as something one might hope
for as a useful side effect, rather than a major motivation -- it's too
uncertain, there are too many people watching nowadays.
"The days when we could actually keep the location of objects in space
secret are gone. I always like to tell people when we talk about this
problem on SSA and the opposite problem on commercial remote sensing is
that the atmosphere is transparent. People can see in both directions. So
we can't hide through a transparent atmosphere. We have to find better
ways to keep the things secret that we want to keep secret." -- Doug
Loverro, US dep. asst. secretary of defense for space policy, Oct. 2016.
Henry
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