Ted Molczan pointed out, > A recent article by Philip Chien includes a quote by an NRO official, regarding > our little hobby: > > http://www.foxnews.com/science/081100/satellites.sml > > "Some military experts say amateur efforts to track classified satellites > undermine national security and violators should be prosecuted. The National > Reconnaissance Office has taken a more laid-back attitude: "There's a lot of > Web pages which indicate how to view what they claim are military satellites > which may or may not be accurate. That's just fine with us," said spokesperson > Rick Oborn." [snip] Well, that's certainly the attitude the NRO *should* have: First of all, of course, because there's little they can do about the visual tracking of most LEO satellites; second because, if one adopts the position that the amateur activities do in fact undermine US national security, one is directly led to the conclusion that the NRO has spent many years and many, many billions of dollars creating systems that allow the national security to be undermined by a handful of people working part-time with star charts, stopwatches, and, sometimes, binoculars. That is not a message I would think the NRO would want to promote. In addition, drawing attention to the visual tracking of spysats could lead to inquiries into how the NRO so failed to understand the potential of visual observation that a satellite (the famous AFP-731 or MISTY) intended to be stealthy wound up a naked-eye object -- and was seen and tracked by some of the present members of SeeSat-L. Again, not something the folks in Chantilly would likely welcome, as the results of such an inquiry might call into question the competence of the organization. But I fear I stray off charter and into murky sociopolitical waters-- best to take this to e-mail if there's anything further to be said. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 23 2000 - 08:34:59 PDT